(1) HOLLY BLACK Q&A. “Holly Black interview: The Cruel Prince author on the boom in faerie fantasy novels, BookTok, and sex scenes” at Slate.
What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?
[Black] As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.
I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.
(2) NEW WORLDS TURNING 60. Richard Glynn Jones told the New Worlds Facebook group on March 13 that an anniversary issue is in the works:
Michael Moorcock and some associates are preparing a new issue of New Worlds to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his becoming its editor. This will be in magazine format as before (A4, saddle-stitched) for publication in mid-summer. The contents are pretty much finalised, so please don’t send any unsolicited material: it’s by invitation only. A second book-format New Worlds is due from PS Publishing later in the year. More info soon.
(3) SOMETHING IS ROTTING IN HOLLYWOOD BITS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Digital is forever. Except when it isn’t. The movie industry has a data migration problem. From The Hollywood Reporter: “’It’s a Silent Fire’: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis”.
Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.
While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.
It’s underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”
(4) FADING SCHOLARSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The same fear holds true for scholarly publications. Nature this week has rung an alarm bell. SF fans should note: this is another reason why fandom’s move away from paper publications is to be deplored. Digital is simply not for evermore. We need plurality and a diversity of solutions…. “Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet” at Nature.
An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.
DOIs for the uninitiated are Digital Object Identifiers: every academic publication should have one so that if a publisher’s website changes and there is a new web-page address (URL) the DOI remains the same and links through. [Jonathan adds, “Fans need not worry about this (the only one they should remember is https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139087735…” Guess whose book that link goes to…]
More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January1, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”
Primary research is here.
(5) LEGACY WORRIES. Brian Keene muses about the disturbingly short half-life of author name recognition in “Letters From the Labyrinth 372”.
…On Tuesday of this past week, I took a rare day off and drove up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit my pal F. Paul Wilson. It occurs to me that I will need to explain to some of my younger readers just who Paul is, and therein lies the meat of this missive. Paul was one of the first horror novelists I read. (As I’ve written in OTHER WORDS, my evolutionary chain as a kid was comic books and Hardy Boys, then Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson). First thing I read by him was The Keep — a seminal, classic horror novel which, sadly, most of you under the age of forty have probably never read. The Keep was the third “grown up book” I ever read (right after King’s Night Shift and Salem’s Lot), and it is an essential part of my writer DNA.
Paul went on to become a giant in the fields of not just horror, but science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other genres, as well. He was a stalwart, perennial New York Times bestseller, and his best-known IP — Repairman Jack — will carry on long after he’s gone. I guarantee you that right now, many of you who did not recognize the name F. Paul Wilson are now nodding and saying, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of Repairman Jack.”
It feels absurd to have to explain all of this to you. How could anyone not know this? But then, I think about this past Thursday in the store, when I overheard a mother explaining to her daughter who Brian Keene was, and that he owned the store they were currently shopping in, and that she (the mother) had started reading him in high school. The girl, high school age herself, was holding a book by Wile E. Young that she’d pulled off the shelf. Wile E. Young, was reading me in high school and my books are an essential part of his writer DNA the way Paul’s are a part of mine….
(6) FEAR THE LEFTOVERS. “Godzilla Minus One Director Releases New Kaiju Short, ‘Foodlosslla’” – here is Comicbook.com’s introduction.
…Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki teamed up with Ajinomoto (a line of cooking products in Japan) on a special new promo that takes the Kaiju director’s expertise and brings it to life in a new way. Highlighting the amount of food waste in Japan (2.44 million tons according to the advertisement), it results in the creation of “Foodlosslla” a kaiju made out of all the wasted food that doesn’t get eaten or cooked. But with the director’s eye, it’s a great looking monster for the promo. Check it out in action below…
(7) STILL PLENTY OF GOOD EATING ON THIS ONE. Don’t ask what internet rabbit hole this 2014 recipe came from: “Edible Art: Spice Stuffed Squash Sandworms” at Kitchen Overlord. (Click for larger image.)
