Pixel Scroll 3/10/17 Anachronism of Green Gables

(1) SKULL SESSION. NPR doesn’t think much of King Kong: Skull Island, but compensates by adding interesting movie trivia to their review:

A noble beast gets shackled, ape-napped from his island home and dragged to America in:

  • Minute 84 of 1933’s landmark King Kong,
  • Minute 90 of 1976’s Jeff Bridge/Charles Grodin/”and introducing Jessica Lange”-starring King Kong, and
  • Minute 135 of Peter Jackson’s 2005 prestige pic King Kong — which, at three hours and change, qualifies as the most Kong-sized of the bunch.

In the new, comparatively unambitious Kong: Skull Island, the big guy finally claims a perk of his eight decades of stardom: He gets to do the entire picture from home.

Indeed, this new colon-ized, name-and-address-formatted Kong is at its mediocre best when it pretends to be a nature documentary about Skull Island’s bizarro flora and fauna. One of its most captivating scenes has the big ape bathing himself in a river — at last, computer animators have learned to make convincing water! But every time the movie threatens to get interesting, one of its hordes of ersatz, non-animated characters shows up and starts talking again.

There’s plenty of top-flight talent — Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, the Johns Goodman and C. Reilly, and the Jacksons Samuel T. and Marc Evan — so it’s no chore to sit through. But good luck being able to remember in two months whether you saw this thing or not.

By comparison, the Boston Globe thought it was fun and gave it 3 stars out of 4:

“Kong: Skull Island” isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.

Better yet (and unlike [Peter Jackson’s 2005] film), the new movie understands the line between thrilling an audience and scaring it silly — between action-adventure awe and horror-movie gross-outs. The movie feels as if it has been made for a 10-year-old kid, either the one living in your house or the one living in your heart.

(2) COMIC SECTION. And Dan Thompson’s Brevity welcomes the movie with a punny cartoon.

(3) NAVIGATING THE AMAZON. Why did Amazon build a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the first place? Why is it now about to open number 10?

People were surprised when Amazon announced its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in November 2015. Then came No. 2, 3 and 4.

Sixteen months later, Amazon just confirmed to Recode that it is now working on store No. 10 — a location at the Bellevue Square shopping center across Lake Washington from Seattle. Plans for this new location were found in building permits flagged by the building contractor site BuildZoom.

“We are excited to be bringing Amazon Books to Bellevue Square in 2017, and we are currently hiring store managers and associates,” an Amazon spokesperson said.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: Amazon really likes the traction it has seen in the four stores that have opened so far and is committed to becoming a physical retailer at scale. New locations are opening in places like Chicago, New York City and the suburbs of New Jersey later this year.

That doesn’t mean the stores still aren’t puzzling. Why does Amazon — bookstore killer — want to become a physical book purveyor? One smart take has been that the stores are as much about selling Amazon devices like the Echo and Kindle as they are about selling books.

(4) NEW STOPS ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY. China’s Internet may be showing the way. British anthropologist Tom McDonald, who moved to Anshan, a small rural town between Beijing and Shanghai, has written a book about the Chinese internet, about which he is apparently very protective, and is the source of information for this BBC article.

Most writing about China’s internet had explored metropolitan elites living in the country’s huge cities – and had tended to focus on the issues of censorship and government control, painting a joyless place straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. Yet here in Anshan, McDonald was surprised to find a vibrant and innovative online world. “It is easy for us to assume that ‘the Chinese Internet’ ought to be a very drab and boring and constraining place, whereas actually, Chinese internet users are incredibly creative and the internet is incredibly lively,” he tells me. “It was more like an online carnival.”

….One of the core differences, from British social media use, was the fact that the people of Anshan tended to shy away from political pronouncements on their profile pages – “not because of censorship, but just because all the people around them would ask why are you posting that on here,” says McDonald. Instead, their updates tended to be centred on the family and relationships with somewhat saccharine images and messages – perhaps as a way of upholding some of the values at the heart of their rural community.

