(1) DUALING READERS. Rob Dircks delivered an unexpected bonus to those attending his reading at Queens Library Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author Night – it’s titled “Today I Invented Time Travel”.
I was invited to read from my novel Where the Hell is Tesla? at the Queens Library Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author Night, and decided to write a short story for the evening — when an unexpected visitor showed up…
Here’s a clip from the story:
And my phone found me the top five reasons to go back in time:
- Stop George Lucas from making the prequels to Star Wars.
- Bet on the 1969 Mets.
- Talk to that girl you had a secret crush on in elementary school.
- Kill Hitler.
- Meet Jesus.
(2) TEMPORAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS. For writers determined to stick with real science there are a lot of details to work out, even when it’s only your imagination traveling to the future. R. A. MacAvoy, co-author of Albatross with Nancy Palmer, tells about those challenges.
This ingenious 25-year leap into the future turned from wiggle-room into a straight-jacket. It helped with the science, but not so much, as each of us kept coming up with new discoveries on the news that needed massive re-write. The Higg’s Boson companion (if it is what it seems to be). Gravitational waves.
And that was just the science!
Sweating, sweating, we began to consider all the other important changes in life which would go along with the advances in the sciences and which would touch the lives of the characters in the story even more than The Theory of Everything. In twenty-five years, we assumed, would people still be driving around in automobiles? Seemed likely – as this was not a Zombie Apocalypse novel. Petrol cars? Self-driving cars? Re-write. Rewrite.
Mobile phones. On the wrist, as part of one’s glasses? People still doggedly carrying things the size of card-decks in their pockets? Hey – at least a person in a self-driving car won’t be guilty of much as they babble or text into whatever form of phone they have as their cars zoom them to their destination. Or get lost in a daily traffic jam caused by the inevitable software problems.
And in a moment of O.C.D. we decided to eliminate all references to the daily habit of tea-time in the British Isles. It suddenly seemed too difficult to decide whether or not the increasingly technical lives we lead would have time for such an old custom. Eliminating all references to tea time was perhaps the silliest rewrite. But it explains, better than anything else, the straight-jacket effect of writing in the near-future.
This is only one aspect of the difficulty we found in writing twenty-five years into the future.
(3) TROPE CONSERVATION. Peter McLean on “Why We Shouldn’t Hunt The Trope To Extinction” at Black Gate.
The poor old trope had had a lot of bad press in recent years. A lot of people seem to want to deconstruct the little critter, or subvert it or discredit it. Basically people seem to want to hunt the trope to extinction, and I think that’s unfortunate.
Now I agree some members of the trope herd have got a bit long in the tooth and are probably due for culling. No one really needs to read another fantasy novel where a simple farmboy turns out to be the Chosen One / Long Lost Heir who is foretold by prophecy and destined to save the world, do they? No, so the “Farmboy” trope is probably due to meet the huntsman, and I think the “Damsel in Distress” has probably had her day too.
You very rarely if ever see these tropes in modern fantasy now, and that’s because everyone got sick of them. An overused trope can eventually outstay its welcome and evolve into a cliché, a completely different critter, and that’s when the huntsmen need to come after it. And that’s fine. The world moves on, as Stephen King would say.
But I don’t think we should tar the whole herd of tropes with the same brush just because some of them get old and go bad. Healthy tropes can be useful little critters. Tropes are what help to stop every novel being 1000 pages long.
(4) A SCALZI FIRST. “On The Wall,” John Scalzi’s first zombie story, co-written with Dave Klecha, appears in Black Tide Rising, the zombie apocalypse anthology edited by John Ringo and Gary Poole. The book is due in stores June 7, however, Baen Books has the eARC on sale right now For $15.
(5) ATTEND ZOMBIE TECH. Amazon is hosting a Zombie Apocalypse Workshop, where you can learn to apply Amazon Web Services technology to recover from the end of civilization. Bring your own laptop and shotgun.
Apocalypse Workshop: Building Serverless Microservices – Washington D.C.
Note: The AWS Lambda Signal Corps has recruited sufficient volunteers for our mission, and all registrants from now until March 10th will be placed on a recruit waitlist. Waitlisted recruits will be admitted if space permits on a first-come, first-serve basis so please arrive early.
Scenario: Zombies have taken over major metropolitan areas. The AWS Lambda Signal Corps has built a communications system to connect the remaining survivors.
