(1) THEMES. For the next 29 days, BBC has the concert celebrating the music of Barry Gray available for free listening — “The Music of Barry Gray”
Stuart presents the iconic music of TV composer Barry Gray performed by Charles Hazelwood’s All Star Collective at St George’s Bristol. Barry Gray created some of the most memorable music on British television and film from the 1960s onwards including Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet and Stingray. His style combines big band swagger, sci-fi strangeness and soaring theme tunes. Conductor Charles Hazelwood is joined on stage by a stella cast of musicians including Jarvis Cocker and members of the British Paraorchestra.
(2) IT’S TIME. Geoff Willmets advocates “The necessity of deadlines” at SF Crowsnest.
Being creative to a deadline is actually good for you because it prevents your mind wandering from what is essentially a lot of hard work. As the deadline approaches, your brain becomes extremely focused on getting things done correctly. I’ve seen myself go into super-drive doing it and at the same time, knowing that giving myself a little distance from the work as well, actually helps as well. The early drafts often look slightly out of focus and polishing them just sharpens them up to what you want to achieve.
(3) JIM ANSWERS. Raymond Bolton interviewed Jim C. Hines about his novel Revisionary and life as a writer.
Most writers will envy your new situation. Why do you write and when did you first realize you were a writer?
I write because I enjoy it. I love inventing stories and sharing them with people. There are days when it’s frustrating or painful trying to get the story in your head onto the screen, and it’s just not coming out right. But then there are the moments when it comes together, or when you come up with a clever twist or idea, or you hit on something powerful. Those moments are amazing.
Plus I like fantasizing about swords and magic and robots and all that other cool, shiny stuff.
When did I realize I was a writer? That’s hard to say. I toyed with writing a bit as a kid. Started doing it more seriously toward the end of my undergraduate degree. To some extent, I started to really feel like a writer after my first fantasy novel Goblin Quest came out.
And then there are the days when I still don’t entirely feel like A Real Writer. Like I’ve been playing a trick on the world for 20+ years and having a blast with it, but sooner or later someone’s going to catch on.
(4) A CERTAIN GLOW. “Unexpected changes of bright spots on Ceres discovered” – EurekAlert! – Chemistry, Physics and Materials Sciences does not think the explanation is an asteroid having teenage complexion problems.
(ESO) Observations made at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile have revealed unexpected changes in the bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres. Very careful study of its light shows not only the changes expected as Ceres rotates, but also that the spots brighten during the day and also show other variations. These observations suggest that the material of the spots is volatile and evaporates in the warm glow of sunlight.
(5) IT’S FIVE! At Tor.com, Myke Cole lists “Five Books About the Ancient World” – fiction books, that is.
The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
This book has a dated prose style that requires some plowing, but it’s worth the work for the incredibly compelling and well researched account of the genesis of Rome’s “Social War” that spelled the end of the Republic.
McCullough’s book is so respected that it’s often cited as a source in secondary scholarship. It’s particularly valuable for those seeking to understand daily life in ancient Rome, from the vaulted heights of the Capitoline Hill to the filth of the Subura, McCullough covers it all.
As with Graves, there’s more if you want it. The First man in Rome is the flagship offering in McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, a seven volume sweeping epic that will take you all the way from Marius and Sulla in 110 B.C. to Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 27 B.C.
(6) SURPRISING A LIFETIME ACHIEVER. Rowena Cory Daniells calls winning the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award “Another Lovely Surprise”.
It would be honest to say that I was stunned.
When I went up to accept the award and had to stand there while Sean read out my list of achievements. It was excruciating.
In my acceptance speech I told the story of my meeting with Robert Silverberg at the Australian World Con in 1999. We’d been wedged in a corner at an industry party where, being the socially awkward creature that I am, I’d said, ‘How does it feel to be the Grand Old Man of Speculative Fiction.’ To which he said, ‘Pretty strange considering that I used to be the Bright Young Thing.’
And there I was, giving an acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award when I used to be one of the vanguard of new faces.
Future Hugo by Taral Wayne
(7) DEBUNKING DISQUALIFICATIONS. K. Tempest Bradford advances “4 Reasons Why You (Yeah, You) Are Qualified To Nominate for the Hugos”.