Chip Hitchcock sent this comment along with the link: “The writer seems especially taken with the way everything works together, which suggests the (possibly-mythical) computer scientist’s praise of cyberpunk (~’Sure, everybody’s doing terrible things to each other — but their computers all work together!’)”

(5) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • March 10, 1972 — Killer-creature flick Frogs hops into theaters.
  • March 10, 1972 Silent Running premieres.
  • March 10, 1997 Buffy the Vampire Slayer premieres on television.

(6) THE BUFFYVERSARY. “20 Years Ago ‘Buffy’ Welcomed Us All To The Hellmouth (aka High School)” NPR reminds us.

Twenty years ago, on March 10, 1997, TV audiences were introduced to Buffy Summers, a pint-sized blonde who could hold her own against the undead. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003. It had witty dialogue and used monsters as a metaphor for everyday high school problems like bullies, catfishing and feeling invisible.

If that wasn’t enough to make high school seem hellish, the characters went to school on top of a literal Hellmouth. “So many people at the time sent us letters saying, ‘I’m only getting through high school because of Buffy,‘ ” says Buffy writer and producer Jane Espenson.

The BBC also cites Buffy’s influence on pop culture:

Without Buffy’s brilliant musical episode Once More, With Feeling would Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s movie ever have been green-lit?

Actually, yes, it would have been. But if you enjoyed the singing dancing love letter to LA which didn’t win best film at this year’s Oscars, you could do worse than to check out Buffy’s musical extravaganza.

It’s exactly like La La Land, but with added demons.

It also set a trend for other TV shows to unexpectedly feature a musical episode halfway through a series, including medical comedy Scrubs and medical drama Grey’s Anatomy – and an upcoming Supergirl/The Flash crossover.

(7) TODAY’S DAYS. You get your choice.

  • Mario Day

Mario Day came about when it was noticed that when one marks the day Mar.10, it spells Mario. From then it just took off. Mario was first introduced in Nintendo’s game Donkey Kong. When he appeared in this game in the early 1980’s he was not the well-named plumber that would be recognized today. His name was Mr. Jumpman and he was a carpenter.

  • International Bagpipe Day.

The Bagpipe Society has been sponsoring the celebration of International Bagpipe Day since 2012. They have helped to bring the bagpipe to new players since 1986. It is important to them that the history and playing of the bagpipes is not lost. Putting this day together was with the hope of bringing awareness of the over 130 different types of bagpipe throughout the world.

(8) JEDI JOCULARITY. Mark Hamill tweeting as Trump —

(9) DANDELION WINE KICKSTARTER FAILS. Filmmakers ambitious to produce a movie of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” attempted to crowdfund production with a Kickstarter campaign but they had received only $4,791 of the hoped-for $350K when the campaign ended in January.

In December, the Utah Independent profiled the men behind the effort.

RGI Productions filmmaker Rodion Nahapetov and producer Natasha Shliapnikoff, long-time friends and colleagues of Ray Bradbury, have launched their Kickstarter campaign for the “Dandelion Wine” movie.

“The Kickstarter campaign is so important to us because by receiving the support of Ray’s fans and friends, we will be able to make the movie the way Ray would have wanted it made independently, true to his vision and with love!” said Shliapnikoff.

(10) ELIGIBILITY POST. Adam Rakunas keeps voters informed —

(11) NATIONAL TREASURE. Maybe the original art for the cover of Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman to the world in June 1938, no longer exists, but in late 1938 or ’39, Joe Shuster re-drew that cover for use as a puzzle from the Saalfield Company of Cleveland, Ohio, which was manufactured in 1940. “I wonder what this piece of original art might be worth today?” asks John King Tarpinian. The search is on!

(12) OOPS! Meanwhile, we know what happened to these treasures — “Pulped fiction: Blundering artist destroys rare first edition of The Avengers and other valuable comics worth £20,000 to make papier-mache scultpture”. The Daily Mail has the story.

