Pixel Scroll 2/3/16 Superscrollapixelistbutextrabraggadocious

(1) THANKS FACEBOOK. Pat Cadigan joined the legions who have committed this social media gaffe — “Happy Birthday, Sorry You’re Dead”.

Well, it happened again…I wished someone a Happy Birthday on Facebook and then discovered they had passed away last year. This is what happens when you have an impossible number of Facebook friends, most of whom you don’t know personally….

Anyway, thinking or not, I have committed a birthday faux pas. And as usual, I feel awful about it. When the person’s loved ones saw that, they probably wanted to go upside my head. Because that’s how it is when you’re on the sharp end of a disaster, whether it’s something of epic proportions or the personal loss of a beloved friend or relative. Your life has changed forever, and yet the world goes on like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Like, WTF? The stock exchange opens and closes. The sun rises and sets and rises again. People go to work, go home, go grocery shopping, go online, tweet, check Facebook––and they can’t even take a few extra minutes to find out if someone’s alive or dead? Seriously, WTF?

(2) THANKS TSA. James Artimus Owen shared a memo with his Facebook readers.

Dear TSA – I’m breaking up with you. It’s you, not me. Or anyone else you and American Airlines conned into this big threeway. We were awesome dates, going along with everything you asked for, giving you sweet, sweet lovin’, and lots of money, and always on time, and you didn’t care. You still just wanted me to get half undressed, and to feel me up, and poke me in my special place, and go through all my stuff – and then your drunk buddy American Airlines overbooked the flight…, and complained about carryons, and then broke their own damn plane while we were sitting here. And now someone is trying to “fix” things, but the air is off, and we have to sit here for another half an hour, and the paperwork is going to take longer than the repair. So, I just wanted you to know – I’m getting a private plane. With my own crew. And you can date my “people” but I’m not taking my belt and shoes off for you again just so you can lecture me about the difference between 3.5 ounces and 11 ounces.

(3) HOW DID SOME GOOD NEWS SLIP IN HERE? Hobart and William Smith Colleges (in New York’s Finger Lakes region) have announced that Jeff VanderMeer will join the Trias Residency for Writers for the 2016-17 academic year.

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula Award, and three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, VanderMeer is the author of more than 20 books, including the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (“Annihilation,” “Authority,” and “Acceptance”), released in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The trilogy explores, among other issues, environmental degradation in extremis, creating, as the New York Times puts it, “an immersive and wonderfully realized world” with language that is “precise, metaphorical but rigorous, and as fertile as good loam.”

During the residency, VanderMeer will teach one class in the fall of 2016 and work with a number of select students the following spring. Additionally, he will offer a public reading and lecture, participate in a service event for the greater Geneva community and curate a reading series featuring Dexter Palmer (who writes sf), Ottessa Moshfegh and a third writer to-be-announced.

Beyond his work on campus, VanderMeer adds that he is looking forward to “a creative writing visit to the super max prison [in Auburn, N.Y.] and a possible partnership with the Colleges’ environmental center.” He has also invited artist John Jennings, a professor at University of Buffalo, to visit in the fall of 2016 “for some cross-media conversation about narrative and creativity.”

…The Peter Trias Residency at Hobart and William Smith Colleges is designed to give distinguished poets and fiction writers time to write. Academic expectations allow for sustained interaction with our best students while providing the freedom necessary to produce new work. Residents are active, working artists whose presence contributes to intellectual environment of the Colleges and the town of Geneva.

(4) MORE THAN MONEY. “Stephen King On What Hollywood Owes Authors When Their Books Become Films: Q&A” at Deadline.

DEADLINE: So rather than making the old deal, with big upfront money, you figure you’ll make your money on the other side?

KING: The other side of this, too, is that if you do that, you can say to these people, what I want is a share in whatever comes in, as a result, from dollar one. So it isn’t just a creative thing, it’s also the side where I say, if you want to do this, let me make it easy for you up front and if the thing is a success, the way that 1408 was a success for the Weinstein brothers, then we all share in it together. You know, of all the people that I’ve dealt with, Harvey and Bob Weinstein were the ones who were most understanding about that. They were perfectly willing to go along with that. A lot of people feel like you want to get in their business. I don’t want to do that at all. I want to be part of the solution. There were things about the 1408 screenplay that I thought were a little bit wonky actually, you know. There’s a part where you brought in the main character’s sad relationship about how his wife had died, she’d drowned, and he was kind of looking for an afterlife a la Houdini. I thought, well this seems a little off the subject. But it was great in the movie.

DEADLINE: So you’re not an author who feels that what’s in your book is sacrosanct, even when it’s translated to the screen?

KING: No. And the other thing is, you start from the belief that these people know their business. There are a lot of writers who are very, very sensitive to the idea, or they have somehow gotten the idea that movie people are full of sh*t. That’s not the truth. I’ve worked with an awful lot of movie people over the years that I think are very, very smart, very persistent and find ways to get things done. And I like that.

(5) TIL DADDY TAKES THE T-BIRD AWAY. From The Guardian: “Elon Musk personally cancels blogger’s Tesla order after ‘rude’ post”.