The Hugo Award nomination period closes in just a few days. You’ve seen my recs, and over the weekend the #hugoeligible hashtag showcased so many more. But I know some of you are still thinking that you aren’t qualified to nominate because:
- You haven’t read/watched/listened widely enough (according to you).
- You don’t have enough nominations in every category to fill ever slot you’re allotted.
- You don’t have time to read all the cool stuff recommended here and elsewhere and on the tag.
- You’re “just a fan” and not anyone fancy.
I’m here to tell you that none of those things disqualifies you from nominating for the Hugos. None. Zip. Let’s break it down.
(8) PRELUDE TO A BALLOT. Abigail Nussbaum reveals “The 2016 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Best Novel and Campbell Award”.
There are three whole days left before the Hugo nominating deadline, but I’m traveling starting tomorrow, so the final post in the series listing my Hugo nominees goes up today. As tends to be the case, the best novel category is the one I put the least effort into. I don’t tend to read most books in the year of their publication, so I’m only rarely sufficiently up to date that I have a full slate of nominees in this category. There are, in fact, more books that I would have liked to get to before the nominating deadline than there are on my ballot–books like Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings (which I may yet finish before the deadline), Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. Meanwhile, the always-interesting Campbell award is one that I tend to dedicate to short story writers–usually those who have impressed me over the year even if their stories didn’t quite cross the bar to make it onto my ballot.
(9) EBOOKS. Max Florschutz continues the debate about ebooks in “The Question of Value Part 2 – Responses”.
The market is failing the readers.
Okay, now that might sound like a harsh judgement to pass, and perhaps I could voice it differently (also, that could be taken way out of context, so aggregate sites, you do not have permission to use that line without context). When I say market, for the most part, I’m not referring to the books themselves, or what the authors are producing, though in a way, we share part of the blame.
No, what I’m referring to here is the actual market and the way ebooks are being handled. That is what is failing the readers.
I went though all those comments again this morning, this time armed with a pen and paper, and I wrote down each concern as I encountered them. When multiple concerns presented the same topic, I made check-marks next to each one. And at the end, almost all of them fit neatly into one of three areas:
- Misconceptions about ebooks that are not being properly explained to the readers, often overlapped with 2 and 3.
- Mishandling of ebooks by publishers.
- A general failure of the “User Interface” of ebook stores.
With these, maybe now you can see why I say the market is failing the readers. Granted, there’s a little bit of equal blame there. After all, it doesn’t help the market when readers go around spreading misinformation rather than learning about the topic, but at the same time, if the market is deliberately making this information difficult to glean, and in some cases actively working to obfuscate things from the reader’s eyes, well, then I would say it’s definitely failed.
So, I want to take a look at some of these concerns that were given, heading them under these three points, and see if we can’t cast a bit more light on things.
(10) BANDERLOVE. Mark Sommer at Examiner.com reviews Bandersnatch in “Creative collaboration demonstrated in the Oxford writers group the Inklings”.
“Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings” is the newly published adaptation of her 2007 book, re-written for a wider audience. “The Company they Keep” was meant for academic use. However, although the earlier book has been described as “easy and enjoyable to read” with “plenty to enjoy” for new fans and scholars alike, Glyer realized the “fundamentally academic” work should be updated. Besides being of interest to fans of Tolkien, Lewis, and the other Inklings, “Bandersnatch” also is also helpful to aspiring writers, artists, and inventors, providing suggestions on how to interact with others in the same kind of creative collaboration the Inklings did.
The title of the book comes from an often quoted line from a letter Lewis wrote to Charles Mooreman in 1959. Mooreman was researching a book about “the Oxford Christians,” which came out in 1966. After admitting the influence Charles Williams and he had over each other, Lewis writes, “No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” (A “bandersnatch” is a creature created by Lewis Carol. Lewis was undoubtedly borrowing from a quote from “Through the Looking-Glass” where the White King describes his Queen: “She runs so fearfully quick. You might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch!”)
(11) PUPPY COUNTING. Brandon Kempner introduces a series at Chaos Horizon, “Estimating the 2016 Hugo Nominations, Part 1”.
