70 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/23/21 I Want To Scroll What The Pixel On The Table Number 5 Is Scrolling!”

1. First! Currently deep in A Desolation Called Peace and loving it. Looking for suggestions on what to read next.

2. A little off-topic for the scroll but I just finished reading Black Sun and guys, fellow filers, people, buddies, comrades in reading, uh.

   Wonderful worldbuilding, really liked that. Nifty characters, enjoyed my time with them.

   But that ending, it really left me hanging. And the POV character’s actions had little to do with the outcome, it’s like they were on rails.

   Why so much love?

3. (10) Peggy Rae Sapienza’s large fanzine collection was donated to the Coslet Collection at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County (UMBC), which was then renamed as the Coslet-Sapienza Fantasy and Science Fiction Fanzine Collection. Donations of fanzines of all kinds are welcome there.

   And check out the website! Lots of interesting information about the collection, including scans of covers. And the entire collection is online as a 1600+ page spreadsheet. Truly impressive.

4. I’ve read Fuzzy Nation. It was… entertaining enough. It’s John Scalzi does the Fuzzies, and if you’ve read any Scalzi you probably already know whether that sounds like something you want.

   The birthday blurb for Stan Robinson says “…then he wrote Three Californias” which to my ear sounds like it’s placing them in time after the Mars trilogy. In fact this is wrong: they were his first three published novels. (Along with a fair amount of shorter fiction, to be sure.)

5. Fifth! Maybe.

   Hawkeye is the least interesting one in the mcu to me, dude with bow and without pointy ears? Yawn. Now I’d love to see more Mark Ruffalo hulk…

   On the KSR Mars trilogy, I stalled out about a third of the way into book one, it felt so unrelentingly American I couldn’t cope with it. I failed on 2312 too.

6. Meredith Moment: Linda Nagata’s Puzzlelands duology is on sale for 99¢ at Amazon.

7. (12) The only K. S. Robinson work I’ve been able to get into was the 1991 Asimov’s story “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations.” Stayed with me, that one. I’m willing to try again with a (non-Mars) novel.

8. (9) IRREPRODUCIBLE RESULTS

   A delightful story!

9. Scalzi’s Fuzzy book is not my favorite Scalzi. A little too sedate, and short on his trademark snark. But still reasonably entertaining. I haven’t read the original in ages, though, so I can’t really do a proper comparison.

   KSR is one where I’m pretty neutral. I’ve read several of his books, and, while I don’t have a strong urge to read more, neither do I have any urge to avoid reading more. I can see why he’s popular—the writing is good—but the stories just don’t seem to draw me in.

   (16) A quick check reveals that I’d have to spend more in transportation costs to get to the nearest Krispy Kreme than it would cost to buy a single donut at one of our local bakeries. Which, since I’m not a huge KK fan to start with, doesn’t break my heart. But it is certainly a very nice gesture on their part, and makes me respect the company more, even if I’m still meh on their product.

10. 2) Murderbot’s progenitors: a car that really wants to make sure you’re in the right lane.

    15) Ah, but are they going to write her as Deaf or deaf, and either way is she going to have noticeable inability to hear or is this going to be more like Daredevil where it disappears when it’s inconvenient because supersenses?

11. I’ve read Scalzi’s FUZZY NATION, and did a compare-and-contrast review with Piper’s original LITTLE FUZZY, back in the day when I was blogging regularly.

    Short version: If Hollywood had done a film version of LITTLE FUZZY, Scalzi’s book might have been a novelization of that hypothetical film, reflecting typical book-to-movie changes.. Main character made younger, a hint of romance, dialogue cut way back (Piper’s characters in the original novel talk, like, a LOT), action scenes pumped up (including a very unrealistic one-punch fight the protagonist quickly bounces back from, just like in a movie).

    Both versions, Piper’s and Scalzi’s, have their merits and are enjoyable. But overall, I somewhat preferred the Piper.

12. Yay Title credit!

13. We’re looking forward to taking advantage of the Krispy Kreme giveaway this weekend. We got a gift card before it was announced, and they’re doing a “buy a dozen, get a dozen glazed for $1” offer on weekends between now and sometime in May. So, 26 for a little more than the price of 12 ain’t half bad… and we can mix and match the first dozen to get a good variety of flavors.

    I’m partial to the Bavarian Creme and lemon-filled, myself, but they really don’t make any bad donuts…

14. I slogged through Red Mars, and gave up a short distance into the second one. I liked Icehenge a little better, but maybe just because it was shorter.