Learn how AWS Lambda provides a platform for building event-driven microservices, all without the need to provision, manage, and scale servers. In this workshop, we will introduce the basics of building serverless microservices using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3.
(6) CAN ALTERNATE HISTORY BECOME DATED? Fantasy Literature reviewer Marion Deeds, in “1632: The tale is dated but I love its exuberance”, makes it hard to figure out why there are (by her count) 23 books in this popular series. (And she may not know about the 1632 conventions…)
Flint lets us know in the prologue of 1632 that there’s going to be no discussion of quantum physics, magical portals, of clicking our heels together and going home. The story is an exciting live-action role-playing game with a small force of Americans who completely outgun the competition. The competition are evil mercenaries, so we don’t have to feel sorry for them as they are chopped down like a summer lawn under the blades of a riding mower.
There are also a few other things that are not going to be problems for twentieth-century people dumped into the seventeenth century. Here’s a short list: no one’s going to struggle with a sense of psychic displacement or post-traumatic stress; no one’s going to pine for family or loved ones left behind; no one’s going to question the basic premise that they are stuck in the 1630s. No one is going to turn, irrationally, on another group; no one is going to scapegoat anyone; no one’s going to have a spiritual crisis.
A few more things no one in the new America is going to have to worry about: sufficient food, clean water, sanitation, electrical power, medicine, radios or even TV, except they do have to create their own programming. That’s because all that stuff came with them. They have their own coal vein, and Grantsville landed next to a river in Europe, so they have water and fuel for steam power. The area had its own power plant and three machine shops, several doctors and a jewelry store, so that as the various couples hook up, they can all get wedding-ring sets. It’s nice. Knowing they can’t maintain their current level of technology for too long, the Americans decide to “gear down,” and convert to steam power, settling at late-eighteenth/early nineteenth century tech. This is smart. All of this clears away survival-level problems so that Flint can get on with what’s important; those battles.
(7) RICHARD DAVALOS OBIT. Best known for roles in East of Eden and Cool Hand Luke, actor Richard Davalos died March 8 at the age of 85. He also was in genre films The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). And he was the grandfather of actress Alexa Davalos, who stars in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.
(8) MICHAEL WHITE OBIT. Rocky Horror and Monty Python producer Michael White died March 9.
His theatre production credits included the West End premieres of The Rocky Horror Show, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and A Chorus Line.
Born in Glasgow, White began his theatrical career in London’s West End producing plays such as Annie and The Rocky Horror Show.
He later went on to produce films, including The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1978, and those which have achieved cult status such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is still regularly screened in cinemas.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 10, 1876 — Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the first telephone message to his assistant in the next room: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” (It is not true that the second telephone message was, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can…?”)
- March 10, 1997 — The CW premiered Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is an oral tradition that Buffy inspired the creation of the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short) Hugo category, and it did receive a couple of nominations before it went off the air.
(10) RABID PUPPIES. After a brief hiatus, Vox Day resumed announcing his slate with “Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Novelette”.
The preliminary recommendations for the Best Novelette category.
- “Flashpoint: Titan”, Kai Wai Cheah
- “Folding Beijing”, Hao Jingfang
- “What Price Humanity?”, David VanDyke
- “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”, Chuck Tingle
- “Obits”, Stephen King
We have been repeatedly informed that homophobia and the lack of diversity is a serious problem in science fiction, and speaking as the leader of Rabid Puppies, I could not agree more. The decades of discrimination against gay dinosaur love in space by the science fiction community stops now, and it stops here!
Let’s face it, there are just three words to describe the only event that might happen in 2016 that I can imagine would be more spectacularly awesome than “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” winning a Hugo Award this year, and those three words are “President-elect Donald Trump”.
(11) HUGO LOVE. Joe Sherry at Nerds of a Feather: “My Favorite Stories Don’t Get Nominated: A Hugo Love Story”.
I love the Hugo Awards because in becoming part of the WSFS I get to add one small voice to the multitude and help pick the nominees for the five best novels / stories / whatevers. In 2014, artist Joey Hi-Fi was one nominating vote from making the final ballot for Best Professional Artist and becoming an official Hugo Award Nominee….
