(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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I, too, have the ship and the tidal wave on my copy of The Wanderer.
I liked it a lot for a variety of reasons.
I’m sure it was partly my being fifteen or so when I got it. Lots of sex of various unusual sorts, more plausible than the average fanfic. I also liked and still like a lot of what the rest of you who’ve commented didn’t. I enjoyed the way the story moved from character to character and place to place. (I’m not sure what big SF novel did that before The Wanderer, especially over a short period of time.) I enjoyed how some of those stories came to strange and abrupt ends. And I especially liked that humanity was just innocent bystanders for a fight between two alien groups not too concerned with us one way or another. Such a likely First Contact story!
It’s not my favorite Leiber novel, but as Leiber himself said of Heinlein, Leiber at his worst is more interesting than most writers at their best.
I am really, really sorry that I didn’t realise that Kevin Standlee could be nominated; if I had, I would. Kevin has been a rock which the swirling turbulence hasn’t moved, and I am in awe of his kind good sense, at a time when kind good sense is both desperately needed and hard to come by.
It’s not a Rocket, but the Stevie Award for Contributions Above and Beyond the Call of Duty has its first honoured recipient, along with my thanks.
I haven’t re-read The Whole Man in decades, but I really loved it when I was young. Through the mists of memory, I think it much better than “The Wanderer”. I read the British edition, under the title “Telepathist”.
Hampus Eckerman on March 31, 2016 at 11:59 pm said:
Thank you for the endorsement. 🙂
I will be participating in the real-world American Presidential political process tomorrow, as one of the elected delegates to the Lyon County (Nevada) Democratic Convention, where they will select the county’s delegates to the Nevada State Convention in May. I will not be standing for a state delegate position, however, because the convention is in Las Vegas (which is a long way from where I live; Nevada is big) and I do not think I can afford another trip, given that I’ve planned trips to Westercon (Portland OR) and Worldcon (Kansas City) this year. And I did turn down the opportunity to pre-qualify for one of Nevada’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention, in no small part because, as I wrote about yesterday, the hotel rooms are $500/night. (And you think Worldcons are expensive!) Maybe if Westercon and Worldcon weren’t fixed items on my travel, but in any event I don’t think I’d enjoy the DNC; unlike the Worldcon Business Meeting, everything is stage-managed in advance and the individual delegates have relatively little input into the process.
@Kevin Standlee
Have fun!
I went to the National Convention in Chicago in 1996, but this year I was content just to chair my local precinct caucus here in Seattle. Instead of the usual dozen or so people, we had 86, and that was enough excitement for me. (My neighborhood has had a lot of new construction since the lines were last drawn.) I thought about you when I conducted a serpentine vote at one point.
(2) “How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?”
All of them!
I’m looking forward to seeing the collation of the Hugo nominee lists in the other thread here.
The which I’m not posting in, hoping, no doubt in vain, to avoid drift.
An April Fools day post from Connie Willis for your perusal:
http://azsf.net/cwblog/?p=164
@2: what matters is not the error on a single calculation, but the cumulative error after repeatedly plugging an answer into another calculation. (Lesson from 18 years coding MCAD, where everything was in fact done to the proverbial 19 decimal places.) I suppose that’s more subtlety than they want on a general-interest blog.
@9: cf Jubal Harshaw (Heinlein’s self-representative) in Stranger in a Strange Land: “You have to give an editor something to change. Once they piss on it, they like the flavor better, so they buy it.”
@5@6: IIRC, George Flynn recused himself in 1980 (for Voice of the Lobster), and Hal Clement detached himself from the 1971 Worldcon committee to avoid questions about his eligibility. (This is recollection without documentation; I hope somebody will correct this if I’m not precise.) However, those were before walling off Hugo processing from the rest of the Worldcon became formalized.
@Galloway: you never read The Wanderer? Ahhh, you young whippersnappers don’t remember when there was so little good new SF that we had to read all the old stuff.
I’m not sure that Hugo year was weak in context; I think the field has improved substantially since then. Some of my fondness for the Lieber may come from the sex (I was 14), but I also remember trenchant comments about somebody living too much in his reflections. It’s true he was following a lot of threads, and without as much point as Brunner did a few years later in Stand on Zanzibar; I have this sneaking feeling he was trying to imitate a mundane form for sales purposes but don’t know enough of the mundane fiction of the time to be sure. cf also The Clone (Thomas and Wilhelm), which ISFDB says came out in 12/65; when were “disaster novels” popular?
