(1) RECURSIVE NEWS. The Large Hadron Collider gets a pixel tracker.
Officials said the replacement of a key component inside the CMS experiment represented the first major upgrade to the LHC – the world’s biggest machine.
Engineers have been carefully installing the new “pixel tracker” in CMS in a complex and delicate procedure on Thursday 100m underground….
More than 1,200 “dipole” magnets steer the beam around a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border. At certain points around the ring, the beams cross, allowing collisions to take place. Large experiments like CMS and Atlas then record the outcomes of these encounters, generating more than 10 million gigabytes of data every year.
The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) pixel tracker is designed to disentangle and reconstruct the paths of particles emerging from the collision wreckage.
“It’s like substituting a 66 megapixel camera with a 124 megapixel camera,” Austin Ball, technical co-ordinator for the CMS experiment, told BBC News.
In simple terms, the pixel detector takes images of particles which are superimposed on top of one another, and then need to be separated.
(2) COLLECTING THE CURE. A bidder paid top dollar for a moldy piece of history.
The mold in question — which actually outpaced early expectations to be sold for a whopping $14,617, according to The Associated Press — is a capsule of the original Penicillium chrysogenum Alexander Fleming was working with when he discovered the antibiotic penicillin. Encased in a glass disc, inscribed with the words “the mould that first made Penicillin,” and signed by Fleming himself, the little sample comes from the collection of Fleming’s niece, Mary Anne Johnston.
(3) GOLD RUSS. James Davis Nicoll has the panelists reading “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ at Young People Read Old SFF.
With this story we enter the 1970s, the last decade in the Young People project . I knew which story I wanted to begin the decade with: Joanna Russ’ 1972 Nebula-winner “When It Changed”. Noted author and critic Russ’s story is a reply to such classics as Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet, stories in which planets populated entirely by women are granted that most precious of treasures, a man and his unsolicited advice. Russ was not always entirely pleased by the status quo. Subtle hints of her displeasure can be detected in this classic first contact tale.
Of course, we live in a modern era of complete equality between the sexes. Who knows if this story can speak to younger people? Let’s find out!
Here’s one participant’s verdict –
….I’d still be willing to suggest that “When It Changed” is the most relevant of all the stories we’ve read so far in this project. I’m sure this is a very hard to believe statement, especially when you compare the story to some of the others we’ve read (i.e. dolphin-people and doomsday don’t-let-the-sun-set cultists), but I’m willing to say it and stand by it, for a few reasons….
(4) DEALING WITH IT. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Business Musings: Writing with Chronic Health Problems” deals with something I’m sure many writers are doing after seeing people’s comments here.
It wasn’t until I got a Fitbit on a lark that exercise became do-not-miss for me. Why? Because I can hit my 10,000 steps even when I’m sick. I shuffle around the house like the walking dead, determined to hit that magic number, because I’m anal, and because finishing my steps every day before midnight is something I can control.
The knee injury got in the way. I made my doctor give me a schedule and benchmarks so that I wouldn’t start up again too soon, but also so that I would start as soon as I could. He thought I was nuts, but he did it. And I followed it, even though I didn’t want to. (I wanted to hobble around the house to hit that magic 10,000 steps.) Even with an injured knee, I got 3,000-4,000 steps per day (using crutches), because I really can’t sit down for very long.
It drives me crazy.
So why am I telling you all of this? This is a writing blog, right?
Because dozens of you have asked me, both privately and in comments, how I write with a chronic health condition.
There really is a trick to the writing while chronically ill. But the trick is personal, and it’s tailored to each individual person.
So, more personal stories—and then tips.
(5) MoPOP. Nominations for next year’s inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame are being taken from the public through April 16.
We’ve opened up our Hall of Fame nominations to the public so that you can choose the creations (e.g. a movie, video game, book, comic/graphic novel, superhero, etc.) and creators (e.g. director, actor, writer, animator, composer, etc.) that have most inspired you!
MoPOP also says the public will be able to vote for the selected finalists later this year, although it’s unclear what impact that vote will have. The website says —
Founded in 1996, the Hall of Fame was relocated from the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas to its permanent home at MoPOP in 2004. Nominations are accepted from the public and the final inductees are chosen by a committee of industry experts.
A public was invited to vote was taken on last year’s nominees, too, but as it says above, selected experts chose the inductees.
(6) NEBULA NOMINEE. Brooke Bolander, who calls this “sputtering,” writes a pretty good thank-you: “Nebula Finalist Frenzy, or: IT HAPPENED AGAIN WTF BBQ”.
“Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies,” my thousand-word rage bark published in Uncanny Magazine, is a finalist for the Best Short Story Nebula. Again, to everyone who put it on their ballot: holy shit, thank you so goddamned much. I was helping clean up after a family funeral when I got the call, so to say that I needed that good news is a grave and frankly insulting understatement to the gift you all handed me. I didn’t expect to get on the ballot last year. I figured it was probably the last time I’d be within six city blocks of a ballot for a long, long time, if ever. Is being a finalist again so soon intimidating? You’d better fuckin’ believe it, buster. Is trying to figure out how I am going to follow this up absolutely bowel-twistingly terrifying, the fear that I’ll never write anything else worthwhile once again lurking at the edges of my internal narrative like a shadow beneath a 1 AM streetlamp? DING DING DING.
(7) SURVIVOR. Pat Cadigan is deeply reflective in this installment of “Still Making Cancer My Bitch”.
…At the same time, however, it’s a little spooky to think that, had my cancer followed its standard course––had I not gotten so extremely lucky––I wouldn’t be here now. And the two friends I lost were supposed to be living their lives as usual. John Lennon once pointed out that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Truer words were never spoken.
A few days ago, I had started writing a post about survivor guilt. There have been a few posts I found very difficult and uncomfortable to write but this one was impossible. I have seldom written nonfiction; it’s really not my metier. I did write two nonfiction books in the late 1990s, one about the making of Lost In Space and another a year later about the making of The Mummy; they were assignments I lucked into and I think they turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. But I digress.
Survivor guilt is one of those things easier felt than explained––easier done than said, if you will. You can’t write about it without sounding like you’re fishing for comfort: Please forgive me for still being alive. You know people are going to tell you that you have nothing to feel guilty about. Except for the few whom you secretly suspect don’t forgive you.
Personally, I’ve always thought of survivor guilt as something suffered by people who have been through terrible catastrophes––natural disasters, mass transit crashes, explosions, wars. These people have been through extreme trauma and injury themselves. So claiming I have survivor guilt sounds self-aggrandising. The truth is, I’ve never been in pain and thanks to my family and my ongoing support system of friends far and wide, I’ve never felt alone or like I had no one to talk to.
What I’m feeling is more like survivor embarrassment. It’s like this: you find out you’re terminal, and you make a big deal out of it, because what the hell, it is a big deal, to you anyway. Then, holy guacamole! Things take a completely unexpected swerve and it turns out you’re not as terminal as they thought. You’re not exactly well, not in remission, but you’re stable and you’re not leaving any time soon unless someone drops a house on you. (And even then, it would probably depend on the house.)
(8) BEAR NECESSITIES. Worldcon 75 has received a 5000 € grant from Art Promotion Centre Finland. If you read Finnish, you can find out the details in the organization’s press release.
(9) ROCK SOLID EVIDENCE. “Oldest fossil ever found on Earth shows organisms thrived 4.2bn years ago”. The Telegraph has the story.
Oldest fossil ever found on Earth shows organisms thrived 4.2bn years ago
It’s life, but not as we know it. The oldest fossil ever discovered on Earth shows that organisms were thriving 4.2 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought.
The microscopic bacteria, which were smaller than the width of a human hair, were found in rock formations in Quebec, Canada, but would have lived in hot vents in the 140F (60C) oceans which covered the early planet.
The discovery is the strongest evidence yet that similar organisms could also have evolved on Mars, which at the time still had oceans and an atmosphere, and was being bombarded by comets which probably brought the building blocks of life to Earth.
….Space expert Dr Dan Brown of Nottingham Trent University added: “The discovery is exciting since it demonstrates how quickly life can form if the conditions are right on a planet or moon.
“This makes it clear to me that as soon as we find conditions on an exoplanet that would favour life as we know it, the probability of finding some form of life on that planet is very high. However, we are not talking about little green aliens but about microorganisms.
(10) ABSTRACT THINKING. Click here for the table of contents of the March issue of Science Fiction Studies which brings us, among other headscratchers, Thomas Strychacz’ “The Political Economy of Potato Farming in Andy Weir’s The Martian” —
Abstract. This essay examines the diverse political-economic registers of Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011) in terms of its symbolic response to the material and ideological crises of the Great Recession. The 2008 financial collapse in the US led to millions losing their homes and posed a serious challenge to the legitimacy of mainstream economic principles. Published at the height of the crisis, and concerning itself with the monumental challenge of bringing just one person home, the novel writes contested economic discourses into cultural fable. On Mars, Mark Watney’s potato farming evokes the paradigmatic neoclassical economic figure of homo economicus, the self-interested, maximizing agent who constantly prioritizes competing choices in order to allocate scarce resources rationally. NASA’s Earth, conversely, is a fantastic world of “unlimited funding” where, overturning two centuries of (neo)classical economic principle, “every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out” (Weir 368-69). The novel’s confused attempts to reconcile homo economicus with a workable concept of the common good can be historicized. Other prominent documents of the recessionary era—the US government’s official Report on the Financial Crisis and Occupy Wall Street’s Declaration among them—manifest the same yearning to restore a vanishing sense of commonwealth.