Unimaginable wealth has brought Elon Musk a lot of benefits, from being able to build a private spaceflight company to planning a magnet-powered vacuum tube supersonic transport system between LA and San Francisco – and be taken seriously. But perhaps the best perk of being Elon Musk is the ability to be unbelievably petty.

The Californian venture capitalist Stewart Alsop learned that to his cost, he says, after he wrote an open letter to Musk about the badly run launch event for the Tesla Motors Model X (the newest car from Musk’s electric vehicle startup).

Headlined “Dear @ElonMusk: you should be ashamed of yourself”, the letter listed Alsop’s issues with the event: it started late, it focused too much on safety, and it was so packed that even people like Alsop, who had placed a $5,000 deposit on the car (which was originally supposed to ship in 2013, but had only delivered 208 cars by the end of 2015), didn’t get the chance to test drive it.

Alsop concluded that “it would still be nice if you showed some class and apologised to the people who believe in this product”.

Instead, Alsop says, Musk cancelled his pre-order.

(6) HARTWELL OBIT IN NYT. Here is the link to David G. Hartwell’s obituary in the New York Times.

Mr. Hartwell worked at several publishing houses before starting as a consulting editor at Tor/Forge Books in the early 1980s. At his death, he was a senior editor there. He was nominated more than 40 times for Hugo Awards, among the most prominent prizes in science fiction, and won three times for editing.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a senior editor at Tor, said in an email that Mr. Hartwell had edited and published hundreds of books, including Mr. Dick’s novels “The Divine Invasion,” “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” and “Radio Free Albemuth,” as well as novels in Mr. Herbert’s “Dune” saga and Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” series.

He also compiled dozens of anthologies, many with Ms. Cramer, including “The Space Opera Renaissance” (2006) and “Spirits of Christmas: Twenty Other-Worldly Tales” (1989), and he wrote “Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction” (1984).

Mr. Hartwell championed genre fiction long before crossover hits like the “Lord of the Rings” films, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series and AMC’s “The Walking Dead” broadened its audience.

(7) BERKELEY AUTHOR APPEARANCE. Carter Scholz, author of Gypsy, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Lucky Strike, and Terry Bisson, author of Fire on the Mountain, at Books Inc. in Berkeley, CA on February 18th.

Carter Scholz, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Terry Bisson.

Carter Scholz, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Terry Bisson.

(8) DOLLENS ART REMEMBERED. Ron Miller’s post at io9 has a gallery of “Scenes from the 1950s Space Movie That No One Saw”.

Morris Scott Dollens is best known to aging SF fans as one of the most prolific space artists who ever lived.…

These three interests—-astronomy, photography and model-making—-led to an endeavor that that was especially close to his heart: The creation of a movie that would take audiences on a journey through the solar system.

It was to be called “Dream of the Stars,” and Dollens created dozens of meticulous models of space ships and alien landscapes. He assembled these into tabletop dioramas which were then photographed in the same way Hollywood special effects artists would create miniature effects scene. Dollens sent these photos to magazine and book publishers, who ran them with captions that declared that “Dream of the Stars . . .is said to be best space film yet.” I remember seeing these photos in books about space when I was a kid and desperately trying to track down this movie. It wasn’t until decades later, when I contacted Dollens while researching my book, “The Dream Machines,” that I finally learned the truth: that “Dream of the Stars” was just that: a dream.

(9) HAT TIP. The New York Post noticed a fan favorite is back — “’X-Files’ tips a (straw) hat to iconic ’70s TV character”.

The latest episode finds FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) interrogating a person of interest, Guy Mann (Rhys Darby), as they hunt for a reptilian “were-monster.” Mann’s quirky attire — straw hat, seersucker jacket and cheap knit tie — bears a striking resemblance to clothing worn by Carl Kolchak, the rumpled creature tracker played by the late Darren McGavin in the 1970s ABC series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.”

The homage to McGavin’s vampire- and werewolf-hunter is intentional.

(10) HINES ON REPRESENTATION. Suvudu interviewed “Jim C. Hines on Representation and the Seeds of Possibility”, and Jim made his case in a lucid and fair manner, as he always does. It’s not his fault that his examples play so well against the next item in today’s Scroll….

I don’t understand why this is such a heated topic, but people get quite distraught when you suggest our genre should be more inclusive. Just look at the attempted boycott of Star Wars for daring to cast a woman and a black man in lead roles, or the oceans of man-tears surrounding Mad Max: Fury Road and its competent and kick-ass protagonist Furiosa.

Imagine the backlash to a science fiction show in which the main starship crew—the captain, first officer, navigator, engineer, and doctor—are all women. The only male character is basically a switchboard operator.

(11) TIMING IS THE SECRET. Who knew Ghostbusters will be putting Jim’s example to the test? “Receptionist Chris Hemsworth is Here For You” at Tor.com.

Last night Paul Feig announced that the official Ghostbusters site is up and running, with the first trailer set to drop later this month. If you poke around on Ghostbusters.com (which also has pages for the original movies), you’ll find a new batch of images, featuring the ladies in civilian garb… and their adorable receptionist, played by Chris Hemsworth.

You know how there’s that silly TV/movies trope of putting glasses on a girl to make her less attractive? Yeah, that definitely doesn’t work here.

