(1) IT’S BIG. At Entertainment Weekly, “Jeff VanderMeer explains what it’s like to edit The Big Book of Science Fiction”.
During one part of our research, we even had to contact the Czech ambassador to the Philippines for intel on particular authors; in another life this man had been the editor of a Czech science-fiction magazine that, before the Wall came down, paid Western writers in items like books of surreal erotic photography. He had become an expert, due to his travels, on fiction in many countries. From him we received a flurry of photocopies and advice that will likely inform future projects. It’s a small world, but also a big, complex one, too.
(2) ENOUGH PI? NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory answers the question “How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?”
We posed this question to the director and chief engineer for NASA’s Dawn mission, Marc Rayman. Here’s what he said:
Thank you for your question! This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a question like this. In fact, it was posed many years ago by a sixth-grade science and space enthusiast who was later fortunate enough to earn a doctorate in physics and become involved in space exploration. His name was Marc Rayman.
To start, let me answer your question directly. For JPL’s highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let’s look at this a little more closely to understand why we don’t use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you present. Consider these examples:
- The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let’s say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don’t need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger….
(3) WHICH GHOST WROTE THE MOST? “Houdini manuscript ‘Cancer of Superstition’ divides opinion over Lovecraft, Eddy ghostwriting”. The Chicago Tribune has the story.
…Potter & Potter lists Lovecraft as the ghostwriter, in part citing “An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia” by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, a 2001 anthology of Lovecraft’s work. The book says, however, Houdini approached Lovecraft and Lovecraft’s fellow Providence, R.I., author C.M. Eddy Jr. “jointly to ghostwrite a full-scale book on superstition.”
But how much of “The Cancer of Superstition” was the work of Lovecraft vs. Eddy is up for debate.
Douglas A. Anderson, co-founder of Wormwoodiana, a blog dedicated to researching and discussing the work of Lovecraft and his peers, said one needs to look at “The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces,” a 1966 Lovecraft anthology edited by August Derleth that published a detailed outline and the project’s first chapter. Derleth, who had exchanged letters with Eddy prior to the book’s publication, listed Lovecraft as the author of the outline but Eddy as the author of the chapter….
(4) CASSIDY IN GALLERY SHOW. Kyle Cassidy’s photos from Toni Carr’s Geek Knits book will be part of an art show opening April 1 at the Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia. The book, subtitled Over 30 Projects for Fantasy Fanatics, Science Fiction Fiends, and Knitting Nerds, has been mentioned here in the Scroll before. Cassidy is known in sf for his photographs of fans taken at the Montreal Worldcon in 2009.
(5) LOSE THE RECUSE. Kevin Standlee says Cheryl Morgan ”Talked Me Into It”.
I am quite obviously eligible for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award for the stuff I write on this LJ plus a whole lot of writing elsewhere, possibly most notably on Mike Glyer’s File 770 news site. But as people were talking me up for a Hugo Award nomination, I was uneasy, given that I’m Chairman of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee and possibly the most visible member of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee. While I’m not required to recuse myself from consideration, I thought it possible that it would be unseemly and that I’d be considered using undue influence. But Cheryl Morgan wrote yesterday about this subject, and I found her argument persuasive. So if you should in fact think that my writing is award-worthy, don’t think that you’re throwing your vote away to mention me.
(6) INFLUENCE VS PERFORMANCE. Or as Cheryl Morgan said it in “Kevin and the Hugos”
My view on this is that it is one thing to have a high position and get nominated for something else (in my case being on the staff of Clarkesworld). It is quite another to have a high position and get nominated for doing that job. In my case, if my WSFS job was getting me votes for my Clarkesworld work, that could be construed as unfair. (I think it is silly to suggest that it was, and the Business Meeting agreed, but that’s not relevant here.) In Kevin’s case the job and the work are the same thing. So yes, having the job makes him noticed, but he’s being nominated for doing the job. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
(7) YOUTUBE STARS. Here’s a trailer for Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, which will be “available on all major digital platforms” on June 7.
(8) COME CORRECT. Adam-Troy Castro says “No, You Have Not Been Nominated For a Hugo This Year”.
Attention to a certain self-published author: no, you have not been nominated for a Hugo this year. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve made an honest mistake, have fallen prey to wishful thinking, or are actively lying, but in any event, you are wrong; just because some folks have filled out the name of your magnum opus on the online Hugo nomination form, doesn’t mean you are “nominated;” certainly not before the nomination period closes, this Thursday.