(8) THOMAS STAFFFORD (1930-2024). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gemini 6. Gemini 9. Apollo 10. Apollo 10 Lunar Module. Apollo-Soyuz. Air Force Lt General. A long and busy life. RIP. “Astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, has died at age 93”. He died March 18. PBS News Hour pays tribute.
…Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma.
Stafford was one of 24 people who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive….
…After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.
“Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the ‘Father of Stealth’,” Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous “Area 51” desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies….
… After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships.
“We have capture,” Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: “Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you.”
The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments….
(9) BELATED BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 76. Not at all surprisingly, the first series that I read by William Gibson was the one that started off with his first novel, Neuromancer, published forty years ago, which is called the Sprawl trilogy. I still love the now anachronistic wording of the opening, “THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
I don’t know at all how many times that I’ve read that trilogy but the last time I did read it, about a decade, it was still impressively excellent.
Neuromancer would get a much deserved Hugo at Aussiecon Two as well as a Ditmar, Nebula and a Philip K. Dick; and Mono Lisa Overdrive won an Aurora. The novels had too many nominations to list here.
Yes, I’m looking forward to the Apple financed Neuromancer series. If anyone can financially afford to do it right, it’s them. And they have a strict hands-off policy of not interfering with the actual production team.
Going back in time I must talk about “Johnny Mnemonic” which was not his first story, which was “Hinterlands“ which I’ve never of until now. “Johnny Mnemonic” I think is one of the finest SF short story written. The same holds true for “The Gernsback Continuum” which was published in the same year, forty-two years ago. I’ll toss in “New Rose Hotel” which showed up a few years later.
Please let’s not talk about the Johnny Mnemonic film. Really don’t mention it. I get queasy thinking about how they butchered that stellar story. And I’ve seen some pretty awful scripts but few that matched this, plus the casting of him. Why oh why?
His second series, the Bridge trilogy, which is Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties came out some thirty years ago. No, I’ve not read it nearly as many times as I’ve read the Sprawl ones but I did find rather excellent. The near future setting is more grounded and a more fascinating read for that.
Ok, I’ll admit that I do not at all know what to make of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. They are well written like everything he does, and the characters are fascinating, but something these works is just not quite right for me. It comes off cold, distanced and just not interesting as what else he’s done.
On the other catspaw, the Jackpot trilogy, or possibly longer series, which so far consisted of The Peripheral that has contain time travel (of sorts, maybe) and Agency, and a third, Jackpot, which I don’t think has a release date, is fascinating in the first two novels. Strange, disjointed but fascinating.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Thatababy is really for the birds.
- Breaking Cat News reports on a comics industry story.
- Peanuts from 1955 explains why we’ll never land a rocket on the moon.
(11) JUNE 4. ScreenRant says The Acolyte release date has been confirmed by Lucasfilm: “We Finally Know When The Next Star Wars TV Show Comes Out”.
… With a summer 2024 Disney+ drop having long been rumored, Lucasfilm has officially confirmed The Acolyte‘s release date as June 4, 2024, via Star Wars‘ official Twitter/X account. As it turns out, the release dates that have been reported for The Acolyte were accurate. This means Star Wars fans will not have to wait long to sink their teeth into the High Republic era, as Lucasfilm takes a big step into a new facet of a galaxy far, far away….
… The books of the High Republic are set centuries before Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Upon The Acolyte‘s announcement, it was confirmed that the Disney+ show would detail the waning days of the High Republic era. This places the show about 100 years before The Phantom Menace in the Star Wars timeline, promising a new, exciting look at an entirely new era of the franchise….
(12) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF LOOKING UP AT GIANT ELECTRIC SHEEP? YES THEY CAN! [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Federal Wildlife Trafficking Charges as Part of Yearslong Effort to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep for Captive Hunting” at the US Department of Justice.
Defendant Worked to Traffic Marco Polo Sheep Parts from Kyrgyzstan, Clone Sheep, Illegally Inseminate Ewes to Create Hybrids and Traffic Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Parts
A Montana man pleaded guilty today to two felony wildlife crimes – a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act – as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.
Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, of Vaughn, Montana, is the owner and operator of Sun River Enterprises LLC – also known as Schubarth Ranch – which is a 215-acre alternative livestock ranch in Vaughn. The Schubarth Ranch is engaged in the purchase, sale and breeding of “alternative livestock” such as mountain sheep, mountain goats and various ungulates. The primary market for Schubarth’s livestock is captive hunting operations, also known as shooting preserves or game ranches.
According to court documents, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals between 2013 and 2021 to create a larger hybrid species of sheep that would garner higher prices from shooting preserves. Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation. Average males can weigh more than 300 pounds with horns that span more than five feet. Marco Polo argali are native to the high elevations of the Pamir region of Central Asia. They are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, domestically by the U.S. Endangered Species Act and are prohibited in the State of Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.
Schubarth sent genetic material from the argali parts to a lab to create cloned embryos. Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named “Montana Mountain King” or MMK….
(13) TINY MESSAGES. Like the “golden record” sent with two 1977 Voyager probes,“NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will carry a poem and millions of names to ocean moon” reports CNN.
When NASA’s Europa Clipper aims to launch on its highly anticipated mission to an icy moon in October, the spacecraft will carry a unique design etched with names, poetry and artwork symbolizing humanity.
The US space agency has a long history of sending names and meaningful designs aloft aboard missions, including the Voyager probes, the Perseverance rover and Parker Solar Probe. Now, it’s Europa Clipper’s turn to carry on the tradition of ferrying a design that illustrates why humans are driven to explore the cosmos….
… Decorated on both sides and made of the rare metal tantalum, the triangular plate will seal the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics inside a vault to protect them from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.
On the inside of the vault is a silicon microchip stenciled with more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public. The microchip is at the center of a design that shows a bottle floating within the orbit of Jupiter and its moons to symbolize that it serves as a cosmic message in a bottle.
Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used electron beams to stencil the names at a size smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
Below the bottle, the design features the original poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, etched in her handwriting, as well as a portrait of the late planetary sciences pioneer Ron Greeley, an Arizona State University professor who played a crucial role in laying the foundation for the development of a mission to Europa.
The side of the plate facing the inside of the vault also includes an etching of the Drake Equation, developed by the late astronomer Frank Drake of the University of California Santa Cruz in 1961 to estimate the possibility of finding advanced life beyond Earth. The equation remains an important part of astrobiological research as scientists search for evidence of life beyond our planet.
The external side of the plate carries waveforms, or visual representations of sound waves, that depict the word “water” in 103 languages from around the world. At the heart of the spiral is a symbol that means “water” in American Sign Language. The audio of the spoken languages collected by linguists for NASA is available on its website….
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mother’s Basement looks back on “How Akira Toriyama Changed The World”.
Akira Toriyama didn’t just change manga and anime forever, he changed the entire world. Here’s how.
Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, JJ, Lise Andreasen, Andrew (not Werdna), N., Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Well! First!
(2) And a congrats to Michael, who I met once, at my first Worldcon.
(3) Why I need to burn my VCR tapes to disk… and why I buy CDs and DVDs. Streaming can poof go away.
(8) And a salute to him. Damn…
Birthday: hell, yes. Let’s see, while writing the first page of Becoming Terran, I was thinking of the first page of Neuromancer. And Agency, and the whole concept of agency, has affected my writing.
(12) Oh, Brave White Hunters… breed a large sheep for captive hunting. Y’know, I had no problem reading about the lions that ate the poachers not long ago….
(13) Yeah, assuming that if anyone finds them, they’ll figure out we wanted to be friends. Hell of a lot better than having them blow up if found.
5) I don’t know what you expect, I can’t even name presidential candidates from 20 years ago let alone authors of books I read back then.
9) “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
(1) Ooh, I’m reading one of her books right now. 🙂
It’s easy to forget she got such an early start in the YA market. And I remember the YA field of the early 2000s. So many stores didn’t know where to shelve it — and usually just shelved the YA with the middle grade.
(3) Oh, great. The bean counters are screwing another thing up.
(4) I can’t understand why a science publisher wouldn’t preserve their electronic articles?! Isn’t that part of … their job? I used to edit articles for a major science publication that went digital-only. But they were careful about preserving the articles (and about converting decades worth of older articles into digital formats).