Collectively, a bunch of people who love science fiction and fantasy come together and say that these, these novels and stories and artists and fans – this is the best of what I read and watched last year. These are some of the best of what the genre has produced.
Then, when the nominations come out and also after the awards are given, we can all sit back and think…what the hell is everyone else thinking? Why are they so wrong? That book is terrible and this book that I loved is so much better.
Of course my opinions are right and everyone else is wrong. Of course this is true. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people who are just like me except that their taste in great fiction isn’t quite the same disagreed. Or, maybe what I loved was their sixth favorite story and they can only nominate five. Or maybe they just never read it because holy crap there is a lot of stuff published every year. I read a LOT and I don’t even scratch the surface of what’s out there. What the Hugo Awards allows me to do is be part of a group where everyone looks at what they read and tries to figure out what the best of that is – and then collectively, the numbers come together and a ballot is produced.
I love the Hugo Awards even when everyone else obviously gets it wrong because at its heart, the Hugo Award nominees are selected by a group of fans who are passionate about science fiction and fantasy. It’s a group of fans who, ideally with no agenda beyond love of genre, point to something they love and say “this, this is awesome.”
(12) LOOSELY WRAPPED. Kate Paulk has a small update on what Puppies can expect at MidAmeriCon II at Mad Genius Club.
Planning for the Puppy Presence at Worldcon continues under wraps until we have things sufficiently stable to make an announcement. The goal there is to be at the convention, have fun (lots of fun), and meet friends face to face. If I can arrange it there will be a PuppyGate in honor of the Jeopardy question and visitors will have to cross the PuppyGate to enter the fun zone.
(13) TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THAT OTHER THING. Attorney-at-Work blogger Jared Correia finds an excuse to write about a favorite show – “The Truth Is in Here: Lawyer Lessons Buried in ‘The X-Files’”:
The point is that Duchovny did not again discover wide popularity until he made it back to TV, for his turn as debauched author Hank Moody, on Showtime’s “Californication.” Now “Californication” has wrapped, and he’s back on “The X-Files.” Accepting that Mulder was the best role that he’s had, and coming back around to it, feeling at home in it, is the best end for his story.
Sometimes, you can take the circuitous route back to where you belong — but, there’s something to be said for recognizing that you should never have left in the first place.
I don’t think Jared Correia is any relation to Larry, although the click-through ad over Jared’s column “The way attorneys get paid” is very Larry-esque.
(14) GREEN PLANET. CBBC answers the question “Could vegetables grow on Mars?”
The team wanted to find out what could we grown if humans try to live on Mars in the future.
Although they didn’t have real Martian soil, they used dirt supplied by Nasa, which was taken from a Hawaiian volcano that’s thought to be very similar….
But there’s still a long way to go – no one ate the experimental vegetables, because substances in the soil including arsenic and mercury might have made them poisonous.
Now the team are trying to find a way to grow vegetables that are safe to eat.
Wait a minute. So there would have been arsenic in Watney’s potatoes…?
(15) MAD SNACKS. An aeropress is a thing for making coffee. The 2016 Australian AeroPress Championship will be held March 17 —
On the night, Australia’s best brewers will be stirring, steeping and pressing coffee generously supplied by Condesa and roasted by the punks at PMC.
Inspired by the Thunderdome of Mad Max, there’ll be beers, industrial disco balls, heaps of food (unlike the Thunderdome), a DJ in full Mad Max dress (not conformed) and, no doubt, some crazy revellers (confirmed), but weirdly the original Mad Max, Mel Gibson, declined the offer to MC.
(16) PUPPY IN ORBIT. Galactic Journey’s time traveler has the latest (really late) space program news in “[Mar. 10, 1961] Dog and Puppy Show (Sputnik 9)”.
We are definitely not far away from a person in space. The Soviets launched another of their five-ton spaceships into orbit. We’re calling it Sputnik 9; who knows what they call it? On board was just one dog this time, name of Chernushka, who was recovered successfully after an unknown number of orbits. It is pretty clear that the vessel that carried Chernushka is the equivalent of our Mercury capsule, and once the Russians have gotten the bugs out of the ship, you can bet there will be a human at the controls.
This is not to say that the American program is standing still—one of our astronauts may go up on a suborbital jaunt as early as next month. But the Atlas booster, the big one that can put a man in orbit, won’t be ready until the end of the year, at the earliest.