(12) CHATTACON REPORT. Ethan Mills of Examined Worlds writes about “The Importance of Community”.

Do we need Cons like ChattaCon today?  Aren’t SF fans all shut-in introverts who make snarky anonymous comments on blogs and YouTube videos?  Even if we do need communities, couldn’t we move the Con experience to the internet, where we’ve moved so much of our communal interactions in the 21st century? A ChattaCon Report While the internet is great (you’re reading it!), I think physical meetings are still an essential part of community.  To make my case, consider some of the things I did last weekend:

…One of the guests was Larry Correia (of the Sad Puppies).  I went to one of his panels with a few friends.  Given my opposition to the whole Sad Puppy fiasco, I was wondering what he’d be like in person.   Answer: not all that different than most author guests, although nobody asked him about the Puppies.

(13) SHOCKING. Max Florschutz at Unusual Things calls it “The Indie Scam”.

There are a lot of blogs, posts, and news articles out there decrying the pricing of the big publisher’s books. They make regular appearances on smaller author’s sites, reddit’s r/books, and very frequently in the circles of indie authors. “Publishers are making their books too expensive!” they cry. Look at the price of these books!

…Then came the bit I didn’t agree with. That everyone should flock (and was flocking) to ebooks and indie because the prices were so much better.

The problem is, this isn’t always true….

Let me tell you a story. About a year ago, I was attending a con and talking with a bunch of authors about ebook sales and indie publication. One man in the “group” we’d sort of formed in the hallway was a known trailblazer in the ebook world, one of the first authors to jump ship from his publisher and go straight indie, a decision that had been great for him. Naturally, he being the one with the most experience in success, everyone was letting a lot of questions and comments gravitate his way.

At some point, ebook pricing came up, and I mentioned I was trying to figure out a price for the draft I was about to finish. He shrugged and said it was simple, and asked me how long it was. 300,000-odd words, I said. Eyes wide, he shook his head, and then told me the best way to sell a book of such length:

Cut it up into 8 or 10 sections and sell them for $2-3 a pop.

This, readers, is what I’ve started to see as “The Indie Scam.”

You see, as already mentioned, a lot of indie authors will decry the cost of “big pubs” and their ilk. Like the classic meme, they repeat the line that the prices are “just too d**n high” while showing that their books are so much cheaper at their low, low prices.

But are they really? Well, in a lot of cases … no. And that’s the problem. It’s a misdirect. Because a lot of these indie books? They’re a lot smaller than what they’d have you believe.

(14) RABID PUPPIES TODAY. Vox Day’s picks for the Rabid Puppies slate in the Best Fan Writer category are Jeffro Johnson, Dave Freer, Morgan, Shamus Young, and Zenopus.

(15) KEEPING THE WARDROBE BUDGET DOWN. Den of Geek asks: “Saturn 3: the 1980s’ weirdest sci-fi movie?”

Saturn 3 wasn’t exactly the sci-fi blockbuster its makers might have hoped. Neither broad and upbeat like Star Wars nor as claustrophobic and disturbing as Alien, it instead became one of the great oddities of 80s science fiction. This is, after all, a movie which features such bizarre lines as “No taction contact!” and “That was an improper thought leakage.”

Then there’s the bizarre scene in which Kirk Douglas (nude, of course) chokes out Harvey Keitel after he utters the line, “You’re inadequate, Major. In EVERY department.”

Saturn 3’s by no means a classic, then, but it is undoubtedly one of the most weirdly fascinating sci-fi misfires of the 1980s.

(16) DON’T ORDER THE SOUP. Gizmodo touts a photo series created by Benjamin Wong, a.k.a. Von Wong.

A lovely shepherdess in a flowing white dress tends to her flock in these gorgeous photographs reminiscent of a fairy tale. The twist: the shepherdess is underwater, and her charges are white-tipped reef sharks.

The image is part of the latest series from conservation photographer Benjamin Wong, a.k.a. Von Wong, who has a bit of an adventurous streak, taking his models into the field for a bit of storm-chasing and to underwater shipwrecks—all in the name of capturing that perfect shot. This time, he took model Amber Bourke to Fiji, a hot spot for ecotourism specializing in shark dives.

But his focus isn’t on thrill-seeking or purely aesthetic pursuits; in this case, he wanted to draw attention to the plight of sharks worldwide. “Sharks are almost always depicted as menacing and terrifying, yet it is humans that are responsible for killing them in the millions just to make soup,” he wrote on his blog. “I wanted to create a series of images that would help break those stereotypes.”

 

[Thanks to James H. Burns, David K.M. Klaus, John King Tarpinian, Jeff VanderMeer, Susan Toker, Moshe Feder, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Stick.]

221 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/3/16 Superscrollapixelistbutextrabraggadocious

  1. I’m really going to have to give The Expanse a watch. I’ve been so aloof about watching current shows and films…about the only thing we watch anymore are documentaries on Netflix and the occasional Seinfeld on Hulu (no cable for me).

    @Kyra
    I completely agree, there is so much to say and love about that book. I am so happy to see more love for it and hope to see it nominated!