(9) IT’S GREAT TO BE A GENIUS OF COURSE. Kate Paulk holds forth on “The Problem of Being Too Good” at Mad Genius Club.
One of the things I learned was that in pretty much any creative endeavor the really good ones don’t look like they’re making any effort. They’re so good they make it look easy. They make it feel easy, and they appear to effortlessly produce the effect they’re aiming for, be it a gem of a musical performance or a story that’s a perfect or near perfect example of its art – and it’s so apparently effortless and clear that those of lesser understanding can too easily fail to see the work the author or musician or artist has carefully concealed behind the appearance of easy. That is why seeing the writer sweat is annoying.
Of course, this leads to those of lesser understanding (many of whom think they’re the bees knees and – to paraphrase Douglas Adams – the every other assorted insectile erogenous zone in existence) thinking that a book (or performance or whatever) that looks effortless actually is effortless and therefore is easy. Simply put, they mistake sweat and visible exertion for skill.
What this reminds me of is my favorite Robert Moore Williams quote. Williams was a self-admitted hack sf writer. He was leery of losing sales by being too literary. He said, “You have to stink ’em up just right.”
(10) WHERE THE ROCKS ARE. An amazing map of prehistoric stone structures in the United Kingdom can be found at http://m.megalithic.co.uk/asb_mapsquare.php.
This map of Britain and Ireland, is divided into 100 kilometre squares. Locations of prehistoric stone circles and stone rows are indicated by the red dots. Click on a grid square to see that map sheet in greater detail. Many of the pages have images and links to information elsewhere on the web, making this a master index of Britain and Ireland’s Prehistoric sites.
(11) MEOW WOW. “George R.R. Martin Spent $3.5 Million to Make This Sci-Fi Art Utopia a Reality” – at Vice.
Perhaps the only thing more disorienting than visiting the art collective Meow Wolf’s permanent art installation, the House of Eternal Return, is getting a Skype tour of the place, which is what I recently received. Labyrinthine and almost hallucinatory, the sprawling former bowling alley has been transformed to a freak-out art mecca, funded by $3.5 million from Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin and another $2.5 million from Kickstarter and other fundraising.
The 20,000-square-foot art space, the size of Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery, opened on Friday with a cavalcade of 5,500 visitors in the first three days, including Martin himself and Neil Gaiman. Described by 33-year-old CEO Vince Kadlubek as the “inside [of] a sci-fi novel,” the House of Eternal Return is many things: a psychedelic art space, a bar, an educational center, a ceramics studio, and an elaborate music venue (with a half school-bus upper deck), featuring a slew of dream-like elements such as black-light carpeting, a laser harp, pneumatic doors, and a 20-foot climbable lookout tower.
(12) COLE’S HEART. I was very impressed with Myke Cole’s contribution to “The Big Idea” feature at Whatever – but I didn’t want to pick an excerpt that would dilute the reading experience, so here is a comparatively bland quote…
When I did my Big Idea post for Gemini Cell, I straight up owned the PTSD allegory. Schweitzer’s undead status kept him permanently apart from the living. He was among them, but not of them, anymore. The resultant isolation was pretty much the same thing many returning veterans feel.
(13) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 31, 1969 — Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, published.
(14) SUPER BOOKS. Random House Books for Young Readers announced the acquisition of four DC Comics YA novels, with bestselling young adult authors: Wonder Woman will be written by Leigh Bardugo, Batman will be written by Marie Lu, Superman will be written by Matt de la Peña, and Catwoman will be written by Sarah J. Maas.
Wonder Woman will release first at the end of August 2017.
(15) CURSES VERSUS. “Superman And The Damage Done” at Birth.Movies.Death.
There have been other Supermans since, and while none have, in my opinion, reached the heights of Christopher Reeve, all have imparted a similar sense of decency, humbleness and grace. From Brandon Routh to various animated incarnations, children growing up over the past 40 years have found new Supermans they could look to as inspirational models of how heroes act.
But what do the children of today have? Warner Bros, custodian of the Superman legacy, has handed the keys of the character over to Zack Snyder, a filmmaker who has shown he feels nothing but contempt for the character. In doing so they have opened the character to an ugly new interpretation, one that devalues the simple heroism of Superman and turns the decent, graceful character into a mean, nasty force of brutish strength.
