(1) WORTH YOUR WHILE. Having seen what shoppers are lined up for, James Davis Nicoll tracked down five highly time-absorbent novels — “Five Massive SFF Books to Read While You’re Social-Distancing” at Tor.com.
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
Clocking in at a streamlined 1120 pages, Ash tells the tale of 15th century mercenary Ash, a woman whose Europe is both very much like and very much different from our own. A natural soldier, she is drawn into the effort to defend a disunited Europe from the Visigoth army that threatens the continent. Visigoth-ruled Carthage has numbers and a seemingly magical technology the Europeans cannot match. Key to the invader’s success: the Faris, a woman guided by mysterious Voices…a woman who could be Ash’s twin.
(2) INSTANT TSUNDOKU. Paul Weimer presents “Mind Meld: The 101 and the 201 of SFF” at Nerds of a Feather. The feature involves asking people a genre-related question and sharing their responses. Answering this time are Marissa Lingen, Megan O’Keefe, Alix Harrow, Adri Joy, Marina Berlin, Lisa McCurrach, Melissa Caruso, Andrew Hiller, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Keena Roberts, J Kathleen Cheney, Elizabeth Fitz, Camestros Felapton, Catherine Lundoff, Sophia McDougall, and Julie Czerneda. His question is:
Some readers are looking for entry points into fantasy and pointing them at a book rich in the conversation and assumed tropes can throw them right out of it again. Other readers want more than a basic experience but are frustrated with novels that retread the same basics over and over.
So I’d like for you to recommend me *two* books:
1. A 101 SFF book that someone who may have seen Lord of the Rings but never cracked open an SFF book might fruitfully read.
2. A 201 SFF book for someone looking for a deeper, richer experience, rewarding their previous reading in genre.
(3) NEW ZEALAND GOING TO TOP ALERT LEVEL. Of concern for those hoping the 2020 Worldcon might still be held this summer, New Zealand’s Prime Minister announced yesterday that the nation has gone to Level 3 status, and tomorrow they will be going to Level 4 status for at least 4 weeks.
A New Zealand Herald article explains: “Coronavirus: What Covid-19 alert levels 3 and 4 mean for you and your family”.
New Zealand has 102 confirmed cases of coronavirus and is now at alert level 3 – and will move to level four for likely at least four weeks from Wednesday.
Alert level 3 means the risk of the potentially deadly virus not being contained and there will either be community transmission of the virus or multiple clusters breaking out.
Level 4 means people are instructed to stay at home, schools and universities closed, as well as non-essential businesses, major reprioritisation of health services, and severely limited travel.
Essential services will be open at all alert levels, but level level 3 means limited travel in areas with clusters of Covid-19 cases, affected educational facilities closed, mass gatherings cancelled, public venues closed (such as libraries, museums, cinemas, food courts, gyms, pools, amusement parks), some non-essential businesses closed, and non face-to-face primary care consultations, with non-elective services and procedures in hospitals deferred.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just told the nation “we are all now preparing as a nation to go into self-isolation in the same way we have seen other countries do. Staying at home is essential”.
That would give the health system a chance to cope, she said.
(4) LAFFERTY FANS DISAPPOINTED. Laffcon, a one-day event about the works of R.A. Lafferty that had been scheduled for June 8 in Lawenceville, New Jersey has been postponed until June 2021.
(5) HELP NEEDED. A GoFundMe to help the late Kate Hatcher’s family has been launched by Rick Kovalcik: “Help Ben (and Ireland) Hatcher”.
As you may know, Kate Hatcher passed away early in March after battling pneumonia (https://file770.com/kate-hatcher-1974-2020/). She left behind her partner, Ben Hatcher, and a daughter with health issues, Ireland. Various people have asked if there is anything we could do for Ben and Ireland. Well, John Hertz called me yesterday and said Ben and Ireland really could use some money, especially in the next month, while Ben tries to straighten out the finances and government payments to Ireland. Since John is not on the Internet, the suggestion was that I create a GoFundMe and send the money to Ben Hatcher. I am doing so. As I did for the Boskone ASL Fund, I will make up the GoFundMe fees (up to the asking amount) in addition to my personal contribution so that Ben and Ireland get the full amount that people are donating. As suggested by John Hertz, I will send Ben a money order on about March 31st with what is raised to that point and then follow up with additional funds as appropriate (perhaps weekly). If anyone wants to check the veracity of this, please feel free to contact John Hertz; if you don’t have his phone number, I can give it to you.