  2. I find Cherryh super hit or miss, and I’m not sure why. I usually end up loving stuff that hardly anybody mentions–couldn’t care less about Chanur, loved Rider at the Gate and Fortress in the Eye of Time. Foreigner I bounced off of hard, but–is it Rusalka I’m thinking of?–I was apparently in just the right place and mood for.

  3. Cheryl S.: I don’t read MGC very often, but I saw a piece by [Freer] recently that had me questioning my reading comprehension. I wouldn’t have if I’d remembered his comments.

    It’s been ages since he commented here, as far as I’m aware. I don’t think he appreciated the way his arguments were dismantled so quickly and effectively by Filers.

  4. @k_choll

    The Expanse has been lots of fun thus far. The other new one that I am enjoying quite a bit is “Into the Badlands” on AMC.

    The wire fighting is excellent. The characters are varied and interesting. I’m curious as to where the story will take us.

    Regards,
    Dann

  5. @Eli:
    So, another meaning of “J-Man” is out there. To me, it was the FBI-like government men in Proctor & Bergman’s hilarious J-MEN FOREVER, and when I showed a friend of mine the movie, he got a license plate that said JMN 4VR, which he said was taken to mean “Jammin’ Forever.” I also happened to find (this was years ago, so details have suffered neuron rot) some sort of adult activity wherein the name was used, and now I see it applies to some kind of fashionable set as well as having a definition in the Urban Dictionary.

    It’s tough out there for a J-Man.

  6. Stevie: It’s amazing how the title alone can ensure that I wouldn’t even glance beyond it; Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind suggests to me that it’s pretentious twaddle, and life is too short for pretentious twaddle.

    The title comes from a quote from Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Italian humanist and feminist writer, from her essay Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women, contradicting a man who claims that her extreme intelligence is unusual for a woman:

    I have been praised too much; showing your contempt for women, you pretend that I alone am admirable because of the good fortune of my intellect… Do you suppose, O most contemptible man on earth, that I think myself sprung [like Athena] from the the head of Jove? I am a school girl, possessed of the sleeping embers of an ordinary mind.

    What a pity that you decide which novels to read based on their titles. I am sure that you miss out on some wonderful books that way. And the phenomenal irony inherent in your comment about life being too short for “pretentious twaddle” is delightful.

  7. Darren Garrison: Re #3: Nice ammonite statue, but it is out of focus, and partially blocked by some dude with a beard! Anyone know where the photo was taken? (I’m assuming it is a statue – some species got that big.)

    The photo is by Kyle Cassidy; you could ask him. It certainly looks like an interesting sculpture.

  8. Well, I went back and read the discussion of Radiance from a couple of days ago. I’m going to agree with whoever it was that said Valente is a love-her-or-hate-her author. I had a friend who told me on facebook, after I had expressed admiration for Valente there (I think after reading “The Habitation of the Blessed”), that she would never trust my taste again. She had just read “Under In The Mere” and was NOT happy about it.

    I, however, love Valente — or at least, out of the 15 books I have read by her, I have loved 9, quite liked 5, and was only meh about 1, which is an awfully good track record for catering to my tastes. I think she’s a master of prose with a chameleon-like ability to fit her style to the story she’s telling. And I also think she’s one of the finest structural writers working in SFF today, working deftly with both straightforward narrative and wild experimentalism, and everything in between.

    Radiance is, to me, first and foremost a story about stories and storytellers, which is a surprisingly hard thing to pull off, but handled here with aplomb. It’s the story of someone who’s gone, and all the people who loved her want to know why. Radiance looks at the fuzzy and permeable definitions of beginnings and endings, truth and fiction, seeing and believing. It does so nonlinearly, in wildly varying styles depending on who is telling the story and why the story is being told. It does so in a milieu that steampunks the origins of SF itself, a story where rococo rocketships are fired out of cannons to the wet jungles of Venus and the movie studios of the Moon, where silent film is king.

    There are, as I said before, quibbles I could make. An extremely minor sequence struck me as not quite right. A mystery at the story’s heart was revealed a little too all-at-once and neatly for my tastes. These are very small issues and they didn’t spoil anything for me.

    In short, if you’re the kind of person that likes Valente, this will likely be the kind of Valente that you like. Thirteen thumbs up.

  9. @TYP ~ I can’t take entire credit since pretty much every book I’ve worked on has been a team effort of talented individuals, but I’m glad to have given you pleasure. ^_^ That sounded a lot less pervy in my head, so I’m also sorry.

    @ XS ~ Yes, HIM. I can’t believe that VD is ignorant of his existence considering the level of overlap in their gaming + political circles.

  10. This may ramble a bit. There is actually a lot I liked about Foreigner The world building is excellent, and the Atevi are a very well realised and truly alien race.

    What I struggled with is something I find a lot in Cherryh’s work. A common source of conflict between her characters is their failure or inability to communicate. This is of course depressingly common in real life too, but it is a trait that I often find infuriating. Even though as an introverted, IT careered, probably slightly aspie and taciturn Scot I’m not exactly Mr Communication. There are times though when I want to reach into the narrative and bang the characters heads together. I think it is partly because I find her characters are so well drawn that it hits me harder.

    Much of Foreigner is built around the difficulty of humans and Atevi understanding each other due to the differences in their psychology. It is very well done but made my head melt.