(5) And it’s often hard to find the formative writers in print. 😐 Except for a few names, publishing forgets too quickly — even if the fans want to read those older books.
(8) RIP – he did a lot for us. Or for somebody. (The moon trip was Stafford, [Gene] Cernan, and [John] Young.)
(9) I like the Blue Ant series, but I can’t explain why.
Speaking of electronic preservation:
I buy more and more ebooks these days, always as epubs. I DL them, strip off any DRM, then archive them so that I & my family can read them as though I actually OWN them.
I’ve been sharing them via Dropbox, but I’d really prefer to do it via a site that I, again, actually OWN. I could roll my own, but why reinvent the wheel?
So what do you guys recommend? Have any of you used Ubooquity? Pros/cons?
A friend reports that Kindle files are no longer .mobi, they’re .epubs — is this true? Can Calibre’s deDRM plugin deal with them? Last time I checked (admittedly months ago) I couldn’t deDRM a Kindle file, and that was the last one I tried buying.
(3) and (4) These people have never had a long, thoughtful conversation with a librarian. Honestly. The codex book has been around for two millennia. Paper is almost that old in China, and started replacing parchment and vellum in Europe in the 11th century.
And even cheap-ass high acid pulp paper, with proper care, can last a century. With halfway decent care it can last half a century.
Call me when an electronic format and the tech to access it lasts half a century.
The first time Amazon deleted a book from the Kindle libraries of everyone who bought it, after discovering the person or company selling it didn’t have the rights, should have been an alarm bell to anyone who hadn’t already noticed the problem.
Digital formats are both vulnerable to decay, and inaccessible if you don’t have the right high-tech gadgets.
No, it’s not surprising that scholarly publications have been slow to notice. Sadly.
(12) I wonder if the lions who dined on the poachers would consider a contract on these guys and the captive hunter market they plane to sell to.
@Doctor Science–Yes, Kindle books are epub format now. I’m not sure whether the Calibre deDRM plug-in has been updated to deal with them, because a year or two ago I was not able to successfully get then most recent version of it installed. I’m a librarian, not a serious techie. I couldn’t do it following the instructions, and I couldn’t find anyone able/willing to help me, and I finally gave up beating my head against that particular brick wall. All knowledge may be contained in fandom, but in terms of this particular bit of knowledge, I’m feeling very unloved.
Ah, yes, the first book Kindle deleted was… 1984. Really.
And bookworm, you can’t? Let’s see, 1968, coming down from a trip, and it’s early morning, and a friend tells me I have to read this book, and it starts… “And TODAY, third of May, 2010, Manhattan, reports mild, spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome, ditto on the General Technics Plaza…”
The book that gave me the structure for Becoming Terran.
(14)
Before I get too far into this video, I’m hoping that was an ironic designation.
I put my bet down on ironic. (Now I’ll see if I get any chips back…)
@Lis Carey that’s the reason I’m not buying my ebooks from Amazon.
Yeah, even DRM-free books from Amazon are hard to backup – sonI buy elsewhere
5) One of the more melancholy exercises I did once was to go back through historical records of award-winning and bestselling books in England and the US as part of research comparing what books are remembered as the best of their times versus what was lauded as the best (or sold the most) at the time.
It was striking how many works and how many authors have been essentially forgotten, even from very recent decades, people whose books were once all over airport bookshops, whose names were all over magazines, who today didn’t even have a Wikipedia page of their own.
If we don’t tell younger people about them, even the most common commonplaces can be forgotten startlingly quickly.
@mark in his first: I likewise buy physical media, but CDs and DVDs aren’t immune to going poof. For example, see the entry on disc rot in Wikipedia. (I knew – very slightly – the fan quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald story “A bad case of DVD rot eats into movie collections”, linked on the Wiki page.)
@Joshua K.: I think the designation is garbled (even though that’s how it appears on the channel). Geoff Thew is famous for his reviews of terrible anime. “Number one Worst Anime reviewer”, properly parsed, would be a reasonable way to describe it.