(6) FAN FAVORITES. The nerd folk duo doubleclicks will livestream interviews with two sff authors this week. (Times shown are PDT.)
TUESDAY:
11am: Interview with Hugo Award-Winning author Becky Chambers, author of the Wayfarers Series, which we’ve read about 2 dozen times. The second book has an AI in it whose story makes me feel one million things. Becky’s latest book is To Be Taught, If Fortunate and is also completely lovely!!THURSDAY:
11am: interview with Hugo Award-Winning author Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries, which we’ve also read about 2 dozen times. This series is about a “robot” who just wants to binge tv shows and protect people and the books are so funny and real and emotional.
(7) A CHAPTER IN GENRE HISTORY. Joel Cunningham, the person who started the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, tells the story of the site, which closed last December after five years. Thread starts here. He’s got a new job at Lifehacker.
(8) NOSTALGIA AVAILABLE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] An Ontario guy set up a site with all sorts of old broadcasts and bits and pieces many locals grew up with. Did you know that in 1972, Dan Ackroyd voiced the call sign for a TV station? They also have Judith Merril’s post-show discussions of Doctor Who episodes from 1980, old commercials, stuff from the Buffalo TV stations … a lovely rabbit hole to slither down: Retrontario.com.
(9) PLAGUE INVADES THE LOCKED TOMB. Bad news for those awaiting the sequel to one of last year’s most talked about sff books. Tamsyn Muir told readers today —
(10) UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED. “Not like the pictures”: “William Gibson Says Today’s Internet Is Nothing Like What He Envisioned”
William Gibson writes visionary stories — in his early work, he imagined an information superhighway long before the Web existed. But in a dozen novels over the last 35 years, Gibson has stalked closer and closer to the present.
His latest, Agency, has a complicated plot that jumps between the far future and the immediate present; Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand. “My greatest pleasure in reading books by other people is to be dropped into a completely baffling scenario,” he says, “and to experience something very genuinely akin to culture shock when first visiting a new culture.”
Gibson imagined that sort of culture shock back in 1982 when he coined the word “cyberspace” in a short story. Two years later he popularized the term in his first novel, Neuromancer, about a washed up hacker hired for one last job.
…”He said once that he was wrong about cyberspace,” says author Lev Grossman, “and the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here.”
Grossman is a former book critic for Time magazine and author of the fantasy bestseller, The Magicians. “You have an artificial intelligence that is everywhere. It’s in all your devices. You’re looking through it as a lens to see the rest of the world. It’s an extraordinary vision of how computers will become aware, and become the thing that mediates between us and reality.”
But Gibson himself thinks the future of artificial intelligence will require human sensibility to take it to the next level. “Over the past few years, I’ve more and more frequently encountered people saying that the real change-bringer might not be something, an intelligence that we build from the ground up, but something like an uploaded healing consciousness that we then augment with the sort of artificial intelligence we already have.”
(11) WILD ABOUT HARRY. Marie Claire ran an article about nineandthreequartersco whose products we mentioned here the other day: “Harry Potter-inspired tea and coffee just launched in a whole range of magical flavours”. See more Harry Potter-themed beverages on the company’s Instagram page.
All the names take inspiration from J.K. Rowling’s fictional world; from ‘espresso patronum’, to ‘butter brew’, to ‘brew that must not be named’, there are flavours for every Potterhead.
The ‘espresso patronum’ coffee blend is, as you may have guessed, an espresso blend, promising to provide a smooth and chocolatey cup of coffee with a slightly fruity finish. The ‘butter brew’ coffee on the other hand, is a sweeter butterscotch flavour brew, taking inspiration from the beer the wizards drink at Hogsmede pub. More information about the other coffee flavours on their website.
(12) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- March 23, 1962 — The third season episode of Twilight Zone entitled “Person or Persons Unknown” first aired. Written by Charles Beaumont Who wrote a number of other classic episodes in this series such as “The Howling Man” and “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, he also was the scriptwriter for such films as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and Queen of Outer Space. The premise of his script is simple: upon awaking from a bender, his protagonist find no one recognises him. Richard Long is David Andrew Gurney and the supporting cast are quite fine in their roles as well.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born March 23, 1882 — Charles Montague Shaw. His most remembered role came in 1936 as Professor Norton in the quite popular Undersea Kingdom serial. It was done in response to the Flash Gordon serial then being played. Ironically, he would appear several year later in the Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars serial as the Clay King. (Died 1968.)