An artist made a papier-mâché sculpture from comics only to discover that the books were in fact first editions worth about £20,000.

The piece of artwork, called Paperboy, was created by Andrew Vickers, 49, from Sheffield, who found the comics for the man-sized statue in a skip.

However, after handing the sculpture over to an exhibition he was told the comics, which included a first edition of The Avengers, would have been worth a small fortune.

(13) THE NOT-SO-DREAD PIRATE GAME. The Digital Antiquarian remembers when Ron Gilbert made an adventure game that didn’t suck – Monkey Island.

The game casts you in the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a lovable loser who wants to become a pirate. Arriving on Mêlée Island, a den of piratey scum and villainy, he has to complete a set of trials to win the status of Official Pirate. Along the way, he falls in love with the island’s beautiful governor Elaine — her name sets the game up for a gleeful The Graduate homage — and soon has to rescue her from the villain of the story, the evil ghost pirate LeChuck.

The Disnefied piracy wasn’t hard to do, especially after Gilbert discovered a charming little historical-fantasy novel by Tim Powers called On Stranger Tides.

(15) SF IN LIVE THEATER. Alastair Reynolds tells about seeing Diamond Dogs in Chicago, a stage play based on his story.

The House Theatre team did a remarkable job with this undoubtedly challenging material, working with inventive stage and prop design to nonetheless evoke a series of settings many light years away, and hundreds of years in the future. All the cast are in the above photo, along with the crew behind the production, and it was a pleasure and privilege to see so much skill and imagination come together on stage.

My story takes place in a range of locales, from the bowels of Chasm City, to a starship, to the ravaged surface of an alien world, and ultimately the many-roomed interior of the enigmatic alien structure named Blood Spire, an enormous tower floating just off the surface of the planet Golgotha. Depicting all this in film would be a feat in itself, and quite beyond any reasonable notions of practical theatrical staging. The solution adopted by the House Theatre was to use artful minimalism and suggestion, trusting in the audience to employ their imaginations given the narrative cues provided the actors and the sound and lighting effects. I thought it worked tremendously well, and the later stages of the story – involving the passing through of the puzzle rooms in the Spire – achieved a strange, stark beauty, all with little on stage but the illuminated, moving doorways and the actors in their spacesuits. Later, as the story progressed to its grim conclusion, extremely effective use was made of the ingenious puppet designs of Mary Robinette Kowal, allowing us to follow the actors as they became something other than human. These latter scenes, aided by an unsettling score, had a truly surreal power.

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

57 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/10/17 Anachronism of Green Gables

  1. First!

    @3: it will be interesting to see whether they make this work. One can only speculate whether we’d still have hifi stores and record stores if the two had found common quarters…. (I’m sure both kinds of stores still exist here and there — but I haven’t seen one locally in a while and keep hearing about them shutting down; I’m probably stuck with Best Buy for replacing my dead music system.)

  2. Second first!

    In other news, I just submitted my Hugo nominations. Over the weekend, I’ll have to help my Mom with hers, because she’s not too comfortable with computers and online forms.

  3. (3) B&N stores were about selling their models of readers as much as books and tchotchkes. Not having been in one for some years – the nearest is several miles away, and inconveniently located on the other side of a freeway between two exits some miles apart – I don’t know what they have now.

  4. (3)P.J., it’s still the readers, books, and tchotchkes. Also cafes. I’m not in there as often as I used to be, but still somewhat regularly.

  5. 6) Click thru to the BBC link, scroll down, and watch the “Where are they now?” video at the end. Put down your drinks first.

    12) Grrr. A friend of mine lost her collection when she went off to college because her father threw it in the trash. She got revenge, though — she sat him down with a copy of the Comic Collector’s Guide and paged through it pointing out issues she knew she’d had and how much they were worth. The total came to over $10,000 in 1970s money. She said he cried.

