206 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/14/16 Pixels Gather And Now My Scroll Begins”

1. Kendell –

   ObReadingUpdate: I realized on checking that the web site for A Crown for Cold Silver had a longer sample than I had – 7 chapters! After reading the rest of that, I was even more interested, so despite mixed reviews, I bought it (it was still on sale; not sure if it still is now). 🙂 ‘Cuz, you know, I need another 2015 book (not).

   Hope you enjoy it, I loved the book.

2. Hellfire! No cheap Stephen R. Donaldson on Amazon UK. How very roynish. I would go quaff some sapid roborant to get over the disappointment, if it weren’t for my caducity.

   (I know, I know, it’s cheap to mock Donaldson’s vocabulary. Also easy. And, indeed, non-fattening too. No downsides at all that I can see, really.)

3. With apologies to everyone (and in particular Noel Coward) – but I’m picturing JCW in a smoking jacket and cravat.

   Bad hags and termagants go out in the Sasquan sun,
   The Puppies don´t care to, the Rabids wouldn´t dare to,
   But bad hags and termagants go out in the Sasquan sun.

4. from (5): “a confusing story full of alien languages and weird words”

   As noted by others, this is not a sin particularly restricted to SF. I speak as someone currently gargling my way thru the proper names in THE GOBLIN EMPEROR. (Which I am otherwise enjoying highly, but boy, the names of characters are mouthfuls!)

5. Read the first Thomas Covenant book. Got to the part where the main character is a rapist. Read to the end hoping the main character would be horribly killed. Didn’t get my wish. Never read another book in the series. Not likely to start now. Ugh.

   I rather like the idea of a Xena reboot, and think it would be quite pleasing to have the main characters openly in love with each other. I join Heather Rose Jones in hoping that it won’t be promised and then snatched away for fear of the JCWs of this world.

   Also, pleasing as new love can be, I kind of hope we get to see an “old married” relationship between them, where the first spark has settled into companionate love, true and trusted, and the relationship is not constantly threatened. But it’s early days yet and no way to tell.

6. @Cat
   Yup, I one and doned the series after the first volume, because I really didn’t like the protagonist because of that rape.
   It’s possible that if I went back to it, I might be able to read it–I did read the Mirror of her Dreams successfully, and I have read Mark Lawrence’s books (whose protagonist is definitely a piece of work). So its possible…

   ….but my TBR pile is too large, so I likely never will.

7. Currently putting together nominations for the 1941 Retro Hugos… Best Editor (Long Form) was a problem this year, I might skip that category entirely for 1941… short on fanzines, too….

   Also, it would be OK, right, to nominate “Slave Raiders from Mercury” and “Mistress of the Blood-Drinkers” for Best Novella, even though I haven’t, err, umm, technically actually read them? I mean, with titles like that, do you actually need to read them?

8. Bruce Arthurs: I speak as someone currently gargling my way thru the proper names in THE GOBLIN EMPEROR. (Which I am otherwise enjoying highly, but boy, the names of characters are mouthfuls!)

   Do yourself a huge favor and check out the name glossary at the back of the book before you progress any further. 🙂

9. Basically what Cat said. I have friends I respect who like the series, but I couldn’t get past either the rape or the fact that the protagonist spends most of the first book refusing to even try and save the world Because Reasons. No thanks: if I want to spend my time with dickheads, I hear eHarmony still exists.

   On sci-fi: For me, it’s mostly that I need at least a Force Ghosts Are A Thing level of mysticism in most of my reading material. Give me that and spaceships and I’m totally on board.

10. I had no real problem with The Goblin Emperor, but the Mirror Empire, with it’s Dhais and Dajians and Parajistas and Onanistas and all that really did my head in. A paper copy, where I could flip between the text and the glossary at the back would have improved my reading experience no end. Alas, I only found it after I’d struggled through the book.

11. A paper copy, where I could flip between the text and the glossary at the back would have improved my reading experience no end.

    True. Is there any e-book app that allows you to have two tabs open to different parts of the book simultaneously?