Where Superman was originally intended as a hopeful view of strength wielded with responsibility, Snyder presents him as a view of strength as constant destructive force; where Christopher Reeve’s Superman would often float and flit away, Snyder’s version explodes like a rocket at all times, creating sonic booms above city centers in fits of pique, such as after his scene of moping on Lois Lane’s Washington DC hotel balcony. He is a constant weapon of destruction, often smashing concrete when he comes to earth. There are no soft landings for this Superman.
(16) CROWD PLEASER. “SciFi Author Alan Dean Foster Draws Largest Science Speaker Series Crowd in Prescott Campus History” reports the Embry-Riddle Newsroom.
Hundreds of students, staff and faculty filled the AC-1 lecture hall to capacity to hear internationally acclaimed science fiction author Alan Dean Foster talk about “Science in Science Fiction” as part of the College of Arts and Science Speaker Series last Friday.
Foster has written over 100 novels but is best known for authoring the novel versions of many science fiction films including “Star Wars”, the first three Alien films, “The Chronicles of Riddick”, “Star Trek”, “Terminator: Salvation”, and two Transformers films.
Foster believes science is the foundation of science fiction. If the work is not grounded in science then it’s not science fiction, it is fantasy or science fantasy.
“Science fiction sets you on other worlds where you have to create entire environments. Maybe it’s a world with seven different layers or an entirely frozen world. You have to look at a problem and say what’s the best solution here, even if it’s not been created yet,” said Foster. “That solution should still be reasonable. As an author of science fiction, and especially with novel adaptations from movies, I try to fix the science as best as I can. Sometimes they let me and sometimes they don’t.”
(17) BREAKING GAME SHOW NEWS. The March 31 episode of Jeopardy! had a Hugo Award-Winning Novels category – but I haven’t found out what the titles were yet.
(18) SAD NUMBERS. Brandon Kempner spends the last voting day “Estimating the 2016 Hugo Nominations, Part 4” at Chaos Horizon.
What we do know, though, is that last nomination season the Sad Puppies were able to drive between 100-200 votes to the Hugos in most categories, and the their numbers likely grew in the finally voting stage. I estimated 450. All those voters are eligible to nominate again; if you figured the Sad Puppies doubled from the nomination stage in 2015 to now, they’d be able to bring 200-400 votes to the table. Then again, their votes might be diffused over the longer list; some Sad Puppies might abandon the list completely; some Sad Puppies might become Rabid Puppies, and so forth into confusion.
When you do predictive modelling, almost nothing good comes from showing how the sausage is made. Most modelling hides behind the mathematics (statistical mathematics forces you to make all sorts of assumptions as well, they’re just buried in the formulas, such as “I assume the responses are distributed along a normal curve”) or black box the whole thing since people only care about the results. Black boxing is probably the smart move as it prevents criticism. Chaos Horizon doesn’t work that way.
So, I need some sort of decay curve of the 10 Sad Puppy recommendations to run through my model. What I decided to go with is treating the Sad Puppy list as a poll showing the relative popularity of the novels. That worked pretty well in predicting the Nebulas. Here’s that chart, listing how many votes each Sad Puppy received, as well as the relative % compared to the top vote getter.
(19) FROM TEARS TO CHEERS. Dave Hogg is basically a happy voter tonight.
Worst #HugoAwards nomination dilemma: which Doctor Who episode to nominate for Short Form.
— Dave Hogg ???? (@davehogg) April 1, 2016
Best part of #HugoAwards nominating? The number of times I can nominate something great *and* know the creator.
— Dave Hogg ???? (@davehogg) April 1, 2016
(20) NOT AN APRIL FOOL? From the Official Gmail Blog: “Introducing Gmail Mic Drop”.
Friends and family have been testing Gmail Mic Drop for months, and the response so far has been awesome:
- “Sending email is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about people responding!”
- “Mic Drop is a huge improvement over Mute! I can finally let everyone know I’m just not interested.”
- “My team solves problems so much faster with Mic Drop. In fact, we stopped talking to each other entirely!”
Gmail Mic Drop is launching first on the web, but mobile updates are on the way. So stay tuned, and stay saucy.
Will R. asks me, “Will you be introducing a similar feature? It would make the flounce a whole lot easier.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, A Wee Green Man, Daniel Dern, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Swanwick, Will R., Rich Lynch, and Reed Andrus for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day StephenfromOttawa.]
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April Fool First!
(5) LOSE THE RECUSE.
(6) INFLUENCE VS PERFORMANCE.
There is no doubt that Kevin Standlee is a treasure.
(9) IT’S GREAT TO BE A GENIUS OF COURSE.