    I wonder whose parents — or children — threw away that collection. I hope they hear about this.

    14) There Is No Number 14.

  6. 12) Grrr. A friend of mine lost her collection when she went off to college because her father threw it in the trash. She got revenge, though — she sat him down with a copy of the Comic Collector’s Guide and paged through it pointing out issues she knew she’d had and how much they were worth. The total came to over $10,000 in 1970s money. She said he cried.

    I never chastised my mother too much for throwing away the comics I had as a kid, since I knew that she also threw away the comics she had as a child (like Superman comics from the late ’30s and early ’40s) and by the end of the ’70s knew the value of what she’d discarded.

    And I might have discarded some of those comics myself if I’d had the chance. I gave up on Fantastic Four after issue #12–never thought it had much of a future…

  7. 12) My Dad allegedly had a collection of Golden Age superhero comics including Superman and Wonder Woman (he also claims he had Spider-Man comics, but that’s not possible given the time frame) that he received from an uncle in the US and which he used to teach himself English and lost it to a spring cleaning fit of my grandmother’s sometime in the late 1950s/early 1960s. I’ll never know what was lost – my Dad can recall some characters, but doesn’t recognise any issues – but I wish we still had them.

    Ironically, my Dad who read Golden Age superhero comics and my Mom who was a huge fan of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and The Heart of Juliet Jones later didn’t want me to read comics, because they were supposedly deterimental to reading abilities. They didn’t even recognise the irony of that.

  8. P J Evans: Fixed the reference — it’s now NPR. The appertainment center is open!

  9. Lee: Sh*nola…. At the last minute I saw that a Vimeo cartoon I planned to link to had been taken down both at Vimeo and YouTube. Unfortunately, I didn’t fix the numbering when I did that.

  10. @ Cora: We got rid of my comic collection when we moved from Detroit to Nashville. But that was with my consent — I didn’t know any better either. And AFAIK I didn’t have anything particularly rare. We put them out in the yard sale, and what didn’t sell went into the trash.

  11. 12) Hardly fair to call the artist “blundering” when it wasn’t them who put the comics in the skip, but that’s the Mail for you. And I wonder if the comics were really in a condition to sell at top price when they were found?

  12. “Killer-creature flick Frogs hops into theaters.”

    Today, the pond. Tomorrow, the world!

  13. Welp, the DUFF voting is over, and Wednesday (America time) we’ll find out if I will be sharing my adventures to Continuum in Melbourne with you all, or not!

    Re B&N stores: Lots and lots of games and ancillary items is what I see in them, now.

  14. 12) I actually visited the exhibition shown in the Daily Mail article a few years ago. The sculpture is more impressive in real life than it looks in the photos, but I preferred the superhero artwork on the walls. There were some fantastic life size stone sculptures of superhero heads as well — I was particularly impressed by Thor and Batman.

  15. When I realized my old comic-book collection had had a copy of Silver Surfer #1 in it, I asked my sister (to whom I had given it at age 13 when I decided I was “too old” to still be reading comics or watching cartoons) whether there was any chance she still had it. She confirmed that Grandmother had burned them all when she cleaned out her attic, where they’d ended up, together with years and years of back issues of Popular Science and other magazines.

    The really valuable ones are in mint condition, and it’s not clear that any of mine would have been like that, since they’d been read more than once by young teenagers. I don’t blame Grandmother either. She had no way of knowing there were treasures mixed with that trash.

  16. It’s strange that both Frogs and Silent Running opened on the same day. I would have thought they were from different eras. In their own separate ways, they’re both ecology movies.

    Waiting for that Frogs update where instead of pollution, it’s climate change that’s turning nature against man.

  17. The value of the comics I had as a kid (despite my mother’s disapproval; my older brother Gary and I had to sneak them into the house; we had a system that was like something out of THE GREAT ESCAPE) was ruined when the open-topped box I had them stacked upright in was used as a scratching pad by the household cat. The top quarter-inch of every comic got shredded.