(11) REVENGE OF THE SON OF THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE. Two more shortlists from Shadow Clarke jurors.
One of the things I wanted to do with my shortlist was to explore the idea of the Arthur C. Clarke Award as an institution that challenges the near-monopoly that genre publishing has over not only the field’s annual hype cycle but also over the construction of literary excellence. Traditionally, the Clarke Award has filled this role by smuggling a few choice mainstream titles over the ghetto walls but what if those disruptive tendencies were allowed to manifest themselves more fully? What if the Clarke Award came to represent genre publishing industry’s systematic failure to drive the genre forwards?
In order to come up with a deliberately counter-cultural shortlist, I made several passes through the submissions list in order to rule things out before making more positive choices about the things I wanted to read and write about:
…Second pass: Genre publishing has slowly developed a near-monopoly on the means through which individual works acquire a word-of-mouth buzz. This monopoly is partly a result of publishers and authors developing direct relationships with reviewers and partly a result of critics and reviewers losing influence in the age of Goodreads and Amazon reviews. With most of genre culture’s systems of recommendation skewed in favour of genre imprints and established genre authors, I chose to prioritise works that were either produced outside of conventional genre culture or which have been marginalised by genre publishing and forced towards smaller publishing venues….
…The task of compiling a shortlist is slightly different for the shadow Clarke juror, because there is more scope to set a personal agenda. What do I want my shortlist to be? This question came into sharp focus when I looked at the list of submissions, and realised that I wouldn’t want to shortlist any of the books that I’d already read.
So I have had to fall back on books that I would like to read. On that basis, I decided to orient my shortlist around the idea of discovery, focusing primarily on authors I hadn’t read much before, and taking note of a few strong recommendations from trusted sources….
Mark-kitteh sent the links along with these comments: “I did a spot of tallying up:
- The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead 5
- Central Station — Lavie Tidhar 4
- A Field Guide to Reality?— Joanna Kavenna 4
- The Many Selves of Katherine North?—?Emma Geen 3
- The Power — Naomi Alderman 3
- The Gradual?— Christopher Priest 3
“Which conveniently makes a potential shortlist of 6. It’s unlikely to be the final result, but the jurors seem to have more to agree on than to disagree.
“They are followed by another 7 chosen by two jurors, plus 10 singletons with a lone champion. Nick Hubble has the honour of being the only juror with at least one other agreeing with all his choices.”
(12) TRIVIAL TRIVIA
Monopoly Board Games produced after September 2008 come with $20,580 in play money. Standard editions produced before that came with $15,140.
(13) TODAY’S DAY
Today is Dr. Seuss Day, a full twenty-four hours to make a mess with the Cat in the Hat, dance around with the Fox in Sox, hear a Who with Horton, count the red and blue fish, help the Grinch see the error of his ways, and listen to Sam I Am’s friend complain about his dish of green eggs and ham, the ungrateful hairball!
(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- March 2, 1904 — Dr. Seuss
(15) EARLY BARR. At Galactic Journey, Victoria Silverwolf has an eye for talent — “[March 1,1962] Hearts and Flowers (April 1962 Fantastic)”:
Appropriately, The April 1962 issue of Fantastic is full of romance, along with the sense of wonder demanded by readers of speculative fiction.
Before we get to the mushy stuff, however, Judith Merril offers us a mysterious look at The Shrine of Temptation. George Barr’s beautiful cover art appears to have inspired this ambiguous tale of good, evil, and strange rituals. Barr’s work has appeared in a handful of fanzines for a few years, but I believe this is his first professional publication. Based on the quality of this painting, I believe the young artist has a fine career ahead of him.