- Born March 23, 1904 — H. Beam Piper. I am reasonably sure that the first thing I read and enjoyed by him was Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen followed by Little Fuzzy and related works which are damn fun reading. Has anyone here read Scalzi’s Fuzzy novel? (Died 1964.)
- Born March 23, 1934 — Neil Barron. Certainly best known for Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction which actually is still a damn fine read which is unusual for this sort of material. If memory thirty years on serves me right, his Fantasy Literature and Horror Literature guides were quite good too. (Died 2010.)
- Born March 23, 1937 — Carl Yoke, 83. One of those academics that I stumbled upon when I was looking for information on Zelazny. His 1979 study of him, Roger Zelazny, is quite excellent, as is his essay, “Roger Zelazny’s Bold New Mythologies” which is to be in Tom Staicar’s Critical Encounters II: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction. He also wrote “What a Piece of Work is a Man: Mechanical Gods in the Fiction of Roger Zelazny” which you’ll find in Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of those serious academic volumes no one really reads for the most part. Yoke does have two genre stories to his credit, they’re called The Michael Holland Stories.
- Born March 23, 1952 — Kim Stanley Robinson, 68. If the Mars trilogy was the only work that he’d written, he’d rank among the best genre writers ever. But then he went and wrote the outstanding Three Californias Trilogy. I won’t say everything he writes I consider top-flight, the Science in the Capital series just didn’t appeal to me. His best one-off novels I think are without argument (ha!) The Years of Rice and Salt and New York 2140. I should note he has won myriad Awards including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, BSFA Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. And the Heinlein Society gave him their Robert A. Heinlein Award for his entire body of work!
- Born March 23, 1958 — John Whitbourn, 62. Writer of a number novels and short stories focusing on an alternative history set in a Catholic universe. It reminds me a bit of Keith Robert’s Pavane but much more detailed. A Dangerous Energy in which Elizabeth I never ascends the throne leads off his series. If that’s not to your taste, Frankenstein’s Legion’s is a sheer delight of Steampunk riffing off Mary Shelley‘s tale. He’s available at the usual digital suspects.
- Born March 23, 1959 — Maureen Kincaid Speller, 61. British reviewer and essayist who has been nominated for Hugos for Best Semiprozine and Best Fan Writer. She’s had an extensive career with her writing showing up in Matrix, Steam Engine Time, The Gate and Vector (all of which she either edited or co-edited), Barbed Wire Kisses, Fire & Hemlock, Local Fanomena, Red Shift, Interzone and The BSFA Review. Other than a brief collection by BSFA, And Another Thing … A Collection of Reviews and Criticism by Maureen Kincaid Speller, her work has not yet been collected.
- Born March 23, 1977 — Joanna Page, 43. It’s not the longest of genre resumes but it’s an interesting one. First, she’s Ann Crook in From Hell from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Next up is appearing in yet another version of The Lost World. (I think there’s there a legal contract requiring one be made every so often.) And finally she’s Queen Elizabeth I in The Day of The Doctor.
(14) COMICS SECTION.
- Bizarro answers the question, “What’s Heaven to a chicken?”
- Bug-eyed aliens from Neptune invade Calvin & Hobbes.
- Cul de Sac chronicles The Attack of the Monster Worm!
(15) COMICS PIPELINE SHUT OFF. Bleeding Cool reports “Diamond Comic Distributors No Longer Taking In New Comics”.
Bleeding Cool has been informed by multiple senior industry figures that Diamond Comic Distributors is requesting that no more product be shipped to any of its warehouse until further notice. Product already in its warehouses will be distributed, such that it can, but after that they will be distributing no more comics, magazine, books, toys, games, or any other product until further notice….
The company’s reasons for the decision are chronicled at Adventures in Poor Taste: “Diamond Comics Distributor explains choice to halt shipping and marks March 25 as last slated shipment”.