    What was in the box? Oh, the first Spider-Man story. The first Thor story. The first Hulk story. The first Iron Man story. And others.

    *sigh* I might be enjoying full retirement today if not for that cat.

  18. “Waiting for that Frogs update where instead of pollution, it’s climate change that’s turning nature against man.”

    Chemtrails.

  19. My dad (and/or my uncle) had a whole bunch of mostly DC scifi stuff from the 1960s (and maybe the 1950s?) — I forget the series titles, but they included lots of Adam Strange, Space Taxi, etc., plus some vintage Disney Carl Barks stuff. I think they were probably in pretty good shape initially; sadly, they didn’t stay in that condition when my brothers & I started reading them every time we went to visit Grandma.

    I still have most of my childhood & young adulthood comics; sadly, the bulk of my collection is from the late 80s & early 90s and so its peak value would only be realized if it was mulched and used for papier-mâché art projects. (Does anybody want 10 mint copies of Robin #1?)

  20. If you all hadn’t destroyed your comic books, the remaining ones wouldn’t be so valuable… someone has to be one to throw them out.

  21. A nontrivial portion of the value of collectibles is a result of rarity, which in turn is a result of most of the items in a given category having been discarded or read/played into shabby condition. If everyone had kept and cared for their childhood comics, pulps, toys, and records, the collectibles market would be a very different place. In the toy-collecting sector, the highest values are on toys in original boxes–and how many kids keep the boxes after Christmas? (That changed a bit–I watched the buy-and-stash-unopened pattern emerge as Star Wars and similar franchise-related toys became a Thing with collector/speculators who had entered the culture via the comics market-space.)

  22. Yes, I participated in the 90s comics bubble, and observed (from my position as a retail clerk at Shinders; does anybody remember Shinders?) the sports card bubble that happened pretty much in parallel.

  23. A bit of trivia to add to this bit of trivia

    A noble beast gets shackled, ape-napped from his island home and dragged to America in:

    Minute 84 of 1933’landmark King Kong,
    Minute 90 of 1976’s Jeff Bridge/Charles Grodin/”and introducing Jessica Lange”-starring King Kong, and
    Minute 135 of Peter Jackson’s 2005 prestige pic King Kong — which, at three hours and change, qualifies as the most Kong-sized of the bunch.

    Add

    Backstory for Curious George (all versions)

  24. #15. I wound up sitting two seats away from Alastair Reynolds at Diamond Dogs and agree with his assessment. They did an excellent job of adapting and presenting the show and didn’t shy away from any of the unsettling imagery. The puppets were extremely well done.

  25. I remember Shinder’s. I used to take the bus to the downtown Minneapolis store every Sat when I was in college.
    I still have boxes of independent black and white comics.

  26. I sold all my childhood comics for a nice profit in the mid-2000’s when I decided it would be too much of a pain to move them all overseas, because for all their faults, I don’t think it would even *occur* to my parents that it was OK to throw away my personal possession without checking with me (or more realistically getting me to come home and do it myself because why would that be their job?)

    Remind me to thank them for not being horrible on that score at some point, since apparently many parents were. Bizarre.

  27. I finished the first pass of my Hugo Nominations today. Compared to last year, I noticed I had not read as many qualifying novels, but still enough to fill a full slate (And speaking of (10), the more I read Adam Rakunas’ Like a Boss, the more I felt it was a highly relevant novel for our times, and not just because it features Rhum Agricole).

    On the other hand, I had apparently read enough short stories to make choosing the 5 best a challenge—up until 2 years ago, I basically didn’t read ANY short fiction. It appears I did not read any Novellas, though, and only one (barely) Novelette (Jeff Walden’s “They Breed Like Flies”).

    Though I’m sure the Dramatic Presentation categories will be utterly stomped by the usual franchise and series contenders, I put in my votes for Zootopia, The Lobster, and Uncharted 4 (hmm… talk about franchises).