    Personally I’m very fond of Rimrunners and Bet Yeager.

  11. @Kip W: Ha!

    @von Dimpleheimer: Farmer said about 1/3 of people so far have said it sounds Afrikaner, 1/3 have said Jamaican, and 1/3 Asian of one kind of another. He was happy with that because it meant it was just unfamiliar enough and ambiguous enough, and also because there are some phonetic commonalities in the first two that one would expect to find in an English dialect that had interacted with an Anglo/Germanic-plus-non-European creole.

  12. At Sasquan, I went to a panel about CJ Cherryh’s work. Ann Leckie, Jo Walton, amond others, were the panelists. Walton suggested that Rimrunners is where she’d suggest someone who is unfamiliar to Cherryh start. Since then, I’ve been searching every used bookstore I can to find this book (Amazon wasn’t a help for this book either, $20 for a paperback??). I probably should just go to Google and find it somewhere else online.

    EDIT: NVM. Just now noticed the “Buy Used” option at Amazon. *bangs head on keyboard* Might just have to read this one after I read Downbelow Station. (Depending on how much I like Downbelow)

  13. @Nate Harada: “But, then, I am a filthy narrativist bastard who has spent fifteen years writing for White Wolf Game Studio and its successor, Onyx Path, and thus the taint of my vile evil vileness could not be cleansed with a power-washer blowing holy water.”

    Heh. Newbie. 😉

    I never worked for the company, unless you count being a full-time volunteer at their ’94 convention and doing a little playtesting, but I vividly remember picking up the advertising booklet for the first edition of VtM back in ’91. If you remember their experiment with The Palace chat room, I helped out a bit with that. (Stack-based scripting languages are FUN!) Now I work for a different game company, doing primarily technical stuff. I bought every WoD supplement White Wolf put out, until they released a new edition of VtM that amounted to “we changed the rules due to events in the metaplot we promised we wouldn’t have.” Still, I got back into it as far as backing the 20th Anniversary Kickstarters.

    I’m also fond of the old AD&D system; as far as I’m concerned, the tan-spines are the One True Version, flaws and all. I know most of that’s nostalgia, but nostalgia has its place. (See above on backing the x20 Kickstarters.) No, I’m not a hardcore OSR guy, but I guess I’m on the fringe somewhere… and as a Bernie Sanders supporter, “conservative” is one of the last labels I’d expect to be given.

    Incidentally, I ran into one of your former Dark Ages colleagues at TimeGate last year. I’ll be there again this May; if that’s your thing, don’t be afraid to say hello! Mini-770-meetup FTW!

  14. Yes very much a matter of taste on Valente; as I described in my December 26 comment, most of the various narratives in Radiance were nails-on-blackboard to me. It’s odd that I loved The Orphan’s Tales but haven’t been able to get into a single thing of hers since then (not even “The Lily and the Horn” although I can see that it’s perfectly constructed).

  15. (3) Cool news about Jeff Vandermeer.

    (10) Jim Hines nailed it, IMO.

    @ JJ:

    O most contemptible man on earth,

    I’d like to read Laura Cereta, if only to borrow her insults.

  16. I just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.

    I liked it very much. I am grateful to the Hive for putting it on my radar.

    I continue to be puzzled that (not a spoiler) Thaniel opened a file cabinet marked “N-R” to find a document about Mori. Typo in my ebook?

  17. @k_choll

    Heavy Time is very good too. It is set much earlier in the timeline before Downbelow Station.

  18. Cherryh is an author who loomed large during my misspent youth (a personal favorite I haven’t seen mentioned much yet is Merchanter’s Luck.) But for some reason I just … haven’t read anything by her in years. I guess the last thing I read by her was Chanur’s Legacy, which was, wow. 1992. That’s a pretty long break for an author who used to be a “must read all of it!” for me. I’m not sure why I stopped … I guess the Foreigner sequence just never appealed to me, for some reason.

    Maybe I should give the Fortress books a shot.

  19. @k_choll

    I am a huge Cherryh fan and I bounced off of Downbelow Station the first time. But now after reading the rest of the Alliance/Union stories I can appreciate it much more. It might be a tough starting point but it really sets the stage.

  20. > “It’s odd that I loved The Orphan’s Tales but haven’t been able to get into a single thing of hers since then”

    Out of curiosity, have you tried either the Dirge for Prester John books or the Fairyland books?

    The Fairyland books are probably the most similar in prose style to The Orphan’s Tales, albeit with a very different structure. But I actually think the Dirge for Prester John books would be the ones that would resonate most with a fan of The Orphan’s Tales but not most of the rest of Valente.

  21. Kyra – That was me. I completely understand why others enjoy her work. It just doesn’t do it for me. Still, the ideas in Radiance kept me from completely bouncing off of it. I was still intrigued by the story, even when the style grated on my nerves (which I don’t completely understand since other authors w/similar styles work for me).

  22. Heh. Newbie. ?

    Both of you. I was briefly involved in playtesting 1st Edition Ars Magica, and with hindsight, a lot of the questions Mark Rein*Hagen was firing at our GM were the initial concepts of VtM.

  23. Cherryh has a couple of short pieces in the Foreigner universe, set slightly before the first book. They might work for a first try at that universe of stories. (You can buy them through her website.)