… Our publishing partners are also faced with numerous issues in their supply chain, working with creators, printers, and increasing uncertainty when it comes to the production and delivery of products for us to distribute. Our freight networks are feeling the strain and are already experiencing delays, while our distribution centers in New York, California, and Pennsylvania were all closed late last week. Our own home office in Maryland instituted a work from home policy, and experts say that we can expect further closures. Therefore, my only logical conclusion is to cease the distribution of new weekly product until there is greater clarity on the progress made toward stemming the spread of this disease….
(16) CORONA CARTOONIST. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna profiles Chen Wang, who uses the name “Messycow” for her cartoons, who uses her background as someone born in Wuhan but who now lives in Seattle, whose comics deal with how she copes with the coronavirus. “Chinese American cartoonist finds satire in coronavirus crisis — with a perspective from both cultures”.
“People in the rest of the world might not have known much at the time, but it was all people cared about in China,” says the artist, who has family in Wuhan. “I followed the news closely and experienced a lot of emotions.”
To channel those emotions creatively, she took a humorous tone with the comic “Quarantine Makes Life Better,” which depicted a faux-news report of characters coping with stay-at-home life.
(17) PIXAR’S ONWARD ONLINE. Adweek reports “Disney’s Onward Available for Digital Purchase Tonight as Coronavirus Shutters Theaters”.
Disney’s latest Pixar film, Onward, opened in theaters just two weeks ago, but the company is already making it available for digital purchase tonight, making it the latest current release to quickly migrate to video-on-demand platforms as the novel coronavirus’ spread wipes out traditional movie theater attendance.
The film, which follows the adventures of two elf brothers voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt, will be available to purchase on digital platforms for $19.99 beginning at 8 p.m. ET, Disney said this morning.
It will then be released on Disney’s streaming service Disney+ just two weeks from now, on April 3.
(18) BRITISH FAN HISTORY. The British Science Fiction Association has made its archive of its official journal Vector available on the Fanac.org website: “Early Vector now open access”.
The BSFA have partnered with FANAC.org to make sixty years’ worth of back issues available free online. This collection includes for the first time scans of all of the first seven issues (editors inclue E.C. Tubb, Terry Jeeves, Roberta Gray, and Michael Moorcock).
Most of what has been digitized is now available on Fanac: issues from the 1980s and 1990s should follow shortly.
(19) COMFORT READS. The New York Times features includes a couple of genre books (one of them by Harlan Ellison): “Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett, Min Jin Lee and Others on the Books That Bring Them Comfort”.
Celeste Ng – ‘The Princess Bride,’ by William Goldman
In 1987, my sister was halfway through reading me “The Princess Bride” when she went off to college. The day she left, I cried myself to sleep — and then, after I got my bearings again, I read the rest of the book on my own. So this has always been a comfort read for me: a fairy tale that acknowledges that life isn’t fair (“It’s just fairer than death, that’s all”) yet still manages to make you feel that the good guys might win, that justice will be served, that there’s a point to it all. If you only know the (fantastic) film, pick the book up, too — it’s just as much of a delight. —Celeste Ng’s most recent book is “Little Fires Everywhere.”
(20) DEPTH SHALL NOT RELEASE YOU. BBC has the bad news — “Climate change: Earth’s deepest ice canyon vulnerable to melting”.
East Antarctic’s Denman Canyon is the deepest land gorge on Earth, reaching 3,500m below sea-level.
It’s also filled top to bottom with ice, which US space agency (Nasa) scientists reveal in a new report has a significant vulnerability to melting.
Retreating and thinning sections of the glacier suggest it is being eroded by encroaching warm ocean water.
Denman is one to watch for the future. If its ice were hollowed out, it would raise the global sea surface by 1.5m.
…Most people recognise the shores around the Dead Sea in the Middle East to have the lowest visible land surface elevation on Earth, at some 430m below sea level. But the base of the gorge occupied by Denman Glacier on the edge of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) actually reaches eight times as deep.
This was only recently established, and it has made Denman a location of renewed scientific interest.