(16) IT’S MERVEILLEUX. At The New York Review of Science Fiction: “Brian Stableford: Madme De Villaneuve and the Origins of the Fantasy Novel”
The first concerted attempt to define and characterize a genre of fantasy fiction was made by Charles-Joseph Mayer between 1785 and 1789 when he published the 41 exemplary volumes of Le Cabinet des fées, ou Collection choisie des contes de fées et autres contes merveilleux [The Cabinet of the Fairies, or, Selected Collection of Fairy Tales and Other Marvelous Tales] in parallel with Charles Garnier’s Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques [Imaginary Voyages, Dreams, Visions, and Cabalistic Fiction]. The latter is now regarded as most significant for the volumes containing imaginary voyages that can be affiliated in retrospect to the nascent genre of roman scientifique [scientific fiction] but, as the full title illustrates, it contains a good deal of material that would nowadays be considered to belong to the fantasy genre, and some of the items, such as Madame Roumier-Robert’s “Les Ondins, conte moral” (1768; tr. as “The Water-Sprites”) would have been perfectly at home in Mayer’s collection. It was, however, Mayer’s assembly that identified the two principal strands of the genre of the merveilleux as the mock folktales that became fashionable in the literary salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in association with the court of Louis XIV and tales written in imitation of Antoine Galland’s collection of Les Mille-et-une nuits (1707–19), which claimed to be translations of Arabian folklore, although many of the inclusions are drastically rewritten from the original manuscripts or wholly invented by Galland.
(17) PULLMAN. In “Paradise regained: ‘His Dark Materials’ is even better than I remembered”, the Financial Times’ Nilanjana Roy uses the forthcoming publication of The Book of Dust to discuss how she read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy ten years ago and how much she enjoyed these books. (The article is behind a paywall; the link is to a Google cache which can be read after taking a survey.)
The first in the trilogy is the most memorably dazzling, a classic quest story where the young Lyra travels to the north, befriending armoured bears and witch-queens. She has a daemon, Pantalaimon — most people in her world do, the daemon being an animal who is the external manifestation of a person’s inner spirit — and that is what I remembered most about the trilogy. When His Dark Materials came out, most of my friends abandoned their dignity and played games of Guess His Daemon? assigning slinking jackals or brown marmorated stink bug daemons to those they didn’t like.
(18) IT PAYS NOT TO BE IGNORANT. BoingBoing tells about the Norwegian news site that makes readers pass a test proving they read the post before commenting on it.
The team at NRKbeta attributes the civil tenor of its comments to a feature it introduced last month. On some stories, potential commenters are now required to answer three basic multiple-choice questions about the article before they’re allowed to post a comment. (For instance, in the digital surveillance story: “What does DGF stand for?”)
(19) THE CULTURE WARS. Yes, it’s Buzzfeed – perhaps someday you’ll forgive me. “This Far-Right Tweet About ‘The Future That Liberals Want’ Backfired Into A Huge Meme”. A lot of tweets have been gathered in this post – here are three examples, the tweet that started everything, one of the pushback, and a third from the bizarre spinoffs.
https://twitter.com/polNewsNetwork1/status/837001201384374272
(Buzzfeed says the photo was originally posted on @subwaycreatures, where it was used to “showcase the beauty of New York’s diversity.”)
two people calmly sitting on a bus. oh the horror! I thought it was the SJWs who were supposed to be easily offended ????
— ????Sunny Burn ???? (@sunweasel) March 1, 2017
Finally:
This is the future that liberals want. pic.twitter.com/WCJHcP1BuL
— Mat (@MatCro) March 2, 2017
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, and Mark-kitteh for some of these stories. Title inspiration credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey.]
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This is the neo, still new to the game
That LOL’d the fan with the funny name
That echoed the slan
That praised the fan
That rebuffed the troll
That scorned the scroll
That featured the pixel
That scrolled on the file that Mike built.
(19) THE CULTURE WARS.
All of the Tweets in the article are worth reading, but I think this one is my favorite:
“Religious freedom, kicky daytime drag looks, and a robust public transit program? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.”
ticky
13) What do the inhabitants call the physician in the town in HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS?
fifth again?!?
WRT the Clarke shortlist: while I agree with come of his comments, the idea that in the age of Amazon, Goodreads, FB, twitter, reddit and vibrant personal blogs, that there are ‘genre gatekeepers’ who have a monopoly on reviews and word of mouth buzz is simply ludicrous. If anything, there has never been a time where the ‘gatekeepers’ have less control over word of mouth buzz.
File thee more stately pixels, O my scroll…
And re @9: the stories I’ve seen about this say the matter is still vigorously disputed, e.g. are the structures really similar to newer accepted structures (one opponent says they’re much too big…). It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but the general-interest media probably won’t cover confirmation/retraction.
(19) THE CULTURE WARS. Forgiven, @Mike Glyer, because I LOL’d. 🙂 The pix at the post are hilarious. One is from Sam Sykes!
@Kip W: Very nice! 🙂
@Chip Hitchcock: Hey, don’t bogart my fifth. ;-P
(11) and @Techgrrl1972:
For all that I disagreed with McCalmont’s prior scroll (on Genre Origin Stories; where I realised that we were using entirely different maps of the genre landscape, like not even showing the same parts of the landscape), here I find lots to agree with. But one has to read his words from the right angle.