I’m going to start with my estimates from the end of the 2015 Hugo season using the final vote statistics. Here’s what I estimated back then:
Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525 Core Sad Puppies: 500-400 Sad Puppy leaning Neutrals: 800-400 (capable of voting a Puppy pick #1) True Neutrals: 1000-600 (may have voted one or two Puppies; didn’t vote in all categories; No Awarded all picks, Puppy and Non-Alike) Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick above No Award: 1000 Absolute No Awarders: 2500
I think those numbers are at least in the ballpark and give us a place to start modelling. Since you can’t vote against a pick in the nomination stage, we don’t need to know the difference between “No Awarders” and other more traditional Hugo voters. I’m going to combine all the non-Puppy voters into one big group, called the “Typical Voters.” I’ll initially assume that they’ll vote in similar patterns to past Hugo seasons before the Puppies. I’ll have more to say about that assumption later on.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day RedWombat.]
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@Stephen Granade:
Reminds me of one of my very first jobs. I was involved in a rather large clear out of physical storage space and stumbled across some old floppies just like those ones. The plan for what to do with them amounted to “err… let’s just wait and see if we find a drive that can read them in there somewhere. And a computer it can attach to… let’s just throw them away.”
@Mark, @Nickpheas — Weird; I just checked my copy of House of Shattered Wings on Kindle, and it most definitely shows “Silverspires” without a space.
Oneiros
Now I’m reminded of taking electronics at the Voc-Tech. I was working in the stockroom with Brett, and one of our tasks was to process the innards of some computer panels that had been donated to us. These were assemblies with a plug at one end, some resistors soldered in, and at the other end, a socket with a vacuum tube in it. Our job was to remove the resistors (leaving them with leads about a quarter of an inch long) and sort them into boxes where they could stay forever, then test and sort the vacuum tubes, none of which would ever be used for anything without -VAC in the name.
So. We put them in the tube tester, one by one, saw that they were Good, according to the meter, and put them in boxes, labeled with their names—names which, of course, no one would ever, ever come looking for, because they weren’t radio or TV tubes. They were single-purpose tubes whose purpose had long passed.
The tube tester had a knob on it where you set the heater voltage. It went up to 110. Any number of times. We’d be testing a tube, and darn if that knob didn’t go right up to the top, where the tube would become briefly incandescent, then quickly go dark. “That one’s bad,” we would say.
TL;dr: Some tubes with no apparent use or value can be utilized as light bulbs, for very short periods of time.
I find it interesting that the “??” finalists are all translated from the English, per the implication of providing English titles (and, well, knowing the authors). The only thing I am not sure of is whether the Stanislaw Lem story was directly translated from Polish, or whether it went through an English intermediary like literary telephone.
edit: Dag nabbit, lack of UTF8 support or something? Haiwai, I don’t know what the Japanese pronunciation is. Overseas/foreign.
JJ:
and I personally think it will be a damn shame if anti-Puppy stuff is put on the ballot by non-Puppy nominators.
I take it you mean specifically the fiction categories here?
I agree it is a bad idea. But bear in mind that many people will have blank spaces in the short fiction categories – see Bradford’s post on ‘not enough nominations’ – so these won’t actually be taking space away from worthier stuff.
I did think of nominating ‘If you were a Platypus’ if I had any blank spaces in Short Story – out of genuine appreciation, not just to annoy Puppy supporters – but I decided against, because I was afraid others might do the same, and it get on the ballot, which would give some people ground for mockery. I take it this is what happened with ‘Shadow War of the Night Dragons’, and the Garcia thing (though the Garcia thing was also helped by some episodes of ‘Game of Thrones’ being taken off the ballot above it), and that was not the Hugos’ finest hour.
Standback:
Just trying to estimate how thousands of new nominators are going to cluster, without any prior behavior, is going to mess it up.
Yes. I can see reasons why they might be more diffuse, and also reasons why they might be more focused, so heaven knows how it will work out.
I have anti-puppy items in ‘Related Works’ (The Alfies, John Scalzi is not a popular author) and some Fan Writers who wrote on the subject. I also have other things.
I will not be especially upset if they’re not shortlisted.
@Joe H
Double weird! I did a text search and there was literally only one instance of it being spelt without a space. I wonder if there’s been an updated version?
—
I imagine we’ll see votes for anti-slate blog posts and the like, but I felt the best response was business as usual. For Best Related I’ve managed to avoid kerfluffle-related blog posts, but only by searching out a lot more SF non-fiction books then I would usually buy in a given year. For Fan Writer I’ve tried to apply a test of “yes, but what did they write in the non-kerfluffle months?” although I’ve undoubtedly been influenced by some fine blogging on the subject as well.