(21) NOT BLASTS FROM THE PAST. Got to love this title: “Not Rocket Science: SF Stories Involving Alternatives to Space Rocketry”, a Tor.com post by James Davis Nicoll:
…A cousin to the sling is the accelerator, a (presumably firmly bolted down) device which uses some force other than centripetal to accelerate payloads. Such devices have some obvious limits (namely, power supply, heat management, and the trade-off between accelerations low enough not to crush the payload and final velocities high enough to be useful). They also have advantages, not least of which is not having to haul a gigawatt-plus power supply off-planet and across space. Accelerators of various kinds go way back in science fiction, at least as far as Jules Vernes’ From the Earth to the Moon, whose Baltimore Gun Club delivers a living payload past the Moon using a very, very large gun. No, larger than that.
Various flavours of accelerators show up all through SF. One of the more striking examples is Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers, whose “transit rings” manipulate space-time to accelerate payloads to high speeds without the payloads feeling the forces involved. I wonder if this was inspired by Robert Forward’s Guidelines to Antigravity…
(22) LET THE SUNSHINE IN. Oh, sure, if you’re going to count everything — “Electric car emissions myth ‘busted'”
Fears that electric cars could actually increase carbon emissions are a damaging myth, new research shows.
Media reports have questioned if electric cars are really “greener” once emissions from manufacture and electricity generation are counted.
The research concludes that in most places electric cars produce fewer emissions overall – even if generation still involves fossil fuels.
Other studies warn that driving overall must be reduced to hit climate targets.
The new research from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen – in The Netherlands – and Cambridge shows that in 95% of the world, driving an electric car is better for the climate than a petrol car.
The only exceptions are places like Poland, where electricity generation is still mostly based on coal.
(23) SEA FOR YOURSELF. SYFY Wire applauds a scientific development: “Creepy Extinct Fish With Fingers Unearths The Bizarre Truth Of How Hands Evolved”.
Humans may not be directly related to fish (except maybe Abe Sapien or that creature from The Shape of Water), but the fossil of an extinct fish known as Elpisostege watsoni was a breakthrough for a research team from Flinders University in Australia and Universite de Quebec a Rimouski in Canada. This literal fish out of water had fingers, as in actual finger bones, in its pectoral fins. Its 380-million-year-old skeleton revealed how vertebrate fingers evolved from fins — and how prehistoric fish morphed into tetrapods.
(24) ANCIENT PILOT. William Shatner was Archie Goodwin in this adaptation of Nero Wolfe.
An unsold, 1959 pilot for a proposed NERO WOLFE TV series starring Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe and William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. The theme was composed by Alex North. Rumor has it there are two additional unsold pilots with this cast out there somewhere.
(25) VULCAN LIVES. John Prine’s “Lonesome Friends of Science” is news to me!
“This song here is an epic. This tells you about the humiliation of the planet Pluto, when it was told it was no longer a planet, the romantic escapades of the Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama, and the end of the world as we know it. All in a little over four minutes.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Nancy Lebovitz, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, rcade, Joe Siclari, Mike Kennedy, Ben Bird Person, Darrah Chavey, Iphinome, Michael J. Walsh, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contirebiting editor of the day Brian Z.]
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(13) I remember loving Robinson’s A Memory of Whiteness
(1) Nice to see the Malazan Book of the Fallen get a little more love. I was a fan long before the link to RPGs was revealed to me and honestly, I never would have dreamed that the world was designed that way.
Clickity
I’ve read plenty of Piper, but haven’t read Scalzi’s Fuzzy novel
“He Walked Around the Horses (being careful to maintain Social Distance)”
I read Scalzi’s Fuzzy, but it has been ages since I read the original, so I can’t offer a detailed comparison. Scalzi’s version had a convincing old-fashioned SF feel to it, which I’m sure was intentional. Very earnest, very obvious. Personally, I got enough of that style when I was young, and it was nearly all you could get. But it wasn’t bad by any means. Just not really my thing.
(3) NEW ZEALAND GOING TO TOP ALERT LEVEL.
I’d hoped (unrealistically) that we could carry on as if it was business as usual. But what our distance & relative isolation did do was to buy us some time. This step the government has taken is necessary if we are to avoid becoming another Italy. In a month, we’ll have a clearer picture of how well we are doing.
In the meantime, I’ve set up to work from home (luckily not all of my job requires me to be at work).
I thought Scalzi’s version was a perfectly reasonable update of the original. Fun fact: the Audible release has (or had at the time I got it) both Scalzi’s version and the original included.
I read Piper’s original for the first time when I was a relatively wee thing, and loved it.