12. Also, it’s kind of confusing that he’s using insults against women to rant against people named David and Patrick, or is it against Worldcon as a whole, which is over half male?

    I figured he was trying to be extra insulting by calling them all “ugly, slatternly, or evil-looking old women” and “overbearing or nagging women” with his insults.

13. I am a huge Xena fan, and honestly, if either Xena or Gabrielle died…I’d probably wait it out for a bit.

    The show was a ridiculous comic-book mish-mash with working magic. I’d want to make sure Xena wasn’t battling her way through the underworld to get Gabrielle back before I threw in the towel. (Because that would be freakin’ awesome! Go full Orpheus on Hades’s ass!)

    Obviously actual perma-death is something else again, but didn’t they kill off Callisto like three times?

14. I’m not sure the right-wing admiration goes much further than the idea of military virtues found in

    “Traveler, carry this word to the men of Lakedaimon
    We who lie here did what they told us to do.”

    (That’s my memory of Mary Renault’s translation of verse by Simonides of Chios; Sparta is not known for its poets.)

15. “Traveler, carry this word to the men of Lakedaimon
    We who lie here did what they told us to do.”

    I kind of want to render the second line as “We followed their orders, and now we’re dead.”

16. Who Killed Morlock Holmes? I must have crossed the streams again.

    “My life fades. The pixels dim. All that remains are scrolls.”

17. @Vicki, Ghostbird

    In a way, I give a lot of right-wingers props for the Sparta admiration, due to it being so much more honest than their usual bilge. Their Sparta love shows that as long as there is a firm authority that frees them from the necessity of making decisions for themselves, they’ll admire a band of homosexual communists. They usually aren’t so comfortable admitting their core authoritarianism, so I feel they get points for the admission.

    re (11)

    God he’s really phoning it in this year. Or he’s really getting lost in his own head. Or Teddy is to busy doodling romantic pictures of Trump surrounded by hearts in his Trapper Keeper? Seriously, Teddy’s blog is on the quick road to Amazon self-published erotica starring Teddy and Donald Trump.

    re (12)

    Termagants? Really? Now there’s a word with a long afterlife. The original meaning, of being one of a trinity of gods worshipped by Muslims, was long debunked by more modern scholarship. And in this case, “more modern scholarship” consisted of Some Frost-Bitten Benedictines In 1100 benefiting from increased trade with the Fatimids. It’s been meaning other (equally offensive) things for longer than it had its original meaning.

    What a sad old man.

18. The Lakedaimonians were in fact known for succinct, pithy sayings and can’t be held responsible for clumsy translations.

    But Tyrtaios and Alkman have to be counted among the best of the early poets.

19. TheYoungPretender

    And, of course, they are yet to twig that Spartan women enjoyed a level of freedom far higher than that in the other city states.

    In other news, the stuff about Xena has prompted a YouTube splurge, and it’s all 770’s fault!

20. I preferred last year’s Rabid Puppy logo to the current design, overly cluttered with skulls.

21. Bruce Arthurs on March 15, 2016 at 4:11 am said:
    from (5): “a confusing story full of alien languages and weird words”

    As noted by others, this is not a sin particularly restricted to SF. I speak as someone currently gargling my way thru the proper names in THE GOBLIN EMPEROR. (Which I am otherwise enjoying highly, but boy, the names of characters are mouthfuls!)

    Pssst! glossary in the back!

22. (5) I’m always suprised when “Ender’s Game” is recommended. In looking at the list of Hugo nominees (nominees and winners) over the years, that is the inflection point where I go from “read it, liked it, understand why it made the short list” to being in less agreement. One exception would be “Old Man’s War”. That would be the book I would recommend to someone new to science fiction that wants to get their feet wet.

    Also on the subject of names, Peter V. Brett’s “Demon Cycle” includes many a mouthful. But there is a linguistic system in place that the reader learns as part of the native text, so it isn’t insurmountable, IMHO.

    @Kendall

    The Death Gate Cycle was good, but not as good as the Dragonlance series/world.

    Regards,
    Dann

23. @ Vicki Rosenzweig
    From The Praise Singer (Renault):
    “Tell them in Lakedaimon, passer-by,
    That here, obedient to their word, we lie.”