(17) A WRITER WHO WELDS. No, it’s not the Emergency Backup Hugo – it’s Nancy Jane Moore’s “Post-Apocalyptic Spaceship”, at Book View Café .
(18) THE ROCKET’S BLUE GLARE. The New York Times has a story on Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ private space program — “Jeff Bezos Lifts Veil on His Rocket Company, Blue Origin”.
Blue Origin is part of a shift of the space business from NASA and aerospace behemoths like Lockheed Martin toward private industry, especially smaller entrepreneurial companies. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, founded by another Internet entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has been the most visible and most successful of the new generation of rocket companies. Last Friday, it launched another satellite to orbit, but an attempt to land the booster on a floating platform again ended in an explosion.
Much more quietly, Blue Origin has also had big space dreams, but until now did not give outsiders a look at what it was doing.
For almost four hours, Mr. Bezos, who only occasionally talks to the press, led 11 reporters on a tour of the factory and answered a litany of questions over lunch. He talked garrulously, his speech punctured by loud laughs. “It’s my total pleasure. I hope you can sense that I like this,” he said.
He described an image on a wall in the company’s central area, which showed two tortoises holding an hourglass and gazing upward at a stylized image of the planets and cosmos. Below is Blue Origin’s motto: “Gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously” — no cutting of corners, but no dillydallying, either. “You can do the steps quickly, but you can’t skip any steps,” Mr. Bezos said.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, Cat Eldridge, Mark-kitteh, Seth Gordon, Will R., and Tom Galloway for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day RedWombat.]
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SJWs are always discussing dinosaur sodomy, so if they won’t vote for Space Raptor Butt Invasion they prove they are hypocrites and Teddy wins again!
Well there’s always dinosaur sodomy ala Stross:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/a-bird-in-hand.html
Tasha
Good luck with the merry-go-round.
RedWombat
You had to spoil it, didn’t you. I know, I know; I should have filed for the patent, so I’ll just have to suck it up.
Simon
It is impossible to imagine life without tea; relationships have crumbled on the horns of the lemon/milk dilemma, people will take to the barricades over milk first or not, and I would probably manage to emulate Eowyn if the Nazgul was threatening my teapot. Sugar tongs can do serious damage if the motivation is strong enough.
Paul
With VD, juvenile embarrassment is not so much a tactic as a way of life, though I suspect he doesn’t realise it.
4) A SCALZI FIRST
If anyone takes the leap on this, please report back on the rest of the book. The Black Tide series celebrates some… questionable elements at best. I generally seek out anything Scalzi publishes, but I’m not going to support this if the preceding and following stories are more stuff celebrating post-apocalyptic gunbunny rape.
And for anyone seeking it out just because Scalzi’s story and with no prior exposure to the series, warning that previous books need trigger warnings for pretty much everything.
Paul Weimer: As I recall, the flood of refugees triggered the first internal conflict in 1632. And lot of worry about how they would have enough to eat for the rapidly approaching winter. And talk about building a wall around the town.
Between the immigrant debate and the heroic labor union, I’ve been very reluctant to recommend it to the more conservative people I know.
@Rail Indeed. I can see how in our current political climate that storyline would be less…appreciated.
Improbable sentences:
Ever have a single sentence in a book stand out in your mind as 1.) likely to make someone who hasn’t read the book either immediately decide to read it or immediately decide to avoid it and 2.) highly unlikely to be independently recreated in the entire remaining history of the universe? I ran across one of these recently while reading Christoper Moore’s Secondhand Souls:
re (6):
While I don’t know 1632, I definitely know the heading. So much of alternate history can be incredibly dated, as we learn more about the actual time period (often called “OTL” by many who discuss counterfactual history) it can make some alternate histories look frankly silly.
A really big one is the standard Rome Never Falls timeline. Generally, it’s the sort of timeline where something keeps the Roman Empire more united, the Library of Alexandria never burns, the scientific revolution happens around 600, and the space ships are making their way to Alpha Centauri and points further well before actual history was having the Bubonic Plague. Think Cosmos, the Sagan version. Really, this is an extension of the old Renaissance view that Edward Gibbon made immortal.
Problem is, the last fifty years have really shown that the actual history doesn’t really support this. A great deal of archaeology, and a welcome desire to read the literary evidence as history with all its flaws, as opposed to written in stone, has really put paid to the notion of Rome as Enlightenment Europe with togas in the year 100. So in this case our alternate “history” are based on wishfully anachronistic back casting of the present into the past.