  28. @microtherion

    It appears I did not read any Novellas, though, and only one (barely) Novelette (Jeff Walden’s “They Breed Like Flies”).

    If you’re looking for suggestions, Rocket Stack Rank just updated the 2017 Hugo Awards Page to include recommendations from various reader’s polls (e.g. the Analog one Mike just posted about) as well as the Nebula nominations. Each story gets one or two points from each reviewer/recommender and they’re sorted by max points.

    So what you can do, if you want, is skim down the list from the top, looking at the spoiler-free blurbs, and if you see something you like, there should be info on how to get it for free (if possible) or else how to pay for a copy. There’s a list of who recommended each one, and, usually, links to what they actually said about it.

  29. Today’s mini-review:

    All The Birds In The Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders

    This is the story of two children who’ve each had magical experiences as children who become friends of a sort, which then fast-forwards to them as adult friends with magical abilities.

    I’ve read so many rave reviews of this book (and it got a Nebula nomination), that I decided it was one of the handful of novels I could work into my reading before Hugo nominations close.

    And I’m just… stunned. I’m wondering what it is that all those people see, that I’m not seeing.

    I read past 20% (approx. 65 pages) of the book, and then I finally stopped. This reads like someone is attempting write like T. Kingfisher. Except that I would characterize the style of this book as “twee” — which is not a word I have ever considered using to describe T. Kingfisher’s stories.

    I went looking for some reviews of it. One person described it as “YA for adults”. Not only do I not think it’s for adults, frankly, if I’d read this when I was 10 years old, I don’t think I would have finished it then, either.

    It’s possible that I just picked this novel up at the wrong time for me to enjoy it (but there aren’t any circumstances in my life right now which would make me not receptive to a book, other than my own tastes). It’s possible that it gets much better when it gets to the part where the two main characters are now adults. But honestly, if a book has me checking the percentage progress every other page to see if I’ve reached a point where I feel that I can quit in good conscience, and at 65 pages I’m still thinking “really? REALLY??? This is what people are raving about???”, then it’s a failure for me as a book.

    Perhaps it was spoiled by my having recently read Summer in Orcus and having previously read Castle Hangnail. If you loved this book and you haven’t yet read Summer in Orcus or Castle Hangnail, I encourage you to do so. If you disliked this book and you haven’t yet read Summer in Orcus or Castle Hangnail, I encourage you to do so.

    So no. This won’t be going on my Hugo ballot. But T. Kingfisher’s Summer in Orcus is definitely in my Top 10, which I am going to somehow have to whittle down to 5.

  30. A quick note about the Kickstarter Skyboat Media’s doing for a full audiobook for Queers Destroy Science Fiction. It’s one of these “special one-week things” Kickstarter’s been getting people to do lately, which is a shame, given the amount they need to raise and the amount raised so far (4/7 of what’s needed). Anyway, in case anyone’s unaware of it and wants to back it – hurry! 😉

    They did an interesting livestream today talking about their process and doing a live recording of two of the flash fiction pieces. They hadn’t hit record, so half an hour in, they asked “hey is anyone out there” and I replied to ask when they were starting. LOL, they were great, though – started over (with record button on, this time). There were minor technical difficulties at the end, so I missed the wrap-up (giving up because after several minutes of waiting). But anyway – like I said, it was an interesting livestream and I’m hoping it funds, but fear it probably won’t.

    ETA: Re. their initial technically snafu – I felt silly for not typing in the chat sooner to ask when they were starting, but I just figured they were getting a late start, kept it open in the background, and lost track of time. I’m just glad I noticed the Q in the chat window when I did, at least. (I imagine someone else would’ve spoken up then if I hadn’t.)

  31. @ JJ: I hear you. I had pretty much the same reaction to The Three-Body Problem — I kept thinking, “Well, there must be something here because so many people whose opinions I respect are raving about it, but I sure as hell can’t figure out what it is.” And it went back to the library unfinished, although IIRC I got more than 65 pages into it.