    Haven’t been tempted to pick up any KSR since.

15. Meredith moment: Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time sequel, A Wind in the Door, is on dale for $2.99 for Kindle today, and possibly elsewhere, as B&N frequently matches Amazon daily sales.

16. (15) Hawkeye was filming only a few miles away from us earlier this month. Looks like the local government had some old building they wanted to spruce up, and they let Marvel do whatever in it for filming purposes in exchange for some renovations. Since the series definitely includes Kate Bishop, I sure as hecl hope they’re adapting some of Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run. He managed to make The Worst Avenger fodder for some pretty darned good books

17. Chris S.: On the KSR Mars trilogy, I stalled out about a third of the way into book one, it felt so unrelentingly American I couldn’t cope with it. I failed on 2312 too.

    I’m an American, and I’ve read 2312 (okay but flawed), Shaman (Hard DNF described here), Aurora (Hard DNF described here), New York 2140 (Hard DNF described here), and Red Moon (I want those hours of my life back described here). I have regretfully moved the Mars trilogy to the murky depths of the TBR pile, likely never to be resurrected.

    Ironically, I loved his 1984 novelette “The Lucky Strike”, which was nominated for a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, and has the very rare pre-Puppy distinction of being No-Awarded by the conservative pro-war members of Worldcon.

18. After the Battle’s Over, One Tin Pixel Scrolls Away.

19. (10) BucConeer was my first con – so thank you Peggy Rae (and thank you for the link Rich Lynch – I’ll check that out)

    (12) I read Piper and Scalzi’s Fuzzy books back-to-back. Piper’s Holloway was in my mind, played by the older James Garner – while Scalzi’s was played by the younger version of Garner (the version with some of his edges not smoothed into lovable irascibility, but still set at “I like him, but, man, sometimes he can be a jerk”).

20. “I Scrolled Pixel Rae’s lawn”

21. I think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness is an absolute classic, and I greatly enjoyed the apparently little known A Short Sharp Shock. I also think Red Mars is a great book. But after that, the next few books of his had diminishing returns for me, and I gradually drifted away from picking them up.

22. recently finished Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation … enjoyed it well enough, kind of Scalzi ‘light’ since, as already mentioned, it was a bit short of the typical snark

    am a fan of KSR, but yeah he is definitely an acquired taste. Read Red Mars many years ago but never followed up with the rest of the trilogy. Enjoyed New York 2140 and Aurora …did not finish Years of Rice and Salt or Shaman.

23. I haven’t read Scalzi’s Fuzzy novel but plenty of Piper’s oeuvre, most recently, SPACE VIKING.

    @Kyra Re: A Short Sharp Shock when I interviewed KSR a few years ago for a podcast, I took the opportunity to ask him about the book, because it doesn’t get discussed so much!

    But here in the year 0278 I am reading this in Latin.

24. (16) So I wouldn’t be eligible having had the Astra-Zeneca vaccine (not that they’re doing the offer here anyway).

    I enjoyed KSR’s first novel, the fix-up Icehenge, more than any of his later works that I have read.

25. Meredith moment: Poul Anderson’s Harvest of Stars is available from the usual suspects for a buck ninety nine. I admit that I’ve not read this one so am curious as to hear how it is from anyone who has read it.

26. Piper’s Little Fuzzy vs. Scalzi’s: As a young girl growing up reading my dad’s science fiction collection, I treasured those books where a woman (especially a competent woman as part of her job) solved the problem. I no longer have the book to check (once I finished it, I snarled at it and donated it to the local library to get it out of my house), but I seem to recall that Scalzi not only undercut that woman and her role but gave her discoveries to the jerk male. So not a fan of the reimaging.

27. On KSR – Couldn’t slog through the Mars trilogy, but really liked New York 2140, which includes a scene with the ghost of Herman Melville. And polar bears in airships. How could you not love that? And The Ministry for the Future is on my Hugo ballot.

28. Re Harvest of Stars: The series (4 books I think) are Andersons I have not yet read…and need to find time to.

29. I seem to be one of the few people who enjoyed KSRs Aurora. I thought it bought up an interesting point that hadn’t been mentioned before- generation three of a generation ship may wish their ancestors had stayed home and not be excited about the going to the stars mission.
    Did not care for ministry for the future though. It seems strange to say a book is outdated in the year of publication but there has been enough change in the climate change area in the past year that it struck me as out of step with current conversations.