Or look at the other main example you see, the ever popular Confederates Win! story. These are even less supported by the actual history – and show the fingerprints of the political wishes of the writer even more clearly. The more that is known, the weirder and more wishful the alternate history can seem.
re (10)
Well, I seriously overestimated Teddy’s cleverness, and emotional age. In retrospect, that was dumb. I’m starting to think that Torgerson was the smart one!
I think its much harder to defend Teddy’s crap as unfairly maligned works this year, but I have every faith in the core authoritarianism of his supporters to make light of this. Now we see just how much SP4 wants to have an impact, and how much they want to be honest with themselves and their supporters if it means they are largely a damp squib this year.
@Standback
I put in links to either the Campbell’s site or to isfdb.com.
It’s just a really hard thing to make work. It’s why for Rocket Stack Rank we decided to do the reading and rating ourselves and not depend on fans submitting things. Sad Puppies shows the same problem. Unless you have a huge pool of people submitting suggestions (thousands at least), you aren’t going to get very good coverage, and if you do have thousands of people submitting suggestions, you’re going to spend forever trying to cope with human errors that cause the entries to not quite match.
I worry that the Hugo Administrators themselves may be overwhelmed with the volume of nominations this year. I won’t be surprised if we get into May or even June without knowing who the finalists are.
3) TROPE CONSERVATION. Peter McLean
Reasonable points. Some tropes are good and useful. Some are bad and dangerous (stereotyping race/gender/disabled/LGBTI/culture/abuse/etc.). Some are done to death and boring but those can be turned on their head or played with if done right.
4) A SCALZI FIRST
If I read John Scalzi’s story in the John Ringo book it will be the only story as my experience with Ringo books has been too triggering. I’ll borrow it from the library.
11) HUGO LOVE. Joe Sherry
Well said. How I feel.
12) LOOSELY WRAPPED. Kate Paulk
Am I misreading or are they (still) talking about having a separate track at Worldcon this year?
I don’t intend to do anything further with the slate/recommendation list at Steve Davidson’s site. I just thought showing what the difference looked like was better than just having the slate posted.
@theyoungpretender
I have a soft spot for “Rome never fell” histories, but I recognize they are far more fantastic than plausible as alternate histories
Re: Confederates Win: I do like the Harry Turtledove AH where the Confederacy wins early thanks to not losing Order 191. Late Confederacy wins, sans things like AK-47’s, really feel implausible. Even Gettysburg, I think is a bit late for the South to plausibly pull off the win for the war.
(14) GREEN PLANET.
Dirt is very complicated.
This reminds me of a thread at another site a few years back, where an author not only retreads that old trope but also makes the brilliant decision of insulting people who question the premise of the book. (Looking at the thread again, I’m wondering how ficbot’s “tea in the bunker” brother would handle the Ancillary novels…)
Careful! You are going to invoke the wombat!
@Darren Garrison
Oh. Hah. Yes, I suppose so.
Mostly it’s that I’ve been recently reading up on the various types of soil and their evolutions as part of some research into climate change, which is looking a little bleak, I can tell you.
To put it another way, Australia used to look like the Brazilian rainforest. A great deal of its farming troubles are due to a “paleosol”, or fossil rainforest soil (which is always very nutrient poor) having petrified into ironstone a few inches under the current dirt, preventing any more fertile soil from developing.
This happened as Australia slowly warmed up and dried out. Given what human activity has done to the Earth’s atmosphere, Australia may be a picture of Brazil’s future.
Fired off an email with some questions about fields on the ballot; will share the results when I get them, in case anyone else is confused like me.
First test save accomplished — my only entry thus far is File 770 in Fanzine. Yep, I’m doing my part for the Vile Hivers! Slates are grates!!*
*you can see through them and they don’t hold water.
@Paul
Not AK’s but I vaguely recall a novel with a time travel plot to give Sten Guns to the South. I think it might have been A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison but not much other than the basic plot and QCIC (a secret agency named after a Latin phrase) has stuck with me. Can’t have been all that earth shattering good…
@Stoic
Doesn’t sound familar. Ak-47s to the South I alluded to is Turtledove’s GUNS OF THE SOUTH, but yours doesn’t sound familiar. Not surprised its an idea that multiple authors have had (guns to the Confederates) though.