@Andrew (not Werdna)–
For DRM-free books, I go to my Kindle library on Amazon. From the available options, I choose “more options,” and that’s where you get the option to download it. Once it’s on my computer, I add it to Calibre.
Now it’s backed up, and I can add it to my Kobo.
If the publisher uses DRM, buying it elsewhere won’t help. It will still have DRM.
@Lis: Thanks.I’ll give that a try again
Doctor Science: A friend reports that Kindle files are no longer .mobi, they’re .epubs — is this true? Can Calibre’s deDRM plugin deal with them? Last time I checked (admittedly months ago) I couldn’t deDRM a Kindle file, and that was the last one I tried buying.
My Calibre de-DRMing for Kindle stopped working sometime last year. I still have a bunch of my 2023 mag issues (before Amazon stopped selling them) which are .azw and have not been converted. I know I need to update my Calibre, it’s up to 7-something and I’m still on 4-something (and I think Apprentice Alf’s got a 7-something update). But the last time I upgraded Calibre it took so long to get the ADE and Kindle de-DRM working and I just haven’t had the fortitude to do it yet.
The MobileRead forums are always a huge help with this.
These days if I absolutely have to buy an e-book with DRM I will get it through NOOK because those are ADE epubs and my ADE de-DRM is still working.
(14) @Joshua K., I watched the whole thing. By the end I was quite misty-eyed. It’s a thorough and heartfelt tribute.
I found the category listing on The Top Ten, and it is about bad reviewers of anime, and not about reviewers of bad anime.
Geoff Thew has scathing things to say about Sword Art Online and this makes him persona non grata with the list’s creator, Sponge by name. Also, Geoff may have broken faith with a certain element of the fandom by actually moving out of his mother’s basement and getting a place with his girlfriend. The utter effrontery of the man!
Regardless, Geoff appears to have accepted his Number One Worst designation as a point of pride, and there is a strong whiff of piss-take in several of the comments in the Top Ten discussion.
3) ‘If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it’ remains undefeated.
4) “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.” Very Adeptus Mechanicus. Assuage the machine spirits!
7) I’m unlikely to use this recipe as I don’t like squash (or cooked vegetables in general) but I do like that they used the ’84 Dune characters in their graphic.
8) A modern day Columbus, de Gama, or Cabrillo helping to push back the frontier and seeing what’s out there. Requiescat in pace.
9) As a supporting point for 5) or maybe a counterpoint, I dunno, I’m not a tech-y guy (I’m whatever the exact opposite of an ‘early adopter’ is) and never had much use for cyberpunk but even I know who William Gibson is.
12) Captive hunting is lame and anyone who does it should be embarrassed. Also, why would anyone go through all that trouble for fuckin’ sheep? I’ve hunted and fished and trapped all my life from Barrow to Oaxaca with rifles, bows (compound, long, and cross) and spears and if I were going to try and engineer an animal, it’d be to make it more challenging, not less. I’d introduce lions to North America, or make more dangerous bears or meaner pigs (although experience leads me to believe that God may have made pigs as mean as possible from the git-go already.) Waste of time and effort, man.
Of course I would never strip DRM from Kindle books, but it seems that Amazon is currently ahead in the DRM race. Also, it is getting harder to track down the information needed to deDRM the books for Calibre. I will do the research and report back if I find anything new.
Robert, I suggest Googling for “Apprentice Alf”. Also, there will be helpful information at the link I gave Doctor Science above. I’m just currently in CBA mode.
Back in the eighties, I attended a panel on cyberpunk with a variety of writers, young and old. They didn’t agree on much, but the one thing they could agree on–the unanimous conclusion of the panel–was that Gibson was a hell of a writer! 🙂
@Doctor Science
Most Amazon books are kfx format now depending on how you are downloading them. In most cases, KFX DRM can be removed if you have noDRM’s DeDRM 10.0.9 and the KFX Input plugins installed in calibre. There are a few books which cannot be decrypted such as expensive textbooks. If you see that the book’s page mentions only being available to the latest app versions and devices, you will probably be stuck with DRM. Another problem with the KFX format is that Amazon always delivers it with DRM even on books from publishers which are suppose to be DRM-free. There are also workarounds to get the older KF8/AZW3 format which is more akin to EPUB and is therefore usually better for converting into that format. And DeDRM can handle it.