Apropos of corona: this is not at all genre, but we could probably all use some humor and Randy always makes me laugh —
(1) Not sure if I’d want one massive book or several short books. Things changing so quickly that I might go with the something I could polish off quickly. I was thinking Wodehouse stories might be best. Or the entire run of Doc Savage if I still had the reprints.
(13) It was Joan Crawford’s birthday. Some of her later work, like Trog her last movie, might be considered genre. Most importantly she appeared in the made for TV movie that introduced Night Gallery. Her segment was directed by Steven Spielberg in his first professional television job.
Pix-Scro-o-o-o-lley
@Jack Lint: Blue Öyster Cult’s version of Joan Crawford is definitely genre! 😀
(One of these days I have to figure out how to embed Youtube with WordPress.)
@Brian Z: Ooh! A classic!
@10: there’s a quote I’ve heard attributed to Charles Beaumont, about working in Hollywood being like climbing a mountain of cow flop for the one perfect rose you know is at the top — only to find when you get there that you’ve lost your sense of smell. I suspect that’s a bit more dramatic than how some of the early dreamers feel about the Internet (and one can always point at Clarke’s idea of a major use of it), but there’s certainly a where’s-my-flying-car gap between the dream and the reality.
@13 (Piper): Jo Walton reported on Kalvan in her latest read-last-month column, nothing that it passes the Bechdel test — which is remarkable for a work that old. “Omnilingual” is also notable for being AFAIK the first story to look at language as a science. I’d call what Scalzi did a remake of Little Fuzzy rather than “Scalzi’s Fuzzy novel”, but either way I didn’t think much of it — seemed a bit like claiming one had made a new piece of art by throwing mud all over a classical statue. I get that the original seems mild, antique, and even somewhat sexist by today’s standards, but ISTM that going forward rather than doing a remake is the SFF way. I can think of a couple of other remakes, both by the same author for serious reasons:
* The Sword of Aldones became Sharra’s Exile — but that was an author taking her own early potboiler and putting depth in it, not just random dirt, and even that attempt was not entirely successful due to her unwillingness to write tragedy.
* Against the Fall of Night became The City and the Stars. Clarke said the first was a rush job he was never satisfied with; to me the later work (particularly including the Jester) was much better in both plotting and worldbuilding.
but the Scalzi just seemed pointless.
@13 (Robinson): a matter of taste — I thought he lost control of the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt was heavyhanded and didactic, but I’ve liked some of his other work.
@13 (Whitbourn): I think Langford and Morgan share responsibility for my picking up four of his books; there’s a lot of historical axe-grinding and one-sidedness mixed into some truly strange and unusual plots.
Interesting how today’s list is much heavier on writers than media people….
@16: those are good.
Xtifr: One of these days I have to figure out how to embed Youtube with WordPress.
Just post the raw http link on its own line, WordPress auto-embeds it.
Hmm. KSR’s just a day younger than my brother. I wonder if they’ve met – my brother also lives in Davis.
Meredith moment: Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone is on sale at Amazon for $2.99
13) Neil Barron was my first periodical editor, on the old Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review. He was a good editor and a good guy, and he and his wife Caroline were very nice to a young(ish) scribbler. His great work, though, was indeed the Anatomy of Wonder series of reference books, the last of which still sits on the shelf above my keyboard. Bibliographers and basic researchers are the too-seldom-sung heroes of SF/F (and many another tradition).
NZ COVID-19: We are trying to stomp it out quickly. Only 155 known cases, just 4 not linked to overseas travel. SIx admitted to hospital, none in ICU. Which I am grateful for, as a friend had a stroke yesterday, got the normal level of prompt treatment, and has a good prognosis.
It will get worse over the coming weeks. There will be restrictions on overseas visitors still in place in July, I’m sure of it.
Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is also on deep discount. I liked it better than American Gods. And of course the new Jemisin just dropped.
@JJ: Thanks. I figured it was something obvious like that.
@David Goldfarb: Anansi Boys is indeed excellent. And thanks for the heads-up on the Jemisin!
Daniel Dern: Yes, that Retrontario site is a fine bit of aged Canadian cheese. As an SCTV fan, I liked seeing promos I had never seen before as well as a Dave Thomas commercial that was still funny. But I think the Judith Merril post Doctor Who talks are on the guy’s want list.