That reminds me of a nice blog I ran across a while back about sand. Yes, there are sand enthusiasts, sand collectors, sand books, and (multiple) sand blogs. There needs to be something similar to Rule 34 stating that if you can imagine it, someone collects it.
Speaking of dirt, MilSF and history fans might appreciate the book Mud: A Military History.
Too late to edit the earlier post, but this link gives some of the best entries from the sand blog. Well worth a look.
I don’t see why we have to be careful. I like reading what the Wombat has to say about dirt. Though maybe if the Wombat has other work to do we should be careful about distracting her.
I am beginning to wonder if *all* the Puppies have lost interest. Beale is throwing away his Dead Elk ballots on stuff that looks like it was written by an eight year old sniggering over bathroom words and that is certainly going to be eliminated over having been nominated in the wrong category–it’s not even a borderline case, and word count is not some subjective thing where tastes can differ. Is he just phoning it in, at this point?
Maybe he’s just phoning *this* in because it’s not his real ballot. In some ways the whole “spoiler stuff that would get on anyway by putting it on a slate” approach would work better if he can put stuff on a fake slate that none of his Elk actually vote for. Then he gets to nominate a complete list of self-serving crud instead of “wasting” some Dead Elk nominations on good things, but also if the good things on his fake slate get more real nominations than his Dead Elk can pile on his e-mail slate, he can try to pull that “they’re only nominated because they were on a slate hur hur you have to vote against them now” gambit.
Though in that case I’d expect to be hearing from some Live Elk; it seems unlikely that he can e-mail directions to any large group of people without someone spilling the beans. So maybe this is as much interest and attention as he can muster and he’s not distracted by a real effort behind the scenes.
I guess we’ll see.
The last part of “Magic In North America” is available now, and it’s, um, well, not as bad as the previous parts. One of the famous wandmakers is probably supposed to be black, given the coding with European stereotypes of American black people (New Orleans, creole, vague hints of voodoo). Another is using thunderbird feathers and hopefully some industrial-strength shrinking spells, because thunderbirds are supposed to be effing huge.
Also, Prohibition totally worked in Rowling’s universe. (Except for the magical community, which is apparently allowed to just ignore any constitutional amendments it doesn’t like, which leads to really disturbing thoughts…)
Re Confederate “winning”
I believe that there was a possibility of them holding on long enough to achieve some sort of political settlement. It’s how the US “won” the revolution. As long as Washington had an army in the field, the British could not win. Most of the time, Washington retreated and/or lost. The American Revolution was won because the British public tired of it.
The most interesting alt history I read of this had Lee fighting on the side of the Union so the confederates lost too quickly, so the Union was preserved but so was slavery. There wasn’t enough hatred built up in the north for Reconstruction to happen in the same way. This was a short story about a time traveler trying to change this outcome. Sorry that I cannot remember 20 years on the title or author. This was more interesting and plausible to me than a confederate victory.
(10) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day.
Let’s face it, there are just three words . . . and those three words are “President-elect Donald Trump”.
Erm, isn’t that four words by most practical standards? Still, I’m just an ex-professional Desk Editor (John Murray) so what do I know?
It is refreshing to know that Beale’s analytic abilities regarding politics are on par with his ability to understand genetics, science, sociology and history.
@Cat: I wonder if the energy that went to the Hugos in the non-election year of 2015 is now being directed to political infighting, like the blog argument with MGC over Trump vs. Cruz.
I’ve been watching some of the Retro-Hugo movie candidates.
* “Black Friday” was an entertaining story. Boris Karloff saves the life of his elderly professor friend by implanting part of the brain of a gangster (the details are very vague). Then his friend starts changing back to the gangster’s personality and bumping off his former cronies. Could be worth nominating.
* I was hoping “Son of Ingagi” would be interesting: it was an independent film with an all-black cast and writer. But unfortunately it’s terrible. The plot is something about a rich old lady who endangers a newlywed couple with the ape creature she brought back from Africa. I quit after about 20 minutes (of only 60!) when it became clear it wasn’t going on my ballot.