    Oh, and “YA for adults”? Gag me with a spoon. That’s basically the same appeal-to-insecurity crap as “bath soap FOR MEN”. Castle Hangnail is straight-up YA, and if you’re worried about whether you’re supposed to be reading it because you’re over 25… the problem isn’t with the book, IYKWIM.

  32. Lee: I had pretty much the same reaction to The Three-Body Problem — I kept thinking, “Well, there must be something here because so many people whose opinions I respect are raving about it, but I sure as hell can’t figure out what it is.” And it went back to the library unfinished, although IIRC I got more than 65 pages into it.

    I managed to finish it, but honestly, I was so underwhelmed by the poor characterization in it, that I’ve not gotten around to reading book 2 or 3 in that series. So yay! it’s good to have some validation that I’m not a total outlier on either of these books.

     
    Lee: Oh, and “YA for adults”? Gag me with a spoon. That’s basically the same appeal-to-insecurity crap as “bath soap FOR MEN”. Castle Hangnail is straight-up YA, and if you’re worried about whether you’re supposed to be reading it because you’re over 25… the problem isn’t with the book, IYKWIM.Lee:

    I agree with you on that — in the sense that I will tell you that I hardly ever read YA because I don’t enjoy most of it, but I’m happy to admit having read and enjoyed Castle Hangnail even though it is certainly YA. I think that Kingfisher/Vernon doesn’t write down to her readers, and perhaps that’s the difference.

    But I also do think that if someone feels compelled to describe a book as “YA for adults” to persuade adults to read it, then that is probably indicative of a problem with the book as well.

  33. @JJ

    ATBITS is kind of a spectacular mess, but I respect the ambition. I think the twee at the start was deliberate, and there is indeed a strong change after the childhood sequence, but if you disliked that part so much then I don’t think it was worth persevering.

    I read Summer in Orcus a few weeks ago, and have yet to find one of my socks. You can tell its origin as a serial, and at a few points that made it a bit less fluid as a novel than I’d expect, but it made for a really fast moving read. I’m glad I resisted reading it as a serial because there were multiple chapters where I’d have had to demand the next installment immediately.

  34. @Lee: I’m missing something; was Riley dismissed that way in the show? (I remember he was back, briefly, with a stunning sidekick.) Amusing connection: a few years later he was in I Conquer the Castle, whose book author is much better known for 101 Dalmatians

  35. @ Chip: I don’t think he was dismissed that way in the show, but he definitely was by a lot of its fans. And yes, he did show up in one of the later seasons, in an episode which IMO could be summed up as “Gee, Buffy, why can’t you just be like HER?” — all the tropes of sibling rivalry and parents-playing-favorites translated to the contrast between Buffy and Perfect Wifey, with him ever-so-subtly rubbing her nose in it. I wanted to throw rotten fruit.

    Basically, out of all the guys Buffy dated on the show, Riley is the one about whom the consensus opinion seems to have been “Why is she wasting her time on THAT jerk?”

  36. But I also do think that if someone feels compelled to describe a book as “YA for adults” to persuade adults to read it, then that is probably indicative of a problem with the book as well.

    I don’t; I think it’s a clumsy way of describing what I guess would more properly be called New Adult Fantasy:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_adult_fiction

    Lev Grossman’s MAGICIANS trilogy falls into the same kind of category — using tropes and situations one might ordinarily expect from YA books (or even those aimed at younger readers), but then telling stories with them about adult concerns.

    I don’t think how someone else describes a book is a reflection on the quality of the book (well, they can say the book stinks, but that’s not what we’re talking about); they may just not be describing it well. I had a comic book solicited by the publisher as featuring “tongue in cheek awfulness,” because the guy writing the catalog was making an inept stab at saying it was black humor, and missing badly.