Paulk’s prose doesn’t read effortless to me.
(12) COLE’S HEART.
That got it added to my Mt. TBR.
(16) CROWD PLEASER.
I’ll always have a soft spot for his Spellsinger series.
ETA: Posted from the time zone where it’s nearly April the SECOND! (A mere FIVE hours to go)
15) Echoes how I feel. I’m a marvel guy so these last two movies only annoy me.
I’ve decided against giving them money for bvs, and after the news* that literally every joke in suicide squad was in the trailer I think I’ll keep my money on that one too.
*perhaps rumor would be a better phrase, but considering I’m willing to believe it also shows something
(9) Dave Freer’s prose suffers in a similar way: Dave layers so much meaning into something that looks simple and easy to follow that people who think they know Literature dismiss his work as plain and low-brow (and miss the devastating satires, the gentle affection, and all the other little goodies Dave buries in his works).
HAHAHAHAHAHA. 😆
Oh, Freer’s prose suffers all right. As does anyone who reads it. His prose suffers from incoherency and irrationality. It is anything but “simple and easy to follow” — it’s convoluted and utterly unintelligible.
That Paulk regards Freer’s writing as excellent — well, if I didn’t already know it from reading her posts, that would tell me all I need to know about Paulk’s skills as a writer.
I swear, the Puppies are an inadvertent comedy troupe.
April first fifth
(18) SAD NUMBERS
And Brandon Kempner still hasn’t figured out the difference between Hugo nominators and Hugo voters.
Seriously, dude — if you can’t get even such a simple thing right, give it up.
Kevin for President!
JJ:
While Freer is horrible as a blogger, I have no idea how he is as a writer. Maybe he tries to be more professional. 😛
(17) BREAKING GAME SHOW NEWS. I want a list of the clues! And a separate list of answers, so I can test myself. Wow, what a surprising (to me, anyway) category.
In other news: Anyone remember Mad Libs? Well, there’s a Star Trek Mad Libs coming out in a few days. What the hey! 🙂
Pi^2’th or some number beyond that….
(9) to quote Type O Negative “Don’t mistake lack of talent for genius”
BTW it looks like Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway is (going to be) $9.99? What the heck, that’s a ton for a novella; do all Tor.com novellas start out over-priced and drop later on? I was thinking it’d be nice to pick up, but, uh, I’ll wait.
I just checked a few from the Fall, and they’re $2.99 (like Binti, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Cornell’s excellent novella). Hmm.
ETA: I don’t believe everything should be dirt cheap or free, despite mentioning ebook sales here periodically. I was just really surprised at the price, which seems like what a full novel would cost. OTOH, it looks good. 😉
@Kendall: (EHaD)
Looks like I did myself a favor by preordering it when it briefly dipped to $2.99… and I did share the news here, so I tried to get the word out.
16)…and here I thought that guy was best known for his Pip and Flinx, Icerigger and Spellsinger series, not to mention the Humanx Commonwealth and….
@Steve:
I certainly knew ADF first as a noveliser, and only later saw his original fiction.
Re the Robin Moore Williams quote – it reminded me of one attributed to Laurence James, but I can’t remember which aspiring writer he said it to: “The trouble is, you keep trying to write deathless prose. You should write lifeless prose, like me.”
::tickbox::
Re: 10. Now this ties into my love of cartography AND ancient history.
Re Robin More Williams. Isn’t there a quote about Mark Twain saying he wanted his books not to be like wine, but like water becaus everyone drinks water?
Re: Jeopardy!. Ironically, Double Jeopardy! also had the category “Pup Quiz” in addition to “Hugo Award Winning Novels”. Clues were (answers in the following post):
400: J.K. Rowling won in 2001 for this novel partly about an object full of flames. [first contestant to buzz in got it]
800: This author’s 5 Hugo-winning novels in “Farmer in the Sky” and “Starship Troopers”. [No one buzzed in]
1200: Frederik Pohl’s 1978 winner “Gateway” is about an abandoned alien base “formed around” one of these space rocks. [first contestant got it right. As a side note, many years ago Fred’s same named son was a researcher [and possibly writer; don’t know if he every moved over to that] on J!]
1600: This author won twice in a row in the 1980s, for “Speaker for the Dead” & “Ender’s Game”. [first contestant got it. After the 1200, they abandoned the category and didn’t return until this and the 2000 were the last two clues on the board]
2000: A new planet’s appearance wreaks havoc on Earth in the 1965 winner named for what “planet” means in Greek. [no one buzzed in. Scores for this final clue of the round were 11K, 11K, and 10.4K, so no surprise no one would take a chance on it].