Russell Letson: I also wrote for SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW and Neil Barron was a pleasure to work with.
(11) HP Coffee & Tea
It does make me curious whether: A) these are officially licensed products; B) they have very precisely calculated the exact amount of reference possible to stay this side of trademark violation (and have obtained a list of all the registered HP trademarks); or C) they are in for an unhappy reckoning.
I get the appeal — I just mail ordered a set of Jane Austen themed teas from Bingley’s Teas (h/t to Catherine Lundoff) — but no one has a financial stake in trademarking Jane Austen.
(6) I have loved the Doubleclicks since they name-checked my son in their tabletop game song, although “Chalker” and “locker” is kind of an awkward rhyme. They do a great concert, if you ever have the chance to see them.
And another Meredith Moment: Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is on sale for $1.99.
Which reminds me, I need to go read my copy of the Iron Dragon’s Mother.
@13
In an earlier life I was an sf person of letters, I suppose you might say, and one of the seminal texts which lit my fire as a kid was Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder. A true treasure, and a stand-out in the crowded field of excellent sf reference.
(I always enjoyed reading books about books way, way, way more than the books, especially “literature.” There are at least millions of book people in this world, and I guarantee that I am the only person living, dead or yet to be whose favorite all-time book [as a teenager, yet!] was Searles’ et al. A Readers Guide to Science Fiction. Nerd alert!)
@13
KSR is my second and third go-to writer, though I settle for his novels. I wish he were inclined to write more non-fiction. His fiction is solid, if uneven, but his mountaineering essays, and his lit-crit and nature writing are top-drawer, and I read every snippet I run across. I hope he is one day included in the LOA series.
In a peculiar inversion, I could not finish his most popular work, the Mars novels. I’ve read almost every thing else with a mixture of pleasure and dismay. Still, a rewarding writer who maybe abandoned short fiction too readily. His novelets are much more cohesive and compelling reading than his novels. IMO, natch.
Although, my favorite work of his is the one-volume condensement of the Science in the Capital Trilogy, Green Earth. YMMV, Cat Eldridge, but I’d give Green Earth a try since you didn;t like the trilogy. I think the overwhelming sense of love for humanity and the natural world is a kind of gift KSR is bestowing upon the reader. I was moved many times to tears and to–yes, corny, I know–awe. Green Earth is my pick for novel of the century so far.
Heather Rose Jones: At best, B. At the bottom of their webpage it says “All products are a fan creation! We do not own any rights to the name of this product. We are magical fans creating product for other fans to enjoy!”
They’re getting a lot of mileage just by using what looks like the same type font as the book covers. Most of the product names are common — except a few like “House Elf Brew”, and I couldn’t say whether a house elf is unique to Harry Potter.
(24) Phryne Fisher one day and Nero Wolfe soon after! I’d never heard of this pilot, and I have to admit that Shatner is not terrible as Archie Goodwin. He has the right physicality and snark for the role. As for Wolfe, Kasznar is playing him a bit too broadly (forgive the pun). The chemistry between the two was good, though. It’s a shame the series never went forward.
Albert Uderzo, the artist of the Asterix books, has died 🙁
Another piece of my childhood gone.
The other day someone was asking about lists of cancelled cons. I just discovered that Tor has been maintaining such a list here. (They do cite File770 as their source on a few entries.)
And this year’s Wiscon has been cancelled: http://wiscon.net/2020/03/24/wiscon-44-is-now-canceled/
@Peer: the London Review of Books has been running a free article from their archives each day (to keep us interested during isolation?). Today they ran a review of Asterix and the Actress, one of Uderzo’s last; typically for LRB, it talks mostly about context, all of which I found interesting. (There was at least one pun that I had not recognized was a pun…) Somehow I didn’t run into Asterix during my mid-1960’s year-plus mostly-in-French-Switzerland — I remember Lucky Luke, and a Tintin that I found pointless — but I did see them in high-school French class a few years later, and have enjoyed them ever since.
You know, William Shatner was once a promising young actor. A guy who was in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. That’s why he got the job as Kirk. I think he gets a solid B as Archie Goodwin and I would have liked to see more of him.
There was an episode of The Practice where Denny Crane showed what he was like as a hot young lawyer in 1963, which included some lawyer clips from a show Shatner did back then.