His view on how the culture surrounding science fiction view award shortlists seems quite simplistic. Now, the big ones, like the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus are similar in purpose, I grant, but we do have a healthy slew of awards that have different purposes, like the Tiptree and the Mythopoeic, and to a degree the Clarke. But I think it’s a consequence of the communal and democratic nature of the big sf awards that they become somewhat bland, and that’s built-in to science fiction fandom. It’s easier for a small group to be edgy and have a mission.
What I think McCalmont means with “the near-monopoly that genre publishing has over not only the field’s annual hype cycle but also over the construction of literary excellence” isn’t to me a new development from me where I stand, but the British scene might be different. What McCalmont means is, I think, that the view of what is science fiction has become dominated by what is published as science fiction, by labels and the genre publishers, and that permeates the publishing industry, the reviewers, and the readers.
I’m don’t agree with his reasoning on why this development has been ongoing, or that it’s a relatively new one, but it certainly is an observation that is defensible.
To take but one example, pick the 1941 retro Hugo results, where the stories that were published outside of the science fiction hothouse fared abysmally: I’m thinking about Kallocain, of The Ill-Made Knight, and perhaps most egregiously “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which is an absolute classic.
(3) GOLD RUSS
I think the prediction that the 70s might be the point that the participants actually started liking the stories is coming true!
(11) REVENGE OF THE SON OF THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE
I do think there’s quite a lot of “facts not in evidence” driving McCalmont’s criteria, but his criteria have led him to a shortlist that a lot of his fellow jurors agree with anyway.
I think the most interesting items that were popular with the jury are Underground Railroad and Central Station. I’ve not got to UR yet – it’s fighting a few other things for a slot on the last minute reading schedule – but I read and enjoyed Central Station. My main issue with it was that as a sort-of-novel assembled from short stories the overall effect was quite fragmented, albeit you could find a through line in the overall narrative, and so while I enjoyed it I didn’t think I could stack it up against other more coherent novels. If Central Station does go further in the Shadow Clarke then I think it will definitely achieve the purpose of increasing conversation.
@Karl-Johan Norén
In this context I think the “annual hype cycle” is the period of eligibility posts and the like, which he routinely condemns.
I agree with you that it’s “easier for a small group to be edgy and have a mission” which is why juried awards are a valuable addition to the landscape. There’s space for everything from mass popularity awards like Goodreads or Gemmel, via limited groups like the Hugos and Nebulas, to the juries. Seeing the different results they bring is all part of the fun.
@Mark
Which makes me wonder how the post-70s wave of Cyberpunk and early New Space Opera would do, to the extent that they’re reactions against 70s SF.
The continued relevance of Russ’ writing is a testament to her skill, and an indictment of how little progress we have really made.
Re: Monopoly. Hunh. An increase in the money would probably make games last longer. Or am I misremembering the rules for what happens when money runs out?
(5) MoPOP
It’s quite difficult to look at the existing list and work out who might be missing, but CJ Cherryh comes to mind. In the creations section, Dr Who is an obvious omission.
Other than that, I’m tempted to suggest some of the classic British authors like the Johns Christopher and Wyndham.
@Ghost bird
Interesting. I wonder if James could be persuaded to throw Burning Chrome into the mix, perhaps as a coda of sorts. Or an early Cadigan might be more successful. They might be the point at which they can go “hey! I can see the modern world from here!”
@Mark
I was thinking maybe Twenty Evocations myself – Gibson had the style but I think Sterling was more influential in the end. But although I enjoy eyeball kicks I think there’s merit in the view that the post-70s movements were a reaction against and an erasure of the women writers of the 70s.
@Ghost bird
My impression – which could well be wrong as I wasn’t very old in the 80s! – is that the reaction against the 70s came out more in the critical discussion than in the fiction. Mind you, Stirling seems to have been the main banner bearer for that, and my introduction to cyberpunk came from reading mostly Gibson and some Cadigan in the 90s, I didn’t take to Stirling so well at the time, although I’ve gone back to read more of him later and his critical writings certainly fit the pattern you’re describing.
I’ve just found Twenty Invocations to read online (from Interzone #7, no less!) so I’ll have a read at lunch.
(5) MoPOP
Addendum: they’re missing Iain M Banks, which obviously can not stand.
The latest Terry Bisson story? Turkeys Discover Dead Cat.
(11) I liked McCalmont’s brief case for The Underground Railroad as a science fiction awards nominee.