@Bob @kendall
That’s got to be a mistake, right? All of the other TOR novellas have been (for e-books, just $2.99). Hmmm.
And the correct responses were:
400: What is Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire?
800: Who is Robert Heinlein?
1200: What is an asteroid?
1600: Who is Orson Scott Card?
2000: What is The Wanderer (by Fritz Leiber. Yeah, I had to look it up too).
Asimov talked about the “stained glass” and “clear glass” approaches to writing in his autobiography.
[tick the box]
J! has started doing a thing called J6! where you can play the 6th clue in each category (an extra one in case something goes wrong when playing a clue so they can toss out the problem clue and sub in the spare). Alas, it seems to can only access it for today, and I didn’t try to look at it prior to it being 4/1 so I don’t know what the spare Hugo clue was.
@Tom
Hunh, “The Wanderer” IS fairly obscure for the general Jeopardy contestant. I am surprised no one got the Heinlein, though.
Hey, I can see The Wanderer on my bookshelves from here!
:: goes to take a photograph so as to prove it ::
:: remembers it’s the edition with the bare-breasted purple and yellow catgirl on the cover ::
:: decides to ask people just to take his word for it ::
I have never read The Wanderer, or even consciously heard of it. Surprised though that no-one knew the etymology of planet.
In all honesty, Nick, unless you have a particular thing for purple and yellow catgirls, you haven’t missed much.
I wouldn’t actually suggest reading The Wanderer, but if you have it’s a good book to keep in mind when talk turns to the immense honour and prestige of the Hugo awards.
1964 wasn’t a particularly strong year for SF novels; the other three Best Novel nominees for the 1965 Hugo were
John Brunner, The Whole Man,
Edgar Pangborn, Davy ,
Cordwainer Smith, The Planet Buyer (also known as The Boy Who Bought Old Earth)
The only one I’ve even heard of is Davy (admittedly, not a Cordwainer Smith fan, so I don’t know if that particular work is considered significant among those who do read him). Some years, it’s just not a strong field (I feel this way about at least one year from this decade other than last year; I don’t think X is a particularly significant winner that’ll be long remembered, but then I also think nothing else on the ballot was at that level either).
@Rob Thornton: Asimov is undoubtedly great but he missed a category: broken glass.
What Steve said. I have read The Wanderer, with only vague memories of it; but the etymological reference was a dead giveaway.
@JJ
Kempner approach can be debated, but he takes into account the difference in turnout between nomination and final vote. It is even a variable in his last few posts.
The Wanderer is a really good book. If you have a spare copy “with the bare-breasted purple and yellow catgirl on the cover”, let me know.
As for the Heinlein question, probably people were shaking their heads over the “five Hugos” and the “Farmer in the Sky” part. I know it made me pause, till I remembered filling an entire retro Hugo category with Heinlein stories yesterday. (One might not be eligible. I’d have to check. But I didn’t remember anything else that stood out.)
It’s better known as half of his novel Norstrilia. Not read the Brunner, but The Planet Buyer would be my pick of the others.
(Posted from 6979, sometime in the middle of the Instrumentality of Mankind timeline.)
Actually, I think 1964 was a banner year for sf novels. Everything on the ballot is a bona fide classic in my opinion, especially Davy and The Planet Buyer (better known in its combined version with The Underpeople as Norstrilia). The Wanderer was perhaps not Leiber’s best novel, but I think was more of a career award.
An image search for The Wanderer Leiber* shows several different covers featuring catgirls. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more specific.
*If you don’t include Leiber, you mainly get the Wanderer above the Sea and Fog/Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer or homages to it.
Of course the catgirl subplot was ludicrous even for 1964, but The Wanderer was by no means a bad book.
Jack Lint: An image search for The Wanderer Leiber shows several different covers featuring catgirls. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more specific.
I think they’re referring to (very slightly NSFW) this one — although the French version gives it pretty close competition.
De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but, in my opinion at least, The Wanderer has some good ideas, but largely fails to develop them, being hampered by an over-large collection of characters dispersed around several narrative strands, most of which don’t actually go anywhere or accomplish anything. (And too many of the characters fall into the “odious comic relief” category for me to be comfortable with them.)