@Martin: Agreed – I mentioned that episode just the other day https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-3-22-20-he-learned-almost-too-late-that-man-is-a-scrolling-pixel/#comment-1154554 – both the young Shatner and the old Shatner gave fine performances in that episode.
Andrew: both the young Shatner and the old Shatner gave fine performances in that episode.
Indeed. I’ve just watched the Boston Legal episode “Son of the Defender”, then went to watch the end of The Defender to see whether the trial ended the way they said it did. It did — and interestingly, the judge on the old episode was Mr. Atoz the Librarian from the Star Trek episode “All Our Yesterdays”.
@JJ: Heh. Interesting coincidence. I recognized Ralph Bellamy as Denny’s father, but I guess the clips in Boston Legal didn’t show the judge.
@2 has some very … individual … selections, starting with the fact that Jade City is one author’s 101 and another’s 201. I also wouldn’t have recommended Morgenstern as 101 (she does not make figuring out what’s going on easy) or Cogman as 201 (fun, but fairly conventional plotting). Oh well, everyone has the gout…
In 1975, when I was 17, the year my family lived in Munich, we discovered the Asterix books (in German translation) and gradually acquired a full run (of what was available at that time). We were all working on our basic German skills and found the combination of graphic novel reading level plus wordplay plus historical in-jokes a highly motivating combination. There are some lines from those books that became part of Jones family ritual humor (and incomprehensible to anyone who Hadn’t Been There). I’ve read a lot of them in English as well, but it wasn’t quite the same as puzzling out the humor in translation. (I also eventually acquired a few of them in Welsh translation.) I was always impressed at how the puns were different in every language.
The Horn Book Magazine, Volume 45, 1969 (according to Google Books Snippet View)
Hairy Meg has her own wikipedia page, and “she had a son named Brownie-Clod, who was said to be a Dobie. A Dobie is a somewhat dull-witted, though well-intentioned, variety of brownie.”
I suspect every family of readers (and even intense viewers) has its sortileges drawn from things they’ve shared — even if sharing started as “You gotta see this!” rather than a mutual experience. Someday I’ll add up all the lines and sources my partner and I share, but the one that occurs to me immediately is “A fiendish device in the shape of a cheese” (from Asterix in Corsica), which I handed on.
Speaking of once-promising actors: I recently fell across the fact that Zero Mostel, despite having had a promising mostly-comic career before getting smeared by HUAC et al., won a Tony for playing the principle antagonist in the US premiere of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a couple of years before hitting it big as a starring oaf in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Producers. I wonder whether any other actor could be said to have descended in substance by moving from genre to mundane work.
(25) I am reading that John Prine is in critical condition with coronavirus. I hope he recovers — he’s been part of my listening for nearly 40 years.
John Prine did not survive the coronavirus.
If you are not familiar with his music, this and this are good introductions.
Sorry to hear that, Bill.
When I went to that George Carlin show, all I knew about the opening act was that Joan Baez covered one of his songs, “Hello In There”, on Diamonds and Rust. I learned a lot about John Prine’s songs in a very short time that day. Such an economical songwriter! Every word is working in his lyrics.
John Hertz replies by carrier pigeon:
In Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros (1959), Zero Mostel was Jean in the 1961 Broadway production. This is the man who turns into a rhinoceros on stage (Act II); Mostel was sensational and won a Best-Actor Tony for it.
Bérenger, a friend of Jean’s – the play opens on their meeting in a coffee house – is the only one who does not become a rhinoceros.
In the 1974 film these characters were named John and Stanley. Mostel was John.
I’m fairly well acquainted with the play.
In high school I wanted to be Jean, and practiced at home. I was not cast.
Later the Drama teacher, who was directing, had me read Bérenger while girls auditioned for Daisy, the female lead. After all the auditions were done he came to me and said “Congratulations. You’re Bérenger.”
I said “But you’ve already cast him” – indeed a long-time friend of mine. The Drama teacher said “That’s just too bad. We’ll have to double-cast him.”
There’s more to the story, and in the event the play wasn’t put on.
About Mostel’s career, even I should have to say “It’s complicated.” I had the good luck to see him as Tevye in the stage-musical of Fiddler on the Roof – about which (the musical, not Mostel’s performance) my feelings are complicated.
But anyway, I’d not call Jean the “principal antagonist” in Rhinoceros.