What your friend may have been talking about is the fact that Amazon’s send-to-kindle service no longer accepts mobi format. But you can now send epub files. These are still autoconverted into an Amazon format. Which format will depend on the device/app. The conversion may have less than great results or may not work at all without some tweeking of the original epub.
@JJ
Do you mean Kobo? Nook DRM is pretty much the worst to remove at this point.
Apprentice Alf and Apprentice Harper have retired. The DeDRM project is currently maintained by noDRM at GitHub.
I can strip DRM from my Amazon ebooks using the Calibre plug-in, with the caveat that the way I found to do it requires having a kindle reader, and adding the serial number from that reader into the plugin settings. If my memory hasn’t wholly failed me, it is the deDRM plugin; I can check when I get home as well as find out what version of Calibre it works on.
(0) I’m still trying to imagine the illustration that goes with this title.
@Avilyn
Yes, that is one of the workarounds to get the older non-kfx formats which DeDRM has long been able to deal with. As you say, it requires having an E-ink Kindle ereader on your account…won’t work with a Fire tablet.
I used to download and deDRM religiously. Then the RAID I was saving everything on died without warning.
These days I console myself with the logic that I hardly ever buy a book when it’s not on a 99p sale, that I have enough unread books that should Amazon play silly buggers with some old I’d have plenty to read, and books I like enough to want to read again I’ll generally buy physical copies of. If only I could find my reading glasses.
Jim Janney: Something by Tenniel?
Tenniel, but with more tentacles…
@Nickpheas: me, too — I think of ebooks as basically disposable reading.
@Laura
That sends you to https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools (latest release 4 days ago)
Apprentice Harper’s repo is no longer maintained. Correct url is:
https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
I’m going to want both clear, straightforward instructions, and someone to help, quite possibly including peeling me off the ceiling, sadly.
(3) and (4) Remember “Sleeper”? Woody Allen film, 1973, about a nebbish who goes into the hospital for an appendectomy, but something goes wrong: he’s put in cryosleep, and wakes up 200 years later. Hilarity ensues.
There’s a scene where he’s talking to historians who’ve been chronicling his native time period. Their attempts to compile a complete record of the Nixon Administration have hit a wall: “There are no records of that time at all.”
The joke then – in 1973 – was that Nixon erased, burned, or otherwise disposed of all records from his Administration because he was covering everything up.
The joke now, and for the foreseeable future, will be that 21st Century Western Civilization left no records behind, either… because everything was stored on media that can no longer be accessed, or was deleted when the company owning the medium the records were stored on decided to delete it all when the tech became obsolete or too expensive to maintain.
@Laura – it does work with a Fire tablet on your account, as that’s the only Amazon tablet I have, so that’s the serial number I used. I followed the steps in this post, and it worked for me: https://auresnotes.com/how-to-remove-amazon-kindles-drm-latest-update/
Note that it does require an older version of Calibre; 6.2.1, whereas the app is telling me 7.7.0 is the latest version. I have no idea if the deDRM continues to work in the later version; I’ve avoided updating.
@Laura
I went there. The page sent me to ApprenticeHarper’s page. It may not be maintained BUT THE LATEST VERSION IS FOUR DAYS OLD.
(Also it says which versions to use for Calibre.)
@P J Evans
The latest code is 4 days old and is part of noDRM’s fork. Last update on Apprentice Harper’s repo is 3 years ago and is the “No Longer Maintained” Readme. Latest actual release is noDRM’s DeDRM 10.0.9 from Aug 2, 2023.
(noDRM’s DeDRM is backward compatible to older versions of calibre. Although the further back you go the less that’s been tested.)
@Avilyn
Then the book was already DRM-free.
(3) We had a defective laser disc hanging in the window to make pretty rainbows for years. Sadly, whatever caused it to not play also contributed to physical rot, and the silver part was eaten away slowly. Probably the UV didn’t help.