The plot, basically, can be summed up as “a new planet appears in the sky, and then stuff happens, most of it bad”. We’re given an explanation, and a rather gloomy picture of the state of the galaxy (by the purple and yellow catgirl), and then there is a shoot-out between the new planet and a second new planet, which nobody in any of the plot strands can influence one way or the other, and then it all sort of comes to a stop. The end.
It may be my own personal prejudices speaking, but I don’t much care for that messy and unstructured a plot. (I didn’t put The Galaxy Game on my Hugo nominations, for much the same reason – and I think Karen Lord is a better writer than Leiber overall.)
@JJ: at least the naked catgirl on the French cover looks cheerful. The one on my Penguin cover is one grumpy-looking kitty. “YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS TO GIVE ME BACK MY UNDIES, MONKEY, OR THERE’S GONNA BE TROUBLE!”
I’m guessing the “bare-breasted purple and yellow catgirl” cover is the later Penguin edition that shows up in the first few image search results. The edition I remember from my mother’s books was the earlier Penguin, with an abstract design.
It’s been a long time since I read The Wanderer, but I remember it as mostly boring and occasionally silly – I don’t think it’s controversial to call it the weakest book on that 1965 shortlist. And that’s OK. It’s entirely in the spirit of the Hugos to award a weak book from a beloved author. I just think it’s worth remembering the award is as much about the fandom as the merits of the book.
Well, “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” is a world-famous painting (which I’ve seen in the flesh – it’s in Hamburg), while “The Wanderer” is one of Fritz Leiber’s more obscure works, Hugo win notwithstanding.
Considering that Casper David Friedrich is remembered as the quintessential romantic artist these days, a lot of his works have a certain fantastic air. “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” is definitely one of them, as are “Das Eismeer” (Sea of Ice) and of course, the wonderfully gothic “Die Abtei im Eichenwald” (The Abbey in the Oakwood).
I think my copy of The Wanderer is one of the few editions that doesn’t have the cat girl on the cover. Instead it has a ship and a tidal wave.
My Wanderer (which I admit I haven’t read) is the 1983 TOR edition (with a big JIM BAEN PRESENTS in the opening pages). There’s a cat head on the cover, but without reading the book (or the comment thread here) I wouldn’t have know that it was a cat girl.
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/3/37/THWNDRRSPF1983.jpg
April Fifth!
(9) I was lucky enough to see Professor Hokum W. Jeebs in a PBS special on one-man bands (featuring two or three good single-performer orchestras and a couple of novelty fillers of varying worths). He was doing a number on his pedal piano (the kind that you can pedal around the stage as you play it), and at one point, told the audience, “And now, I will make it look hard.” He grunted, made faces, and displayed outward signs of stress. It was actually a pretty good lesson in performance dynamics.
JJ
“Immortality is a pain in the ass.” —Kilgore Trout
Cora Buhlert
The first two things I thought of regarding “The Wanderer” were Schubert (both the Wanderer Fantasy and the song of the same name) and the epic poem.
Mr. Mxyzpxlltk
ps: Schadenfrood is when the suffering of others makes you hoopy.
I notice that the JPL answer on Pi doesn’t get into the fact that once you’re dealing with a circle the size of the solar system the relativistic effects of non-flat spacetime ought to have more of an impact on the length of your “circle” (or whatever corresponds to a circle that size as a geodesic corresponds to a straight line in whatever variable curvature of space is involved) than even the level of variation he cites with 15 decimal places.
re Wanderer:
That was a furry urban fantasy cover (a contorted pose no actual living being could strike) before its time.
“Every Heart a Doorway” is probably $9.99 because it is coming out in hardcover instead of the general paperback. So the price is on par with “A Slow Regard of Silent Things by Rothfuss”, which is the same length.
THE CABINET OF DR. SEUSS
If Mike really wanted to April Fool people, he could set up his Hugo thread so that it accepts your comments, and then when you hit enter, it all goes blank. Get it? GET IT??
This is just to say
I have eaten the Hugos
That you were saving
From destruction
Forgive me
They were just sitting there
Such sweetness
Such noms
Worse yet, as I recently learned, Pi, nice as it is, may be only half as good as Tau.
Re: Every Heart a Doorway
The print release is a hardback priced at 17.99 (Most, if not all of the others have been paperbacks), so that likely has an influence on its initial ebook price point. I think it is the first of the Tor novella line I’ve seen on a Barnes and Noble new Science Fiction and Fantasy shelf.
I read it as an ARC via Netgalley and it is quite good and will be a contender for my Hugo list next year.