4: as much as I respect and admire KKR – this is a perfect depiction of how the electronic overmind is taking over: first it will encourage you to take 10,000 daily steps. Next it will demand 10,000 daily steps. Eventually, it will MAKE you take 10,000 steps and, if you don’t, the Terry Gilliam analogue will send the thought police to arrest you…unless a fly happens to land on the typer at just the right moment, in which case they’ll be arresting the wrong bloke…but Ms. Rusch will still be taking those 10,000 daily steps.
On something of a tangent, I read “Revenger” by Alastair Reynolds on various scrollers’ recommendations and it was fine, but I’m wondering if I’m the only person who thinks the treatment of antisemitism was a bit unwise? Reynolds isn’t John Ringo, so I’m assuming that the sinister money-loving (alien) race of bankers and doctors who manipulate the economy will eventually turn out to be the misunderstood victims of prejudice, but I didn’t spot any foreshadowing in this volume.
@Ghost bird
Twenty Evocations makes your point, rather too well. Pass the brain bleach please.
@Mark
On the one hand, I thought the implied relationships were enough unlike anything we have now that I wasn’t bothered. (One thing about cyberpunk is that the only kinds of power it’s interested in are money and ownership. Which I guess is understandable for something created by white men in the 80s.) On the other hand, I think there’s a wider tendency for early Sterling and Gibson to treat women as various kinds of Other.
And on the third hand, I just remembered Donna Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, which has a better understanding of cyberpunk than most contemporary critics and manages to apply it to feminism in a way that’s still relevant today. But that’s academic and didn’t really feed back into genre SF until internet feminism brought academia and popular culture back together.
(9) world’s oldest fossil organisms: well, they didn’t possess pixels or scrolls, did they, eh?
@Ghost Bird
The connection to antisemitism didn’t even occur to me when I read it. The delusion that Jews control all the money in the world seems really archaic these days–in the English-speaking world, at least. I think it was just a reference to Wall Street, if anything.
@Greg Hullender
There are people – some of them now in the US government – who still believe that Jews control all the money in the world, but in this case I’m pretty sure it’s consciously written to go with the Age of Sail in Space setting. See also the treatment of robots.
My guess is that this is a setup for a later volume – probably the third, from who’s being set up to tell the story in the next one – to put the record straight, so I’m more flagging it as something that makes me uncomfortable than suggesting it’s a mistake. But still…
@Ghost bird
I’m increasingly convinced that “I’m gonna subvert this in the next book, honest” is a really bad idea even when you absolutely mean it. Intentions aren’t magic after all, and if you haven’t written it yet it’s impossible for a reader to be confident that’s what’s happening.
(15) EARLY BARR
I particularly liked the George Barr covers for Thomas Burnett Swann’s mythic fantasy novels. The style matched perfectly.
EU Parliament passes resolution calling for the end of visa-free European travel for Americans.
This could be implemented prior to Worldcon 75, so if you’re planning to go to Helsinki you want to keep an eye on it. Even more so if you want to hit some other countries while you’re over there; you might be required to get a visa from every single country you plan to visit.
@ Mark: Not to mention the readers who won’t even go on to the next book.
Schengen rules would still apply for visiting countries within the Area.
@Lee: Per people much better informed than you or I, the EU requirement for a US visa is unlikely to be implemented in any timeframe relevant to Worldcon 75.
But the Worldcon 75 committee is aware of this and follows it. In the unlikely event that this happens, Worldcon 75 already has a system for giving visa assistance to programme participants, academic presenters, and general members that I’m sure would be extended to US members as well.
Wild wild Pixels couldn’t Scroll me away
Hey! We’re up to I cannae change the Laws of Physics Day*. Celebrated on March 3 in honour of James Doohan’s birthday
* Yeah, I just made that up. But it should be a thing, shouldn’t it?
(11) REVENGE OF THE SON OF THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE.
I’ve had a second fifth moment, and apparently lost the ability to count to nine. There’s one last shortlist. Luckily it doesn’t affect the count I gave Mike above.
It could happen!
Maybe I misread it but I thought it was meant to be not-actually-the-case. The extent to which characters focus on it increases as they become more clearly paranoid and suspicious. Later revelations were from the most untrustworthy source in the story and by a point in the story when a key character had undergone deep personality changes some of which were due to a kind of infection.
On the one hand, it’s a beautiful, sunny day, withe the temperature a balmy 32° Fahrenheit.
On the other hand, I have a headache. On the third paw,
I think I shall appertain myself some chocolate.