  24. Foreigner is the one major Cherryh sequence I never quite got around to. Now it’s gotten so long that I get intimidated. Maybe someday. I’m happy to see more of her back catalog getting rereleased electronically.

  25. Re: Cherryh’s Foreigner universe

    I know exactly why I’ve never read any of the Foreigner series, despite being a major Cherryh fan. Her books have always required a massive investment of attention and mental energy for me to read — one that is rewarded, but still required. Foreigner came out in 1994. I started grad school in 1993. I think I bought the first couple while I was still operating on the principle of “I’ll buy all the books that I would be reading if I weren’t in grad school so I’ll have them available to read later when I’m done.” But I found that academic reading left essentially no brain for thinky fiction. And when I emerged at the other end of the process, a decade later, there were bodies of work that were just too daunting to contemplate trying to catch up on. Foreigner was one of them.

  26. @Kyra: Thanks for the tip on “Prester John”. I guess I should give Valente one more try.

  27. Vasha, I’m currently reading Valente’s Prester John novels. Warning: they’re NOT light beach reading. They’re very, very dense. But, I think, worth it. (halfway through second book….)

  28. I loved the Orphan’s Tales and liked the first few Fairyland books (haven’t gotten around to the newest ones yet). I’m not really sure why Radiance did not quite work for me: it may actually be related to the 8 deadly words since I really did not care for any of the characters, one way or the other.

    Also I thought the very end (last set of ‘colored’ pages) was lame, which was disappointing since the previous hundred pages or so had finally started to coalesce into something interesting. I was just thinking I might have been premature in my comment about the Faberge egg when things fell apart again.

  29. @emgrasso: I thought the only tolerable person in Radiance was Severin; in spite of the fact that she admitted that her movies were self-centered vanity projects, the sections she narrated were much less pretentious than anyone else’s.

  30. JJ

    Until such time that Anne Charnock demonstrates that she has the intellectual capacity of Laura Cereta I shall continue to believe that this is pretentious twaddle. It’s not exactly unusual for writers to try to piggyback their way into being taken seriously by using quotations from other works as their titles, but it tends not to work the way they hope.

    On the other hand I could just point to the review of the book at Publishers Weekly, which conveys the same point at much greater length. Sticking three pleasant and competently written stories together does not create a novel at all, much less one which has great merit, and, as they note her breezy style and interesting historical tidbits don’t make up for the book’s overall lack of plot or dramatic tension.

    I have absolutely nothing against breezy style and interesting historical tidbits; I draw the line at pretending that three nice little stories can be transmuted, by some mysterious alchemical process, into a novel of outstanding substance. Sticking a quote from a famous writer in the fifteenth century as the title, in the hope that it will miraculously achieve this aim, is not only doomed to failure because of its sheer crassness, but also because it makes it blindingly obvious that the author hasn’t a clue.

    I fully accept, of course, that I have read a very large number of books, and perhaps JJ has not, thus explaining his apparent ignorance of the vast numbers of works out there with titles derived from other works. It happens all the time, particularly when writers are trying to piggyback on others because their work can’t stand on its merits…

  31. Stevie: I fully accept, of course, that I have read a very large number of books, and perhaps JJ has not

    I fully accept that you have repeatedly made it crystal clear through endless paragraphs of “pretentious twaddle” that you have a vastly overrated opinion of yourself in relation to other people here.

    I’ll point out that your earlier statement was based merely on the title and not on the actual content of Charnock’s book — which you only bothered to investigate after I challenged you. I’ll also point out that the review you are now quoting pretty much echoes exactly what I said about the book.

    I laughed for 5 minutes at your “pretentious twaddle” comment. It’s seldom that I encounter someone not on a Puppy blog who is so un-self-aware.

  32. JJ

    Has it never occurred to you that there are a lot of people who know a great deal about the texts of women in the Renaissance because we have researched them? Has it never occurred to you that those people will recognise the quote and know where it came from because of that research?

    You have devoted two posts to mansplaining me, interspersed with personal insults, and the fact that you know bugger all about the research is just par for the course for you. Heaven forbid that you should exert yourself to actually learn something when it’s just so much easier to pontificate…

  33. GENERAL DISCLAIMER FOR EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS!

    “Everyone” knows that the only TRUE D&D is the original tan covers (+Greyhawk, just so we have thieves)!! Maybe we’ll grant you Blackmoor, but only if you have sea adventures in your campaign. But we don’t need no stinkin’ miniatures, and every DM is a GOD who can dictate house rules as long as they are articulated in advance . . .

    Yes, several of my friends flunked out of college in 1974-6. But, hey, they published articles in The Strategic Review (which became The Dragon in 1976) about the creatures and character classes they invented and fought the good fight for mana-based magic systems instead of those stupid spell charts. And they did funny voices for all of the NPCs! *END RANT*

    When my kids (not all CWM and all 22+ these days) talk about “Old School,” what they mean is pretty much the “sensible” part of the above–that the game not be bogged down in setting up miniatures/toy soldiers or taking long breaks in the action to consult rules, that a good DM has an actual world and campaign planned out and that you can learn the “rules” of the world a la Dream Park and base your actions on that knowledge but can also take creative approaches to solving problems. Of course, a group that plays together more might want to expand the rule base or play with toy soldiers and rulers. But OSR to them means it ain’t all hack’n’slash. It’s roleplay, not just rollplay.