30. I loved the Mars trilogy. I discovered the series through a giant display at Tattered Cover in Denver that touted the Green Mars Hugo Award win, back in the 1990s when that bookstore was enormous.

    On another note, I can’t recall who recommended The Old Guard to me last week as a potential Hugo nominee but that was a great recommendation. We watched it and thought it was wonderfully weird.

31. @bookworm1398 I liked Aurora well enough though I’ve not gone back for a reread. So you’re totally not alone.

    I’m alone though here in the year 0296. Gonna see if I can find Red and hitch a ride to a better century.

32. Could someone explain to me exactly what a semi-prozine is? I know what a fanzine is, and a prozine is obvious but what the Hell is a semi-prozine? Is it a chimera of sorts? Locus which operates like a prozine gets stuck in the category for a lot of years.

33. (12) Keith Kato — About 25-30 years ago I ran a research contract for the U.S. Army in which Keith was the PI for developing a Relativistic Klystron Amplifier (a tube for generating microwaves at very high powers). In addition to his fandom and culinary activities, he’s quite the physicist.

34. Semiprozine.org answers the question What is a Semiprozine? using the WSFS Constitution.

    It’s any zine that pays contributors and/or staff in actual money but doesn’t pay enough to be 25 percent of anybody’s income. There’s also a provision about it generally being available for paid purchase only but that confuses me, since a lot of semiprozines put content on the web.

35. 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.

    Is that not backwards? Checks Wikipedia. Mars – 1992-1996. Three Californias 1984-1990.

    I’ve liked most of the KSR I’ve read, but he tends to require quite a lot of commitment. Didn’t grok the conceit of Years of Rice and Salt until horribly late, so I think much of it went over my head and I’ve not managed to drum up the energy to read it again

36. rcade says It’s any zine that pays contributors and/or staff in actual money but doesn’t pay enough to be 25 percent of anybody’s income. There’s also a provision about it generally being available for paid purchase only but that confuses me, since a lot of semiprozines put content on the web.

    Huh. That really doesn’t makes sense as a lot of writers stitch together their income by working for multiple publications. The magazine shouldn’t be defining itself by whether a writer makes enough income off them. Certainly that was even true of many genre writers in decades past. I’m betting that some of our present-day editors likely work for a number of Houses that exceed four or more at any given time depending on which projects they’re working on.

37. @ Cat Eldridge:

    I suspect the 25% is more for the staff than for the writers.

38. I liked Three Californias better than the Mars trilogy (and also am a fan of Memory of Whiteness)

39. From above, the actual book I was talking to KSR about was Shaman, which is another of his books that seems to fall through the cracks.

40. The magazine shouldn’t be defining itself by whether a writer makes enough income off them.

    I think the “25 percent” provision took effect in 2013. Neil Clarke said a year later that his income from Clarkesworld had crossed that threshold and the magazine was no longer eligible, which he considered good news because it “gives me continued hope that someday I’ll be able to make this my full-time career.”

    There’s a surprisingly detailed article on Wikipedia about the category which states, “During the 37 nomination years, 38 magazines run by 133 editors have been nominated. Of these, only 8 magazines run by 25 editors have won. Locus won 22 times and was nominated every year until a rules change in 2012 made it ineligible for the category.”

    There have been challenges to eliminate the category. I think rules changes have been an attempt to save it. Semiprozine.org offers a directory to make it easier to know which publications currently are eligible in the category.

41. @Kathryn Sullivan – I remember Dr. Ortheris fondly.

    Piper’s short story “Omnilingual” is a classic.

42. Harvest of Stars is, as Paul Weimer posted, the opening volume of a four-book sequence that continues with The Stars Are Also Fire, Harvest the Fire (a novella), and The Fleet of Stars. Back in my 1997 review, I wrote, “I always come prepared to enjoy a Poul Anderson story–with the understanding that enjoyment can include strenuous disagreements with someone who knows a lot more than I do and who argues with great passion and conviction.” I also wrote, of the last volume, that “Anderson may now have gone one book too far with this material.”

    In many ways it’s Anderson-as-Heinlein (obviously consciously so), which probably means that readers a generation or two younger than me will find it more annoying than enjoyable. And as much as I argued with the books all the way through back in the 90s, I never found Anderson dull.

    BTW, back in the day, “semi-prozine” was basically “not-Locus.”