My NOOK will no longer recharge (and it has that !@#$ proprietary charger) and I no longer have the credit card number I used, so there are many, many books I bought which I can no longer read. Any ideas gladly received at (my name at yahoo). But I’m pretty sure the bitrot is final.
I need to look into how to save the things I paid money for on Kindle and Google Books — hopeless trying to save all the freebies!
(6) I like that ad. And apparently all you need to do to defeat this monster is pour pure concentrated MSG over all your food. Not an option for those of us with certain non-standard brains.
BTW, the Godzilla Minus One team were so delightful at the Oscars. Not only carrying their ‘zillas, but having matching shoes with the claws on the heels.
(7) That sounds like a pretty standard treatment for butternut squash, except for the detailing. But perfect for this autumn’s Nerd Thanksgiving!
Avilyn: I can strip DRM from my Amazon ebooks using the Calibre plug-in, with the caveat that the way I found to do it requires having a kindle reader, and adding the serial number from that reader into the plugin settings. If my memory hasn’t wholly failed me, it is the deDRM plugin; I can check when I get home as well as find out what version of Calibre it works on.
I used that for years, but Amazon changed something last year in their azw files and it stopped working. I probably just need to install noDRM since Laura says it’s backward compatible.
I’ve got an old Kindle DX which I bought in 2010. I haven’t used it for years, but the serial number gives me access to Amazon ebooks through Calibre. Amazon stopped connection to the 3G wireless on it a few years ago, so it can only be loaded by using a USB cable from my desktop computer. I’m dreading the day when Amazon nullifies the serial numbers for old Kindle DXs.
Laura, thanks for the updated de-DRM info. One of these days I’ll set aside some time to upgrade Calibre and work out the kinks, but as it’s only for a handful of the SFF mags (which I can read through the Kindle app) it’s not an urgency right now.
@ JJ
This site has up-to-date information about using deDRM in 2024 (their instructions worked for me last year, so it probably works now):
https://www.cloudwards.net/remove-drm-from-kindle-books/
@Robert Thornton
The instructions for the first part there requires an E-ink Kindle (not a Fire).
The instructions for using older Kindle for PC 1.17 will not work for books published after 2022.
Both of those methods avoid KFX format so installing the KFX Input plugin as they suggest isn’t necessary.
However, if you don’t have an E-ink Kindle and your book was published in 2023 or later, DeDRM 10.0.9 and the KFX Input plugin will help with most books downloaded from the current Kindle for PC/Mac.
I’ve been unable to de-DRM any Kindle book published in 2023 or later. Does anyone know if the newer de-DRM tools work on the newest Amazon encryption? (I keep backups of my e-library… for personal use only… ever since Sony stopped supporting ebooks and I lost my library; I do NOT trust corporations to maintain my e-library.) I’ve heard that buying a physical older Kindle might work, but I see some commenters saying that this workaround no longer, well, works-around.
@Cassy B
Yes, the plugins I mentioned will work for most books downloaded with the current Kindle for PC/Mac. There are a few exceptions like expensive textbooks.
If you have any E-ink Kindle (not a Fire) new or old (doesn’t even need to be working anymore as long as it is registered to your account), you can download books in the older format (with the older encryption) from your content & devices page. You need to enter the Kindle’s serial number into DeDRM’s customization for those. Again there are some exceptions. The same few books which won’t work if downloaded with Kindle for PC/Mac will not have the option to download in the older decryptable format. They also removed the download option for borrowed Kindle Unlimited books.
(9) Around the time the Sprawl trilogy was hitting big, the popular wisdom was that hard-edged cyberpunk (such as Gibson’s) was being written on the laid-back rainforested West Coast, whereas the high fantasy was coming out of the concrete urban east (Guy Gavriel Kay). Not sure if this was true even then, but it makes a good story!
For me, the Blue Ant novels, though different thematically from either his earlier or later novels, work a similar vein as several of Cory Doctorow’s stories. Attack Surface, for example. Spook Country is my favorite, followed by Pattern Recognition. Zero History I thought was okay, but a bit morose.