  34. Stevie: JJ isn’t mansplaining as I understand it. At no point had you noted that you were familiar with either the origin of the quote or the contents of the book you were dismissing. Which is why JJ, and I, thought it sounded rather like you were dismissing something else as pretentious twaddle on a basis that made your words look like, well, more of the same.

    It certainly sounds to me from the reviews thus far that the book in question might well be pretentious twaddle by my definition, or at best not to my taste, but I would not have waved it off in scorn based, as you appeared to do, solely on the title, nor heaped further scorn on someone else for saying that doing so is a bit of a jerk move.

    Then again, I tend to think titles are HARD and any source for a half-decent title, be it quotation or not, is a relief to authors. But what do I know. My single best title to date was given me by my publisher.

  35. RedWombat

    That’s very kind but I’m unlikely to go into berserker mode. My doctors get really cross with me if I divert from the master plan, and the masterplan is stick me in hospital and whack seriously heavy duty intravenous antibiotics into me, against bugs which are very hard to kill.

    I look forward to when they finally find me a bed, along with Wifi, but as my daughter, who is a doctor, has pointed out, this is still not Funtime. I noticed this first some half a century ago but I’m reluctant to cheese her off by saying this…

  36. Stevie: Has it never occurred to you that there are a lot of people who know a great deal about the texts of women in the Renaissance because we have researched them? Has it never occurred to you that those people will recognise the quote and know where it came from because of that research?

    I’m well aware of this. Nothing I have said would indicate that I’m not aware of this.

     
    Stevie: You have devoted two posts to mansplaining me

    I suggest you check the definition of “mansplaining”. I’ve directly commented on what you’ve said. You gave no indication that you had any idea where the title came from, you just called it “pretentious twaddle”. Now you’re trying to ret-con and pretend that you knew where the title came from all along.

     
    Stevie: the fact that you know bugger all about the research is just par for the course for you. Heaven forbid that you should exert yourself to actually learn something when it’s just so much easier to pontificate

    You have absolutely no — ZERO — idea what I do or don’t know on this subject. You haven’t asked, and I haven’t said. You’re just making more of your usual pompous assumptions about your superiority over other people.

    In fact, I do have some knowledge of Womens’ Studies, though it is certainly not an area of specialty for me — which one reason why I enjoy being educated by the posts of people here who have specialized or done extensive work in it, such as robinareid.

    I’m not the one here who is continually trying to insist that I know more about everything than everyone else. I’m continually trying to learn from the people here who actually do know more about things than I do.

    It is a methodology you would do well to adopt.

  37. I always assumed that Old-school RPGs were the sort that rely heavily on dice rolls and take place in in a Howard/Leiber/de Camp-inspired sword and sorcery setting. Given the epic and ongoing popularity of this sort of game, I fail to see how it ever needed a revival.

  38. Leonora

    I live in a world full of books, and I know that I can never read them all, because there are so many of them. That means there has to be some sort of triage to decide which books are worth reading.

    It’s using the phrase as title itself which is extraordinarily conceited, and life is too fragile to devote my time to this sort of twaddle. Of course, I’m waiting until they can free up a bed to get me into hospita for IVs, and so I am probably even more focused on life is fragile than usual. Life at the sharp end has no resemblance to fictional life at the sharp end. I have been walking the high wire since I was a child. One day I will fall, but it won’t be because I gave up.

  39. About Foreigner – I really liked the first few books, found them more accessible than a lot of Cherryh’s work. A young translator isolated alone as envoy among the alien atevi, desperately trying to understand them to avert the all-out war that nearly exterminated the tiny shipwrecked colony of humans the last time there was a serious cultural misunderstanding. The alien atevi evolved from a species with a strong pack-leader tendency – so that in their culture, the emotional attachment of fealty to a leader (called manchi) is considered the supreme passion to which all others are as nothing. This is so much the case that the dominant atevi language doesn’t even bother to coin a word for the emotional attachment of parent for child, of mate for mate, or friend for friend. No word for love, or friendship, or even preference for people outside the bond of leader for follower (the word “like” is generally used for saying how one likes, say, one kind of salad more than another, and the translator confuses atevi when he speaks of “liking” people.)

    Add to this the consideration that the way atevi form attachments of fealty to a leader is often analogous to the way humans fall in love – suddenly, passionately, unpredictably and occasionally violently – and that the popular classic atevi plays often depict a follower falling out of manchi-love with his old leader, falling in manchi with a new one and happily and bloodily betraying and backstabbing the old one, apparently to general applause. Add to that the fact that assassination is completely legal among atevi, as long as you get the proper permits through the Assassin’s Guild, make a decorous announcement of your intent, and don’t engage in any amateur slaughter, and you’ve got a terrifying situation for your frightened young narrator to desperately try to understand. I loved it.