24. @Vicki Rosenzweig I’m not sure the right-wing admiration goes much further than the idea of military virtues

    @Stevie: And, of course, they are yet to twig that Spartan women enjoyed a level of freedom far higher than that in the other city states.

    I suspect the position of women is a selling-point for modern Islamophobes, although more freedom than Athens is a pretty low bar.

    My feeling is that there’s a little more to it than just discipline and celebration of military virtues… but I’d have to do research if wanted to turn that feeling into an actual argument. “Tiny elite vs the undisciplined swarthy hordes” is a powerful conservative image that has a lot of applications, of course – NATO vs the USSR in the Cold War; “the West” vs “Islam” in the War on Terror; authorities vs the underclass at any time. There’s also a fascination with Spartan simplicity, though, which I’m tempted to read as a way to reconcile aristocratic conservatism with the myth of America’s egalitarian foundations.

25. Mr. Wright, put down the thesaurus. Put down the thesaurus.

26. Xena was a great deal of thoughtful fun. I wonder if new Xena will evade the Moonlighting problem. The Xena-Gabrielle relationship did not seem fully resolved (though some people think different) and that tension carried the show. Will they be able to do show without the “will they or won’t they” vibe?

27. Old Man’s War isn’t the book I’d start someone with, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the right book for some people. I found OMW rather American, rather accepting of the military industrial complex and the right of Americans to go to war with the Universe.
    Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck might be more to my taste, perhaps the early Vorkosigan books, perhaps To Say Nothing of the Dog.
    Aks me again tomorrow and I’m sure I’d come up with something different.

28. I’m buying my first attending membership to a con (this weekend’s Lunacon) and the webpage asks for “name on badge.” Is just my first name sufficient? Or do they need my full name and title as on my driver’s license, Dictator for Life (in Exile) Xaxnax Quibbletipper XXI of Mars? I didn’t ask on their facebook page, since they seem overworked and stressed and my question is trivial.

29. Death Gate was probably my favorite Weis/Hickman series — at least the first four books or so. I’m always torn about them — they do interesting world-building, create engaging characters, the stories are well-plotted, but the actual sentence-by-sentence paragraph-by-paragraph writing …

30. @5 In my recollection, the “howls of outrage” over Rowling’s Hugo were mostly because it was a mediocre book by someone with no connection to the (broadly considered) genre. A few people may have howled because it was fantasy (just as some complained about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell); they had no understanding of either the rules (which had been amended to explicitly include fantasy some years before) or the history (“That Hell-Bound Train” was one of the first Hugo winners).

    And the discussion of what to start with points up an interesting fact: sometimes “classics” don’t age well. The newest unrecommended is from 1965, while Ender’s Game came out in 1985. (I’m not sure how well it ages either, given that it’s not much better about gender roles, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more people find it readable.)

    @lurkertype: you’re too generous. All of that snarky quote applies as much to bad fantasy as to bad SF.

    @Ghostbird: an interesting take on fans/unfans of Cherryh. I’m a big fan despite being unfond of obscurity; perhaps the difference is that Cherryh seems to have worked out all the background and shows just the necessary bits, where a lot of other obscurists seem to me not to have done that foundation work.

    also @Ghostbird (seconding TheYoungPretender): Sparta is all about power. Much of the hard-right doesn’t care about homosexuality except as a way to rope in enough Bible-belters to win elections, and many of the rest are fine with man-boy (the popular idea of Sparta’s standard — I don’t know enough about the reality, and probably they don’t either); what squicks them is the idea that two equally-empowered males could do that, because it violates their ideas about hierarchy. (cf an autobiographical essay reprinted in Fancyclopedia ~1994, that in parts of the midwest Us it was OK to be a “pitcher” but not a “catcher”.)

    @JJ: that was cruel and badly metered and I still laughed.

    dann665: tastes differ. I’d be hesitant to recommend tOMW to anyone female; I’m not, and I was … taken aback … by the idea that everyone’s first reaction to getting twenty-year-old bodies would be to screw themselves silly, which sounds like a standard male fantasy (cf “5,271,009”)

    von Dimpleheimer: if their web page doesn’t say, ask; it’s a touchy subject (if you have a free day, ask for opinions about The Boskone from Hell), and each convention has different rules.