    But then, I liked ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY a lot, too.

    for anyone else who liked it, or maybe didn’t, or maybe is curious about it but would like to try something shorter, there’s a short story that deals with a side thread from the book: http://www.tor.com/2016/10/25/clover/

    kdb

  37. Mark: I read Summer in Orcus a few weeks ago, and have yet to find one of my socks. You can tell its origin as a serial, and at a few points that made it a bit less fluid as a novel than I’d expect, but it made for a really fast moving read. I’m glad I resisted reading it as a serial because there were multiple chapters where I’d have had to demand the next installment immediately.

    I started out reading it as the installments came out, and got about a third of the way through, but was having the problem that when I finished an installment I was stomping my foot and saying, “But what happens NEXT??? I want to know NOW!!!” So I forced myself to stop reading it until she had all the installments finally posted. 😀

  38. Kurt Busiek: I think it’s a clumsy way of describing what I guess would more properly be called New Adult Fantasy:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_adult_fiction
    Lev Grossman’s MAGICIANS trilogy falls into the same kind of category — using tropes and situations one might ordinarily expect from YA books (or even those aimed at younger readers), but then telling stories with them about adult concerns.

    Ah, thanks for that. A category beyond YA would make more sense. I really loved The Magicians trilogy. I wish that I had loved All The Birds In The Sky. 😐

  39. @Lee & @Chip Hitchcock: I liked Riley, at least originally; I don’t remember much about his later, brief return, though. It was nice to see a human paramour for her, with his own secrets, and (mostly/almost) able to keep up with her. But I wasn’t thrilled with some of the writing for him/them.

    Unrelated: I just filled out some “missing” Hugo categories, yay! My only empty category is Best Related Work; I don’t tend to read/watch/listen to much in that vein (and don’t like the category anyway). I won’t have time in the next week, methinks, but I feel a twinge of guilt. At least this year, I remembered I have a couple of Fancast entries! I’m still annoyed that last year I forgot I watched something that qualified as a Fancast. 😉 Baby steps.

  40. @Bookworm1398

    Just finished Beacon 23. It took longer than it should have with a long week at work interfering with reading time.

    Socks duly blown! I did not see the last chapter coming and am still mulling it over. I think it would have been stronger without the epilogue. Semi-wrapping it up in a nice clean package to some degree did it a disservice. Then again the howls would probably have been overwhelming if Howey had left it hanging. Even with the epilogue it has left me thinking.

    Overall the serial nature of the original publication showed through. There was definitely uneveness between the episodes. I liked the totality of it though. If it was in eligibility it would definitely be on my list. I hadn’t read Howey before but will definitely be looking at his other work.

    Sbe n pbzcner naq pbagenfg ba gur svany rcvfbqr, PW Pureelu’f Gur Fpncrtbng vf jryy jbegu n ernq.

  41. It’s I Capture the Castle, not Conquer. An important difference, in fact.

  42. @Mark

    I read Summer in Orcus a few weeks ago, and have yet to find one of my socks.

    Okay, I’ll risk it then. We go barefoot in our house anyway. 🙂

    I thought All the Birds in the Sky was an okay story, but not a great one. The worst part was probably the cardboard-villain parents.

  43. “The Corroding Empire” – Teddy’s latest Scalzi parody (? or whatever). Supposedly by some unfortunate Finnish author “Johan Kalsi” he suckered into it. ::eyeroll:: That totally looks like a real name and not a fake name, yeeeeeaaaaah.

    (BTW this proves to me yet again that Amazon’s search is funky, seeing as it’s the third hit for “Collapsing Empire”, after the real book and a KSR book.)

  44. Sorta-Meredith-Moment:

    If, like me, you’re interested in Emma Newman’s upcoming book, Brother’s Ruin, FYI it’s available (in the U.S., at least) for pre-order for only $3.99 from Tor (DRM-free). 🙂 Since it comes out in two days, I expect this is a pre-order-only sale, and the price will go to regular levels on release. But that’s just a guess. I just read the sample & pre-ordered – it looks good!

Comments are closed.