    At least – I did. But as the series went on, and on (and on), I found myself flipping through the later books in Barnes and Noble instead of buying them. It seemed to me that the more Cherryh showed us of atevi society, the less alien – and interesting – it actually seemed. The narrator got more secure about his knowledge of the atevi, and less curious to understand them – and so, apparently, did the author. In the early books the narrator desperately tries to understand the culture he is surrounded by, gets interesting hints about how atevi society in the past might have been very different than how it is now – but his atevi hosts refuse to give him the history books necessary to understand this past better. This intriguing plotline is simply dropped in later books – the protagonist doesn’t bother to learn any more about the past once he gains the trust of the atevi king.

    Later in the series, it seems that even Cherryh herself forgets what made the atevi alien to begin with. In the beginning she specifies there is no such atevi word as love or affection between people outside the leader-follower bond – but then in a later book an important plot point hinges on how a high-ranking atevi noble “doted” too much on her son and gave him power he was too incompetent to handle. Suddenly the word for affection that we were told doesn’t exist in atevi appears. Suddenly atevi society seems less alien than before – and it doesn’t seem to matter. The narrator doesn’t care that his entire understanding of atevi society and language is apparently fundamentally flawed. He is mainly interested in the political cock-up the incompetent noble has created, and that’s all we hear about for the rest of the book. And honestly, Cherryh’s political plots are not very interesting on their own, without a genuinely alien society as a background. In the later books it seemed to me that for “atevi” you could just pencil in “nineteenth-century Imperial Japan” for huge stretches without much difference.

    Not mention the narrator gets insufferably smug as the series goes on, and when we actually get a first-person view of an atevi mind, it turns out to be depressingly un-alien. In fact, it’s the all-too-familiar child protagonist seen in other SF novels – the kind of bright and precocious kid whose adventurousness and chafing at adult discipline is supposed to awaken our sympathy. Unfortunately (as often happens with such children) he repeatedly chooses to be all precociously adventurous JUST where he can cause the most disastrous and annoying plot complications. I wanted to slap the dear little brat upside the head more than once.

  40. JJ

    Seeing your later posts it is obvious that you have no interest in discussion; you just want to flounce in circles around File 770 screaming at me. Frankly, your comments seem identical to VD’s frothing at the mouth invective,

    I shall, therefore, try and find how to block you after I come out of hospital; I know that others do it, so I shall ask for their assistance .once I am well enough to understand it

  41. JJ, for the record, when I read this:

    Stevie on February 4, 2016 at 7:26 am said:

    It’s amazing how the title alone can ensure that I wouldn’t even glance beyond it; Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind suggests to me that it’s pretentious twaddle, and life is too short for pretentious twaddle.

    I interpreted it just as you did–that she hadn’t glanced beyond the title and that the title alone suggested to her it’s pretentious twaddle.

    Thanks for posting the quote. I need to read the rest of that!

  42. Stevie

    I’m sorry to hear you are having medical issues.
    In a hard couple of years my husband and I both had extended hospital stays, and I have to say I would find the prospect of returning extremely daunting.
    You know things are bad when it looks like the right alternative.
    I hope all goes well.

  43. Wow, that shark shepherds video was a surprising idea. I hope they got some lovely pictures out of it. I also hope they had a way the model could easily dump the dress and get to the surface in an emergency…

    I enjoy CJ Cherryh’s _Foreigner_ books very much. Whereas a lot of her previous writing was too dark for me. I remember telling my friends that her basic pattern was “everything starts out horrible and gets worse. By the very end of the book it gets just slightly better–just enough that it seems reasonable that the protagonists are going to make the effort to try to survive another day.” Which wasn’t my thing. The Foreigner books don’t seem so devoid of hope to me which is probably why I enjoy them.

    Valente is another writer who writes some books I really love (Fairyland) and some books that leave me wishing I hadn’t picked up those images.

    On another note everybody has their own way of picking books and their own turn-offs. You aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but let’s talk sense; life is short, the to-be-read pile is high, and none of us is ever going to be able to get to everything. You have to choose somehow.

  44. Stevie: it is obvious that you have no interest in discussion; you just want to flounce in circles around File 770 screaming at me. Frankly, your comments seem identical to VD’s frothing at the mouth invective.

    I am sorry to hear that you are one of those people whose sensibilities are so delicate that you regard any disagreement, however articulate and rational it might be, as “screaming” and “invective”. Daily life must be very difficult for you when any challenge to your worldview is regarded as an vicious attack.

    I hope that the doctor will be able to alleviate your physical pain and distress.

  45. ULTRAGOTHA: Thanks for posting the quote. I need to read the rest of that!

    I know, I was intrigued enough by it to go look up the source material. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a woman during that time, and it’s amazing to think of how much courage she had (and how much she was probably punished for it).

    There’s a really (SPOILERS) well-written analysis / review of Charnock’s Sleeping Embers of An Ordinary Mind on Amazon. I found that reading it after I’d read the book really enhanced my appreciation of the book.

    I would encourage anyone who does not think they will read the book, or who is unsure whether they would enjoy it, to read that review. I found it very enlightening.

  46. Huh. So apparently Zen Cho is going to have a book signing/ Q&A near my neck of the woods. Since this isn’t something that happens very often (English language SFF authors) here, I may actually do something unexpected and go for it. Though mind you, the only question I can think of asking her will probably be something like SEEQUUUEEELLLL WHENNNNN?

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