31. Clicky.

32. von Dimpleheimer on March 15, 2016 at 7:35 am said:

    I’m buying my first attending membership to a con (this weekend’s Lunacon) and the webpage asks for “name on badge.” Is just my first name sufficient? Or do they need my full name and title as on my driver’s license, Dictator for Life (in Exile) Xaxnax Quibbletipper XXI of Mars? I didn’t ask on their facebook page, since they seem overworked and stressed and my question is trivial.

    In my experience, Name on Badge can be anything. Cons that don’t like anything on the badge usually don’t have a separate field for it. Some Cons put your legal name on the back of the badge with your anything goes name on the front.

    What do you want people to call you after they peer at your badge? That’s what you should put in the Name on Badge field.

    Have fun at your very first con!!

33. von Dimpleheimer, “Name On Badge” refers to your nym. Your handle. The thing you want on your badge that others will call you.

    Many people put their first names. Other people put their nicknames. Some people put their cosplay names, or a short joke (like “Doctor What” or “Inigo Montoya”) or whatever you like, so long as it’s not offensive. This is the public name you’re presenting to the convention; it does NOT have to be your legal name (which, in my experience, is usually printed on the BACK of the badge so if you need to present ID at a party-with-alcohol or something they can check your actual identity).

    Hope this helps.

34. @Chip Hitchcock

    Is that scene/aspect the only reason why you wouldn’t recommend it to women? Is there something else?

    It worked for me for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that older people live in bodies that they remember as being be capable of so much more in the past; sexually and otherwise. There is also the factor that a high percentage of the group appeared to have lost their spouses. The human need for intimacy never really wanes. Getting slammed into fully functional (and hormone raging) bodies would certainly cause people to want to use abilities that were thought to be lost to time.

    IMO, consensual sex across a diverse group was reasonable shorthand for “hey look what I can do again!” IIRC, while sex was the most common activity, it wasn’t the only one. If the switch had occurred on a planet, then I suspect that there would have been many other activities.

    —
    Regards,
    Dann

35. @von Dimpleheimer
    I’d ask on the FB page or go to the website and look for the membership and/or registration person and contact them privately. I’ve found cons to be pretty good about using whatever name I’d like but I frequently know people on the concom and they know me under multiple names so my view probably is skewed. Some are strict about it matching your license/ID. Others have a character limit so if your name is too long they become accommodating.

    I bring a sharpie/permanent marker to add my other names to my badge by hand so people will know who I am.

    @Chip Hitchcock
    Boskone from hell? I’m curious. They are one of the cons I’ve been in and out of over the last 17 years.

36. A nice piece over at SFsignal on Kelly Robson, who is probably one of my Campbell picks. As I’m now looking out for helpful comments on editors, I noticed some fulsome praise in there for Ellen Datlow:

    Ellen Datlow rightly deserves every single award she’s won for excellence in editing. Nothing gets by her. She can expose a story’s weaknesses with just a few questions, and she’s not prescriptive at all. She doesn’t tell you what to do, just puts the finger right on the problem and lets you decide how to deal with it.

37. With regard to Old Man’s War, there’s more there to defend than just the humping dann665 has latched on to.

    Particularly, it’s that the second two books of the series start seeding the sci-fi violence with some fairly smart stuff about colonialism and the logic of an expansionist military state. If you really want to see the root of Teddy and the other conservatives hatred of Scalzi, it’s here – he’d written up some nice gung ho ultra-violance, and then they realized they were reading something that wasn’t just Obedience To The Flag Massacre The Others Ra-Ra-Ra.

    They all felt betrayed by Scalzi – much like they’d felt betrayed by that one girl who’d smiled at them the one time without then immediately offering to have sex with them. Mind, I’m not sure I’d call a lot of Scalzi’s work Hugo-able, but often quite enjoyable.