43. Meredith moment: Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, A Hainish Cycle novel, available from the usual suspects for a buck ninety nine.

44. rcade: There was a failed attempt to eliminate the Semiprozine category at the 2009 Business Meeting (see “2009 Business Meeting Keeps Semiprozine Hugo”). A committee was appointed to consider rules modifications. In 2011 they submitted the Semiprozine Hugo Committee Report (2011). That also was the year that some other fans got a rules change passed which they believed would restrict Best Fanzine to magazine-type publications (ie not blogs) but which was not actually worded in such a way to effect that result, which many people observed and is why it was able to pass.

    There’s a lot of material on this site about semiprozine rules, I won’t try to index it all now.

    One more note, though: Locus wasn’t a prozine because the Hugo rules formerly had a prozine definition that included a 10,000+ copy print run.

45. Locus started winning Best Fanzine Hugos in 1971, when it was, physically and culturally, clearly a fanzine. (It was nominated in ’70.) I’d been aware of who-won-what for years, but I needed to refresh my memory via Wikipedia. From ’73 onward, Locus was a regular nominee, winning in ’76, ’78, and ’80-83. After the “semiprozine” category was devised for the ’84 award year, Locus won every year until ’93 and from ’96-08 (with one year out for Ansible).

    What was interesting about the mid-80s onward was the growth of semi-pro fiction-centric nominees, starting with Whispers and Interzone. By 2012, the last Hugo win for Locus, the category had finally become dominated by publications emphasizing fiction and poetry rather than news, reviews, and commentary.

    Mike G. certainly has a more detailed understanding and recollection of the evolution of the fanzine/semiprozine/prozine categories in the business-meeting end of things, but from the years I was still attending Worldcons, I do recall a growing amount of frustration at the long string of Locus wins. While it was nice to get nominee seating at the award ceremony some years, I was content to see other outfits get some recognition.

46. @Cat:

    Meredith moment: Poul Anderson’s Harvest of Stars is available from the usual suspects for a buck ninety nine.

    The same is true for its sequel, The Stars Are Also Fire

47. @Cat: A semiprozine is a paying periodical with eighteen wheels.

48. @Mike: The amendment of the wording for Best Fanzine that was passed in 2011 and came into force after the 2012 WSFS business meeting would be sufficient, actually, to restrict the award to discrete publications like those you can find at efanzines.com. To be eligible, a publication needs to have four or more issues. A blog is just one publication that gets updated over and over again. Every bit of content in a blog is or was available at just one URL, therefore a blog is the equivalent of just one issue. Fanzine PDFs each have different URLs, and are thus separate and discrete issues. But Hugo administrators have never signed on to this reasoning and it’s doubtful they ever will. So……

    Maybe it’s time to split the Best Fanzine category, giving that over to true fanzines and creating a new category for blogs. They are not the same thing, after all. There have been quite a lot of new categories created in recent years for the pros. It’s time for the fans to get another one too.

49. 6) Are others as vexed with the MCU treatment of the “Blip” as much as I am? It seems the producers and writers have decided to only pay attention to the personal and individual impacts of people suddenly disappearing, then abruptly reappearing five years later. That part is ok, it’s the sort of thing you can put onscreen and get a lot of dramatic impact from, but all I can think about is how huge the effects would be.

    Start with half of all moving vehicles losing their drivers. Multiply by half the skilled workers in any area: Power plants, refineries, foundries, factories, everything. Half of all government officials, half the bureaucrats who keep things running. You’d have an economic collapse that would make the Great Depression look like a picnic. The mortality rate would be extraordinary.

    Maybe, maybe after five years some areas would start coming together again. So you drop ~3.7 billion people back into this broken world. There’s not enough food. Housing stock has churned like mad. (Many if not most dwellings have been deteriorating for five years and many survivors have moved. Buildings, neighborhoods and probably entire towns would be abandoned.) Suddenly there are less than half the perishable material goods you need. Durable goods won’t be much better due to lack of maintenance. It would basically be a second apocalypse.

    I can see why the MCU producers don’t want to deal with that, but every reference to the Blip or someone’s five year absence reminds me of the metaphorical elephant that is neither in the room nor on the screen.

50. Red Mars and Green Mars are two of the greatest SF novels ever. Blue Mars is pretentious garbage.

    His breaking rules of fiction to further his political commitment fails more often than not but when it works it is quite spectacular.

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