KipW: AAUUGGHH!
@Hampus Eckerman:
Baen.com has a short story by Freer up. It seems competently enough put together and is moderately entertaining. I don’t recall anything about it that makes me think underappreciated grand genius writer either though.
I am pleased to report that the ending of ERASED did not suck. It’s easily going to be on my list of Hugo-worthy anime for the year. Beat the crowds and check it out now! (Depending on your location and preferred language, you may be able to watch it at Crunchyroll, Daisuki, AnimeLab, Wakanim, and/or pepperment anime.)
@ Paul Weimer
As others have noted, this is one of that category of Jeopardy clue where the overt category and context are irrelevant (and distracting). All you’d need to know to get the answer right is that “planet” is Greek for “wanderer”.
There are a lot of Jeopardy clues that have that sort of structure — the trick is recognizing them quickly enough that you don’t get slowed down by trying to know the answer the hard way.
Hmmm, apart from the ordinary book signings we could have Kevin signing business meeting protocols…
@Petréa Mitchell:
I appreciate the report! I’m wary of anime endings because sometimes they fail to stick the landing so hard that they bounce away into oblivion. *glares at Wolf’s Rain*
@Petréa Mitchell,
Agreed! Erased was, overall, awesome. An interesting story, interesting characters that I cared about, twists and turns that made sense and brought the story forward, avoided too-easy pitfalls, including having an ending that was satisfying.
(And, pleasantly, avoiding a lot of the “typical anime” clichés as well – using it instead simply as an excellent medium for the telling of the story.)
Steve Davidson: Yes, I still think of him as the creator of Pip and Flinx. I’m glad he’s had such success with tie-ins, though.
Chip Hitchcock: I recused myself when I chaired the 1996 Worldcon — and put myself ON the Hugo admin subcommittee to seal the deal.
@Tom Galloway: Thanks for the Jeopardy! info! The last is obscure to me (I didn’t know it); the 1200 one is one anyone could just guess, so I’m not sure it’s even a good question. No one got the Heinlein?!
@JJ: Yipes, those The Wanderer covers are horrendous. Thanks?!
@Rev. Bob re. EHaD: Gak, I either missed that or forgot to preorder it. Or I wanted to wait to read a sample (more likely) – clearly a mistake on my part!
@REM & @Lee Whiteside: A lot of the Tor.com novellas have print versions, no? But I guess your explanations for the price make sense. It’s a drag, since this started as a “hey e-novellas, cool” thing, but it’s morphing into a “hey overpriced small books” thing. This may be the only time where I’m grumpy at the pricing of the ebook being related to the print; usually I totally get that! Oh well, I’ll stop whining about it. 😉 I have other things to read, so I can wait (or buy it, if I decide I just! can’t! wait!). Thanks.
I think of “The Wanderer” as one of three Hugo Best Novel Winners that is so bad that it damages the reputation of the awards. I’ve read all the best-novel winners, but there were only three that were so bad I wondered how they ever got published, much less won awards. The other two are “They’d Rather be Right” and “Hominids.” (I might think otherwise if I’d read them in my teens rather than my 50s, of course.)
Others have had the same opinion about The Wanderer:
Sorry, Fritz Leiber — The Wanderer Is Terrible, by Josh Wimmer
Why on earth did Fritz Leiber win the Hugo?, by Sam Jordison
On the other hand, just looking through the list of winners over the years is a good way to make yourself feel pretty good about the awards. There are an awful lot of really wonderful stories on that list.
I am sitting here, thinking the terrible phrase, Protocols of the Elders of Fandom, and blaming Hampus for my poor moral discipline. That’s how low we’ve sunk, here in 8608.
@Lis Carey
I’ll bet that includes “the Butt Libel.” 🙂
In the hope that it is clear to people who may not understand the various entities involved:
Administration of the 2016 Hugo Awards is the exclusive responsibility of the Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee (HASC) established by the current Worldcon, MidAmeriCon II. All of the people on that Subcommittee are ineligible for the current Hugo Awards, by provision of the WSFS Constitution. (However, being on a HASC in one year does not disqualify you from eligibility in a subsequent year. For example, OGH and File 770 are eligible this year for Best Fan Writer and Best Fanzine, respectively, despite him being on a HASC some years ago.)