* “Dr. Cyclops” is in attractive Technicolor, which is good because there’s lots of green-glowing radium. The plot’s thin: Dr. Thorkel discovers a radium deposit in South America and is using it to shrink creatures (getting a horse the size of a chicken). Four outsiders make the trek to Dr Thorkel’s camp, and when they get too curious about what he’s doing, he shrinks them too. For the rest of the movie, they try to evade Dr Thorkel and fight back. A possible nomination.
The 800-pound gorilla for this year is going to be “Fantasia”: it’s hard to imagine that anything else will win.
@stoic I think that’s actually dinosaur bukakke…
@ Darren Garrison
Christopher Moore is good for that. Things I have encountered in his writing: the moment when a washed-up ’80s fantasy movie starlet brings a horny sea monster to “little death” with the aid of a weed-whacker; that one time Balthazar (of the Three Wise Men fame) has his shaved-bald head massaged by the breasts of one of his seven Chinese concubines; a rubber dinghy used as an impromptu prophylactic by a female humpback whale, to the trauma of the marine biologists occupying said vehicle; and basically any time Biff narrates events during the course of The Gospel of Levi called Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal — which would be all of them. Also: he is the vector by which the term “rattlesnake PMS” entered my personal vocabulary.
@bloodstone75: Fired off an email with some questions about fields on the ballot; will share the results when I get them, in case anyone else is confused like me.
Thanks from another confused filer. My plan was to include name of an eligible work and link to their eligibility list or the Campbell eligibility site. 😉
Having an idea of what the admins would like so I can make their job easy works for me.
Not AK’s but I vaguely recall a novel with a time travel plot to give Sten Guns to the South. I think it might have been A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison but not much other than the basic plot and QCIC (a secret agency named after a Latin phrase) has stuck with me.
That was exactly the plot of A Rebel in Time. The time-traveling villain put the machinery for building the weapons at the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and the time-traveling hero destroyed it during the confusion following John Brown’s raid.
(12) Is it just me, or does Kate’s phrasing seem a little bit desperate. “We’ll be having FUN! Not like those other people at regular Worldcon! You have to come to the Puppy zone to have FUN!” Its like she’s working very hard to convince herself that she’s going to be enjoying herself, almost like Chevy Chase when he has his epic meltdown in the rain in Phoenix in National Lampoon’s Vacation.
When I’ve prepared Hugo ballots in previous years, I’ve labeled that field “Example”. I was looking for something to give me (as the Hugo administrator) to look for to help determine the person’s eligibility.
I suspect that’s what they meant this year. Really, the only thing that ‘s important is the name of the person or the item that you’re trying to nominate–everything else is to help the Administrator identify exactly what it is that you meant to nominate.
The American Revolution was won because the British public tired of it.
The French navy showed up. (Long supply lines are vulnerable.)
It’s my understanding that about a third of the population hadn’t supported the war in the first place.
I’ll preface my next comment by saying it may read either that I’m aiming at comic irony/mockery or that I’m denigrating/trivializing something that is important but I’m not, so…
…I think this about the Puppies needing something not unlike a ‘safe space’ – somewhere they can go to when the presence of people not conforming to their worldview in a way that can cause them a degree of social stress becomes too much. I think it was in Larry’s second version of his experience at 2011 Worldcon were he said he ended up hanging out with the Baen’s barflies a lot so he wouldn’t get frustrated by people winding him up.
Darn, still reads like I’m either mocking the Puppies or mocking the idea of safe-spaces. Or maybe I’m projecting my introvert’s anxieties onto their ideological stances (I find social interaction stressful, they find interacting with socialists stressful, same thing? 🙂 OK now I really am being flippant)
@Camestros, I think you’re on to something. If you are feeling like everyone is against you, having a way to find your people would be very reassuring.
And even those of us without such fears may still find Worldcon intimidating. Knowing that you have friends there, and some way to connect with them, helps an awful lot.
A few years ago I went on an extended walk in the Blue Mountains* (just West of Sydney i.e. they start just where Sydney stops) and on top it was all typical Sydney outskirts Australian bush and then we walked down into a deepish (and dark and damp) gully and it was another world. I don’t know how like Brazilian rain-forest it was but it was how I picture rainforest is. Easy to imagine that with a different climate the whole of Australia being more like that.
*[not mountains even by English standards]
It sounds like Kate thinks she will need a place where people don’t disagree with her about things she thinks are important.