If those categories end up as a bit of a pro-puppy/anti-slate battleground this year and therefore squeezing out good books then it’ll be quite sad, but I’m not betting against it.
@Oneiros, @Kip W, you’re both giving me flashbacks to some lab experiences.
One of my favorite factoids is that we know the answer to the Pioneer anomaly because Slava Turyshev and his team managed to rescue ’70s-era magnetic tapes literally right before they were going to be thrown into the dumpster and because another engineer took a bunch of flight data home with him when he retired.
It seems to me that, as BFW goes so often to people who have written on current matters of concern, it would be odd to ignore Puppy issues there. I have also nominated ‘A Detailed Explanation’ for BRW.
When you write in “The Alfies” do you write “by George R.R. Martin”?
This pixel walks into a bar, and the barman says “Why the long scroll?”
KipW: Sounds like some of my research with Smoke Emitting Diodes, which are not as surprising as incorrectly wired capacitors.
I think that people putting things on the ballot to mock the Puppies is a pretty understandable urge, considering that most think that the Puppies have been putting things on the ballot to mock the Hugos for the last three years.
I will absolutely not nominate anything puppy-related in any other category than Best Fanwriter and will vote everything in other categories below No Award. Below Stomp It To Pieces and below Wisdom From My Ass if I could.
I want The Hugos to be about SF&F. Not about a couple of screaming narcissists. Best Related Work should be about something I can learn from. Something that has taken months or years of work and thoughts.
Not about blogposts.
The Alfies are my only exception.
Oi, blog posts can be enlightening and educational and have taken years or months of hard work and consideration.
Zil: Maybe one in 10 billion?
Re: data formatting: at one of my old day jobs, we had an author who refused to use email, file transfer, or even CD-roms, but insisted on sending his manuscript on floppy disks. There was an office-wide search for a computer that would read them, and I think eventually either one of the employees came up with a super-old home machine or found a Kinko’s.
If the guy had been less prominent, we’d have told him to go pound sand. Oddly enough, the field in which he was a superstar was in fact computer programming.
I’ve had A History Of Epic Fantasy on my long list for ages, so I’m not bothered about blog posts as a format. Some of the longer and better considered kerfluffle blogs probably stand up perfectly well as items of fannish history, but they weren’t what I wanted to concentrate on.
“It’ll outlast you, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to read the data off of it.”
Yeah, the common Star Trek conceit that machines will be able to decipher anything from any other machine simply by virtue of the fact that they are machines is belied by the fact that I have copies of things I wrote from 1990-1995 that are totally unrecoverable simply because there is nothing left that can read the disk its on or the language its written in.
@Snodberry Fields:
Very dark, agreed, and although the book presents casual sadism I don’t think that it presents sadism casually. If that makes any sense at all. One of the things I really liked about Library at Mount Char was the way it showed the psychological consequences of abuse and violence. More than a lot of grimdark that I’ve read.
You say you’re halfway through? Please check in when you’re done because I’d love to hear what you think.
Coulda ticked the box…
ObSF: Software Archaeology in Vinge
Sure. Sturgeon’s Law applies to every medium.
Oh, a few days ago Amazon suggested I was interested in an external usb-connected 3.5 floppy drive. I had to stare at it for a few moments while my brain rationalised that such a thing still existed.
I guess it’s aimed exactly at the “got some stuff on old floppies, better see what’s on there before they crack” market.
Actually, I think I have some old save games on one somewhere….
@Snodberry Fields & Dawn Incognito: Agreed. There is cruelty in The Library on Mount Char, but I wouldn’t describe any of it as casual. I thought it was very well contextualized, it all serves a variety of purposes, and it all “pays off” by the end.
I really, really like this book!
I want The Hugos to be about SF&F. Not about a couple of screaming narcissists. Best Related Work should be about something I can learn from. Something that has taken months or years of work and thoughts.
I agree. None of my Related Work nominees are related to the Pups at all. I would rather recognize good work in general than highlight a collection of Canine children who tried to rig the vote to go their way.
For the record, my Best Related Work nominees are:
Letter to Tiptree edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce
These Are the Voyages by Marc Cushman and Susan Osborne
Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939 by William J. Fanning, Jr.
Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer
You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day
Zil said:
海外? Kaigai. Yes, this blog, as an early adopter of WordPress, is stuck with a database that can’t handle anything but ASCII, so anything else will get mangled when you save your comment. You can get other character sets through if you’re willing to type out HTML escape codes.
Anyway, to the translation question, I don’t see any reason to believe the Lem story wasn’t translated directly from Polish. I expect they provided the English title in the belief that it would be easiest for the international audience of non-Polish, non-Japanese speakers to work it out from there.
The Thomas’s of the excellent Uncanny semiprozine are suggesting that any BESF nomination for them should be a joint one.
I’d already put them both on individually because I couldn’t see how to split their work apart, but I’d be happy to free up a slot with a joint nom if possible. There have been joint noms in the past for the Dillons in pro artist back in the 70s, but does anyone know of any more recent joint noms in “people” categories being denied?
Bought Kate Beaton’s “Step Aside, Pops” to see if it was something for Best Graphic Story, but – and this was a first one for me – found it too american to be able to understand all the references and/or nuances. Names I maybe know, but have absolutely no sense of feeling or context for. Felt weird.
So I gave it to my mother instead. Will see what she thinks.
The whole Heath Robinson affair couldn’t be changed because It Works Just Fine Don’t You Dare Touch It.
Frisbie spent most of a summer in Dayton, Ohio, as part of a group getting a Vax to speak with a hard drive belonging to a PDP-10. (DEC said that It Couldn’t Be Done, but they got it to work.) He’d be my first stop in trying to get data from Old Media.
I read teh Sculptor last night, and it was… long.
I’m still trying to decide if I liked it or not. It was definitely interesting.
I seem to remember a Hugo administrator saying a little while ago that joint nominations for Jeff and Ann Vandermeer were not acceptable.
I have a grocery sack filled with text files on 5 1/4″ floppies
And I did just buy an external drive to see if I can read the 3 1/2″ ones.
Niall McAuley said:
Back when I was an undergrad taking Advanced Physics Lab my roommate and the head lab tech decided to find out what happens when you stick an electrolytic capacitor into a power socket.
Spoiler: they explode. And the fluid inside them smells awful.
Hampus:
Best Related Work should be about something I can learn from. Something that has taken months or years of work and thoughts. Not about blogposts.
Generally, I agree. Blogposts are better treated as qualifying their author for Fan Writer. (‘A Detailed Explanation’ is a special case, because the author does not see himself as a fan writer and has declined nomination in that category.) The category used to be for Best Related Book, and was changed to Work so as to allow online material, not short essays. But I’m worried that this may be a lost cause, pups or no pups; in the aftermath of 2014, lots of blogposts got recommended, as if that were now seen as what the category was for.
I also would like BFW to go more often to people who write about books. Still, giving it to people who write about topics of current concern does have the advantage that there will be different likely candidates each year; if it were just ‘Best Reviewer’ it’s quite likely that this would always be the same person.
Re Hugo nominating
I am beginning to feel like a small child wailing Are we nearly there yet?; just when I think I’m done someone reminds me of something I’ve overlooked. Incidentally, I do recommend Cherie Priest’s Jacaranda, and there’s still time to read it!
Re obsolete technology
People still sometimes write about the VHS v. Betamax video competition; those articles almost invariably overlook the fact that it was really a three way fight. Sitting in the depths of my storage compartment is a VCC, along with the Blake’s Seven episodes taped thereon. At the time it was broadly accepted that VCC was superior to its competitors, which didn’t prevent its summary dispatch into oblivion…
The hardware engineers at one company I worked at rigged a couple of boards they used for capacitor cannon contests in the parking lot. I think it started with a batch of bad caps… I think they stopped after someone’s car got spattered.
At an earlier employer, there were a couple of times boards came off the assembly line with caps wired backwards. Once a bunch of them started to cook off at once in the QA lab (sort of like popcorn), and the QA guys just hit the floor until things settled down. One that blew in the main development lab flew about 30 feet and hit a manager in the shirt pocket, right where TV shows always show the bullet holes for heart shots. There were a lot of jokes about that one, and some debate about how one would go about aiming a capacitor, anyway.
@Andrew M: I seem to remember a Hugo administrator saying a little while ago that joint nominations for Jeff and Ann Vandermeer were not acceptable.
I have the opposite memory.
I’m nominating Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray together for Best Short Editors. I know Joshua contacted the Hugo admins to find out how they should be nominated as they’ve co-edited all four of the anthologies which make them eligible. When he got back to me, a week or so later, I didn’t ask if he got an answer I assumed he had.