38. The thing you want on your badge that others will call you.

    Or perhaps more importantly, the thing that when people see it they’ll think “Oh, that’s the person I [chatted with | had a furious argument with] and would [happily offer to buy them a drink | would rather step away before they notice me].”
    It’s very little effort to find my real name, but the handle here is one I’ve been using on various forums for twenty years, so I figure it’s more likely to be much use.

39. @Chip: See, I *am* female, and I totally agreed with that scene. Asexuals exist, of course, but the majority of folks aren’t, and I suspect many people’s reaction to having a suddenly young-and-fit body and being surrounded by other people in the same situation would indeed be to screw themselves silly. (q.v. college, only more so.)

    tl;dr: Lots of casual sex with attractive people is not only a male fantasy.

40. Tasha –

    http://www.nesfa.org/History/RiseAndFall.html

    Article about the Boskone from Hell and some things that lead up to it.

41. @Ultragotha
    Hopefully this will distract me from the cold from hell I caught while out last week doing medical stuff. 😀

42. True. Is there any e-book app that allows you to have two tabs open to different parts of the book simultaneously?

    I use the bookmarks feature on my Kindle Paperwhite to jump quickly to maps and glossaries – it’s not perfect but a bookmark at least makes it easier. (Bonus tip: Placing the bookmark in the middle of the glossary and not the beginning means less paging within the glossary.) The search-function can be immensely helpful – mark a name, select “find in this book”, and there’s the scene where that character was introduced.
    Some Kindle books also have the X-ray feature, but that seems to be uncommon. (Or maybe I’m just reading a lot of ebooks from other sources.)

43. Iphinome – love the title!

    Still with GRRM, how about:
    “For the net is daft, and full of errrors”

    ETA: Yes, I’ve spotted the spelling mistake. I think I’ll leave it in, though; it seems more appropriate that way.

44. @Tasha: don’t say Chip didn’t warn you…

45. @TYP

    I didn’t “latch” onto anything. Chip suggested the sex scene was problematic. I thought it was a reasonable short-hand for “hey! we’re young again”.

    In any case, I do think that OMW is a decent recommendation for an adult looking to expand into science fiction. It is well written and conveys a number of ideas. Some of which I agree with, others I might not. YMMV.

    —
    Regards,
    Dann

46. Wait, there’s a glossary at the back of THE GOBLIN EMPEROR?

    [fetches book from lunchbox] [I’ve been reading TGE during breaks at work]

    Well, goddam. Schnauzer me with a three-tined fork. I actually read the entire friggin’ Table of Contents before starting the story. It would have been nice to have had the pronunciation aid, and the list of people, places, things and gods, given brief notice after the ToC entry for the last chapter.

    If I had JCW’s thesaurus to hand, I would be saying my face is incarnadined right now.

47. First Scroll On The Left And Straight On ‘Til Moaning

    I Like Pix Scrolls (And I Cannot Lie)

    Vaster Than Empires And More Scroll

48. @Chip Hitchcock

    Yes, wouldn’t call Cherryh’s style obscure, exactly. All the information you need is in there – it’s just that you have to enjoy (or at least not mind) the process of putting the pieces together. (And now I’m trying to think of examples of writers I like who I would call obscure. R A Lafferty, maybe? John Clute’s “Appleseed”?)

    (cf an autobiographical essay reprinted in Fancyclopedia ~1994, that in parts of the midwest Us it was OK to be a “pitcher” but not a “catcher”.)

    This is common across a lot of cultures – penetration is masculine; being penetrated makes you less of a man. The Greeks and Romans had it too, of course. (And for a marginal SF connection, Delaney’s autobiography has a fascinating encounter with a bisexual guy who thinks of himself as straight but highly-sexed.)

49. Sigh… Marc Millar deserves better than to be used by Beale like this.

50. Thanks for the badge advice. It makes sense that if it had to be my legal name they wouldn’t ask what I wanted on it. I’m tempted to write Xaxnax or Short Joke now, but will probably just go with my real first name.

    I haven’t been reading File 770 much the last week. Did I miss any talk of a File 770 Lunacon meetup?

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