I’ve had a very different experience in teaching Russ to my students in a number of college composition courses. Russ gets very quickly identified as ‘an angry feminist’ and usually dismissed, which I find fairly depressing given how much I like her work. (I should also note that this is not exclusively stated by men.) I even tried to pair “When it Changed” with the essay on the battle of the sexes in sf to show the context that she was up against, and the playfulness and humor of the work is never recognized. I don’t think I have had such a universal reaction to any other of the work that I have assigned. For instance, Octavia Butler is almost universally loved, and the work of Delany has its advocates. The work of Le Guin is also quite popular as well.
To shift briefly from the reception of the text from my students to my own views, one of the most brilliant things about both the short story and the later novel, The Female Man is the dense, intertextual engagement with the genre that Russ brings to those texts. Russ’ criticism of the genre deeply affects the work of her fiction, and I really love reading the two side by side.
(3) @ Paul Weimar – well said!
@ Robert Wood
Thanks for this thoughtful comment. When I read The Female Man, more than a decade after it was published, Russ’ rage terrified me while it thrilled me. Her work isn’t easy, so no wonder younger students are a bit scared. How about trying a The Two of Them on your students? The ending is so moving, in contrast to that of The Female Man, which is not only funny but a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(6, 14, 16, 19) yay!!
Read, enjoyed and wrote a review for Mira’s Last Dance (4 stars).
It was certainly full of surprises. V qvqa’g rkcrpg Craevp gb or tvivat beny frk gb n trareny. Abe sbe uvz gb or fb oynfr nobhg vg nsgrejneqf.
Ghost Bird: I read “Revenger” by Alastair Reynolds on various scrollers’ recommendations and it was fine, but I’m wondering if I’m the only person who thinks the treatment of antisemitism was a bit unwise? Reynolds isn’t John Ringo, so I’m assuming that the sinister money-loving (alien) race of bankers and doctors who manipulate the economy will eventually turn out to be the misunderstood victims of prejudice, but I didn’t spot any foreshadowing in this volume.
Whoa. Well, that’s the life of white privilege I’ve had showing: it never even occurred to me that this was a reference to Jewish people. I was raised Protestant in a veeeery small town in the Midwest where I had no idea that Jewish people were something that existed outside of the Bible (seriously! they don’t talk about Jewish people in science fiction and fantasy, we didn’t get religious multiculturalism education, and there certainly weren’t any in my town!). There were no Catholics there, either, so I had only the vaguest idea what Catholicism was or how they were different from Protestants. The Holocaust was covered briefly in high school World History class, which is where I would have learned about contemporary Jewish people — but it never occurred to me that such prejudice still existed so many decades later, and in the U.S., not just Germany.
(As a side note, we weren’t even taught — not a single word! — about the Japanese Internment. I was perusing books in the high school library trying to find a subject for my paper for American History class, when I stumbled across a mention of it in a book. I was horrified that such a thing had happened, and how the hell did I, at the age of 16, not know that it happened??? It still horrifies me to this day that our high school textbooks deliberately omitted this. I hope like hell it’s being taught in schools now.)
I then lived for more than 15 years in a very large city in the Midwest, and at some point I learned at least something about both Jewish people and the Catholic religions, because of course there were synagogues and cathedrals in that city, and there would be newspaper stories which mentioned various religions. But I had walked away from religion as soon as I got the hell out of Dodge, so I wasn’t paying attention to any religion at that point, and it wasn’t as if I was having discussions about it with any of the people I met, at work or elsewhere.
I must have been in my late 20s, possibly even early 30s before I even found out that there was such a thing as anti-semitism, and the supposed reasons for it (cue a huuuuuuge amount of eye-rolling on my part, because I was absolutely incredulous that this was even a thing, and what the fuck was wrong with the people who had made it a thing?).
When the sequel to Revenger comes out, I will probably re-read it so that I can evaluate it with a more clued-in eye this time. So I’m glad that you mentioned it.
@Greg Hullender: “The delusion that Jews control all the money in the world seems really archaic these days–in the English-speaking world, at least. I think it was just a reference to Wall Street, if anything.”
I can’t comment on “Revenger” because I haven’t read it, but…
1. Oh my goodness, if only that were “really archaic”. Sadly, no. In polite society maybe.
2. Again I haven’t read the book, but if Ghost Bird is correct that the aliens are “bankers and doctors“, I can’t see how that’d be just “a reference to Wall Street.”
Speaking as an aging Brit – ten years older than the similarly British Reynolds – with Jewish family connections, I am not aware that there has ever been a perceived correlation between being Jewish and working in the medical profession in the UK, although I’m vaguely aware from reading American literature that this might be a minor trope in the USA.
The financial correlation used to be true, for historical reasons stretching back to the European Middle Ages (when banking was one of the few professions Jews were allowed to pursue, in order to facilitate monarchs borrowing money from them with the fallback of banishing them if repayment proved problematical). It’s been rather old hat here for several decades, however.