Have I mentioned determining eligibility and how to fill out the ballot is hard?
@Paul Weimer: Oh yeah, The Shards of Heaven! That was already on my “no I’m not into historical stuff” list. 😉 I’ve read slightly mixed reviews, but overall it sounds good.
@Mark (Kitteh): I’d expect it to be split into two by Hugo Administrators if I had room on my ballot, or thrown out if I already had four other nominees. The category is Best Editor, singular after all – not Best Editorial Group.
(9) EBOOKS. I skimmed this, as it was rambly and I didn’t buy a lot of it. Plus, it was annoying that nearly all his gratuitous digs at Apple were inaccurate (e.g., Apple hasn’t used DRM for music in a long time), made up (e.g., claiming you don’t own your iPhone), and/or more accurately applied to other companies (e.g., who’s famous for removing ebooks from devices? Amazon, not Apple). Look, I get that it’s the in thing to diss Apple, but if you can’t be accurate and even-handed, you just have an axe to grind and lose me in a hurry. Ditto for handling anyone else that way, of course.
Tasha, if you haven’t mentioned that, I know I have. There seems to be too many spaces in some places and not enough in others.
And yeah, I know Joshua sent out an update to his kickstarter folks that he wanted to be nominated as him and Bray.
Yaaay!
As for I, Claudius…in my misspent youth, I would go over to my friend’s place and play Magic and get stoned. (Don’t do drugs, kids.) My friend had a very peculiar roommate who was obsessed with the I, Claudius miniseries, which means that it was constantly playing in the background. Six months of having that quietly soak into my chemical-addled brain meant that to this day, at random moments, I will hear Caligula start ranting about how he conquered the ocean and didn’t get a parade.
Said roommate was eventually fired from his job at the deli for making raw pre-rotisserie chickens act out scenes from the series during work hours.
RedWombat — sounds like a variant of “Electric Disco Chicken”, a short film in which finds a power cord coming out of the raw chicken carcase they’ve just brought home. It was a favorite at Boskone back when films came on actual film, but Googling suggests it’s no longer findable.
Possibly the oddest thing I’ve read related to Batman vs. Superman is this handy chart from The Economist graphing Batman’s estimated height and weight over the years.
Clear-y, like you’d expect:
http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=735
In that news snippet linked to, one of the talking heads says “clear-y” and the one who does the interview says something more like “clarr-y,” but Cleary herself doesn’t say her name in the interview.
When she does say it, though, it’s “clear-y.”
@Kendall I read the Shards of Heaven and found it disappointing. I read at least one reviewer who thought that the author started to set up some really interesting stuff and then wimped out in favor of a far more standard story, and I tend to agree. The first third of the book really grabbed me, but then it got sort of meh.
I really hope this is not a case of an editor or early readers pushing him away from something interestingly different. It’s possible he decided that following things to conclusions would make the Hidden History structure impossible.
Oddly, the book made me really hope Glen Cook writes more of his Instrumentalities series, which does NOT back down from the implications of its cosmology.
@alexvdl
The most innocent questions one asks… Poor Joshua hadn’t realized this year he and Patricia are eligible (or someone might nominate) until I asked based on the Temporally Out of Order Kickstarter if he’d edited 4+ anthologies. This led to the update on eligibility of stories as well. I’m such a troublemaker. 😉
[gods of the stalk, hear me!]
Back when I was a member of SHOT, the membership used to come with a subscription to American Heritage of Invention and Technology. In every issue, there would be an article about an ancient (usually 100+ years) piece of machinery that was still in use today. (Or yesterday, as the magazine itself has been dead for five years.) Invariably, the article would list some staggering figure for how much it would cost to replace said machine.
Mornard’s Law states a working piece of code will never be replaced. I suppose that’s true for computing machinery, too.
PRELUDE TO A BALLOT – I don’t know why I even clicked that link, because we have very different tastes, but she linked to an Iona Sharma story that I had somehow missed. So, yay.
Years ago, I was living in a foreign country and had just enough grasp of the language that I could understand about 30% of the words in children’s television programs. I, Claudius was shown once a week, in English. I’ve always been worried that the magic wouldn’t be so magical without that intense isolation, so I’ve never attempted to rewatch it.