I kind of get it; I want to feel like people aren’t going to disagree with me on some things I consider important–women and minorities being fully human and having important viewpoints to consider on various issues, being one example. If that means I want an echo chamber, then I want an echo chamber.
I get the impression what Kate wants is a place where nobody will disagree with the Puppies on their pet peeves, which I consider a qualitatively different issue. But hey, better if it’s just one room with someone at the door to let me know this space is not intended for such as I.
And Larry is probably best off hanging out with people who agree with him on all points, since respectful disagreement doesn’t seem to be his strong point.
Even in high school, in Texas mid-80s, I was convinced that if the South had won the Civil War it would be a third-world country by now.
Not in season one, which is where I gave up on it: the mundane explanation was *never* true. If Scully was never right, why did everyone still think Mulder was a crackpot?
@Camestros:
I might go with that, except for lines like this:
If I can arrange it there will be a PuppyGate in honor of the Jeopardy question and visitors will have to cross the PuppyGate to enter the fun zone.
There is something almost taunting in saying one has to cross the “PuppyGate” to enter the “fun zone”, plus the implication that the rest of Worldcon isn’t “fun”. This seems to go along with the whole Puppy narrative that Worldcon is populated by grim-faced dour people who are spending all of their time pretending to like things to “virtue signal” to others that they are morally correct while the Puppies are just all about FUN!
I kind of expect that the “Puppy zone” will be, at best, sparsely populated.
Conventions can be lonely places – I don’t mean just SF conventions. I’ve been at professional conferences at which I knew many people, and was a speaker and still felt like a freaky outsider.
I can see for somebody like, say, Larry Correia who doesn’t suffer those who he perceives as fools gladly would find it very stressful to be in a milieu in which the social rules are odd, in which many people casually assume others share their views on assorted hot topics and in which not just the manner of debate but also the underlying assumptions and modes of argument are alien, to be very stressful.
I don’t know to what extent the stereotypes of SFF fans being introverts matches reality (there are obvious individual counter-examples) but I strongly suspect any community built around a deep interest in books may have more introverts in it than the general population – and that will be true of the Puppies as well. Anyway, if Kate Paulk’s proposal amount to a way of saying to a set of fans ‘hello, and you are welcome here and here is a place where you might feel more comfortable’ then I think that is nice and good.
@aaron
Meh.
It’s a very SJW idea but I think that everyone deserves a safe space. If this is what Kate and the Puppies want and need in their safe space, more power to them. I’d not go anywhere near such a place, but that’s a feature, not a bug, in their eyes. And if they are crowded with Puppies and have fun there, then I am not going to harsh their squee.
In Canada, those are called United Empire Loyalists and quite a lot of them moved north after the American Revolution.
And if they are crowded with Puppies and have fun there, then I am not going to harsh their squee.
Sure. If the Pups want to get together in a space that is friendly to them, that’s up to them. What I’m saying is that Kate’s post sounds like she’s desperately trying to convince everyone – herself included – that they are going to have fun in their Puppy zone. As if she doesn’t really believe it, but that she figures if she says it enough it will become true.
From what I hear, there were some juicy scandals going on at the time in the English court and the Americas were little more than an afterthought.
CF :
My mother tells tales of moving over to Australia and being given directions by the locals like “It’s just over that hill”, and her looking around trying to figure out if there was any hill in sight…
@Camestros
I think you are on to something – and that it would a terrible shame if what Katie is talking about putting together in (12) didn’t have the short hand tag of “Puppy Safe Space” used for it so often that the phrase was established by the time of MAC II…
I think that was the original premise for Stargate: Infinity.
More sad news for prog rock fans, as we’ve just lost Keith Emerson – notable for many SF-tinged works, including Karn-Evil 9 and much of the rest of Tarkus.
While Chuck Tingle is plainly more deserving of a Hugo than any writer in the history of everything, I can’t help but feel that if he were going to appear on the Rabid Puppies slate, a much more appropriate work would be his masterpiece Angry Man Pounded By The Fear Of His Latent Gayness Over A Dinosaur Transitioning Into A Unicorn.
@Simon Bisson,
Sad indeed, although for me Emerson’s finest work was always his prog jams based on 20th century orchestral pieces, “America” by The Nice and “Fanfare for the Common Man” by ELP.