I suggest therefore that US commenters should be cautious in attributing a malicious or at least careless association to a foreign author, on the basis of a prejudice which may be on the radar in their own culture, but isn’t really a factor in his.
@Lee: the BBC’s discussion of tit-for-tat visa requirements quoted a section of the rules involving a 12-month lag between notice and implementation; I don’t speak Legal, so I couldn’t tell whether this vote, or some previous, or actually taking the formal step, constitutes notice.
(2) I note on that list is The Golden Whitchbreed by Mary Gentle. Now I like that book but Gentle has written other more distinctive books. Seems like an odd choice on reflection.
Ugh – put that comment in the wrong blimmin’ thread didn’t I?
Camestros–
I see your point, but I suspect The Golden Witchbreed is easier for many readers than some of Gentle’s other works, like Rats and Gargoyles (where even the geometry is not ours), and Ash is too long to be a good starting place, I think. (
@Terry Hunt: Fair enough, although in my case at least, I wasn’t attributing anything “malicious or at least careless” to Reynolds: from the description of the book, it sounded like it could just as well have been a deliberate reference that was making fun of real-world prejudice. But if it’s true that such a reference would’ve been meaningless to UK writers and readers, then never mind.
(However, I do think you’re slightly missing the point with your remarks about how “the financial correlation” is “old hat”. The fact that antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish financiers persist in the US is not based on actual current statistics about how many people work in what profession. Like most stereotypes, it’s been passed down for generations, and the original historical basis for it isn’t of any interest to the kind of people who keep it going.)
Eli: my point was that it’s old hat in the UK, outside of the really lunatic fringes. Again, I don’t doubt that it’s more alive in the US, but Reynolds, born and raised in Britain (coincidentally, he did his PhD at the Scottish University at which I’d earlier dropped out of an Astronomy degree) presumably brings British cultural underpinnings to his SF – certainly those of his works I’ve read never registered any ‘non-Brit’ moments, as most US writers inevitably do. I really doubt he’d deliberately play to the background prejudices of the States, either seriously or as a satire.
Actually, an ethnic group which would tick the boxes for ‘traditionally prominent in the financial (somewhat) and medical (strongly) sectors in the UK would be the Scots.
Clearly, I’m going to have to acquire a copy of Revenger to root out the scurrilous anti-Caledonianism :-).
@Terry: I think we’re talking past each other. I’m not questioning your knowledge of British culture, something I know very little about. I’m taking issue with the broader claims you seem to be making about how bigotry and stereotypes work.
You seemed to be saying (though of course I may have misread you) that the stereotype was old hat in the UK because “the financial correlation” is no longer true. What I’m saying is that the one doesn’t logically imply the other; there’s no direct relationship between the historical basis for a stereotype becoming obsolete and the stereotype going away. The difference if any between the UK and the US in that regard would not be explicable by relatively recent differences in historical employment patterns: “several decades” are a drop in the bucket when you’re talking about an idea with medieval origins. In fact, your reference to its medieval origins sort of undermines your argument, since if the stereotype still existed in England at any time during the twentieth century, then it had already survived a period of at least 400 years of there being (by law) literally no Jewish financiers in England at all. Which is no surprise, since this particular kind of idea fills such a useful role in a bigot’s imagination— that is, portraying a despised group as being surreptitiously very powerful and overrepresented in positions of authority— that it’s highly resistant to changes in circumstance.
I think there’s also a danger in assuming that if you’re not hearing a particular stereotype bandied about in your own circles, and it’s only sincerely believed by “really lunatic fringes”, then it is a non-presence in the culture at large.
To illustrate both of those ideas at once: in the US, a racist cliché representation of Black people is that they’re inordinately fond of watermelon. This idea had multiple roots: a general theme (previously applied to other poor minority groups in other parts of the world) of watermelon being cheap sweet finger-food and therefore déclassé, and specific references to watermelon being popular in the South and a common crop for Black farmers after the Civil War. Is that background known to most Americans today or relevant to their lives now? Of course not. Is it a “fringe” stereotype? Well… anyone who states it as fact, or even as a joke, would be considered an unusually blatant racist; it’s extremely unlikely to come up in conversation among people who aren’t. But it’s out there and commonly known, to the point where someone who claims never to have heard of it is either disingenuous or sheltered; if a US author wrote a satirical allegory where some fictional group was referred to by bigots as a bunch of watermelon-eaters, it’d be easily understood.
As a data point, as a Brit, while I obviously don’t believe that stereotype I certainly know it exists, and that there are some people out in the world prepared to deploy it. I’m as aware of it as I am the watermelon stereotype Eli mentions.