I am not a member of this year’s Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee. I have tried, in all of my responses for opinions regarding eligibility, to defer to the current HASC’s decisions as final. (HASC’s have not always ruled the way I would have done had I been the one making the call.)
I am a minor member of the MidAmeriCon II convention staff, being a member of the WSFS Business Meeting staff reporting to Lisa Hayes, who in turn reports to the WSFS BM area head, Jared Dashoff.
I am Chairman of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, which holds the WSFS service marks (including “Hugo Award”) on behalf of WSFS. This includes being Chairman of Worldcon Intellectual Property, the California non-profit, tax-exempt corporation set up to hold the WSFS service marks primarily for the purpose of registering them outside of the USA, due to the difficulty that other countries have understanding unincorporated associations. (Our registration of various WSFS marks within the EU is in progress.) However, being the manager of the service marks doesn’t mean you get to decide who wins Hugo Awards, or even pick the people who administer them.
I’m a member of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, and probably its most visible member, inasmuch as nowadays I write most of the material that appears on the Hugo Awards web site, including the post I put up this morning about the close of nominations and the scheduled announcement of the shortlists. It is perhaps understandable that some people assume that those of us who manage TheHugoAwards.org are actually the people who count the votes, determine eligibility, and otherwise run the awards, but that’s not the case. Most of the time, we learn about results about the same way everyone else does, that is, when the current Worldcon announces them. Our insider information is rather limited.
So I hope people understand that while I’m a Worldcon “insider” due to piles of experience (as is OGH, who, like me, is a past Worldcon chair and past Hugo Awards Administrator) and know a whole lot about how the rules work, I’m not one of those people actually making the technical decisions about the Hugo Awards this year. And that suits me just fine.
I shall continue to decrease morale with this old video of a steampunk duel.
“Pixelscrolls of the Learned Filers of Fan…”
NAH
Just… NAH.
The talk about the number of decimal places needed for various things reminds me that my then-boss (this was about 10 years ago) said that 6 decimal places on a GPS location will put you within six inches of the point. We used 8 places….
It’s 8608: shouldn’t we all have built-in locators by now?
Sadly, it looks as if my last nominations didn’t go through, but the vast majority did. I think maybe the system just couldn’t handle everything in the last few hours.
On a more cheerful note I think I have found the most unlikely spin-off from SF/F it is possible to imagine; Louis Vitton are selling leather hand/wrist wraps as cutting edge fashion inspired by anime.
Naturally they cost a fortune, but fortunately I did leather wrist and hand wraps years ago, so if anyone has a burning desire for one, without the necessary big bucks, I could probably dig some out from wherever I have them stashed, though memory does tend to fade somewhat by the time you reach 8608…
I still can’t work out what is going on with the Glamorist Histories prank fanfic, but reading Mary Robinette Kowal on twitter has me giggling insanely
It starts here
Curious, I googled to see what “Erased” was, and learned (re-learned) it is the English name for Boku Dake ga Inai Machi. I haven’t seen the anime, so I don’t know how it differs from the manga, but I read chapters 1-35 of the manga a couple of months back and just last week checked for updates and found and read chapters 36-44. I was initially pretty disappointed in the last couple of volumes because bs zl rkcrpgngvbaf–V unq nffhzrq gung, cbfg-pbzn, ur jbhyq qb nabgure whzc onpx gb puvyqubbq gb fgbc gur nhgb penfu sebz unccravat. V xrcg jnvgvat sbe vg gb unccra nyernql, qnzzvg! naq gubhtug nyy fgbel qhevat gung vagreiny jnf “jnfgrq.” Jura vg svanyyl svavfurq naq gurer jrer ab zber onpxjneqf whzcf, V errinyhngrq gur raqvat nf “bxnl”–ohg vg fgvyy unq ceboyrzf. Juvyr guerr yvirf jrer fnirq ol uvf vagreiragvba, gurer jrer n ybg zber ivpgvzf jub pbhyq unir orra fnirq vs ur pbhyq unir qbar bar zber whzc, vqragvsvrq gur xvyyre, naq tbg uvz neerfgrq. Naq rira gubhtu nethnoyl gur zbgure vf orggre bss abg fgnoorq gb qrngu, univat gb fvg guebhtu 15 lrnef bs qrnyvat jvgu ure fba’f pbzn rirel qnl jnf njshyyl hasnve gb ure. Fb gur raqvat vf uncclvfu–ohg vg pbhyq unir orra unccvre.
@Kendall All of the tor.com novellas have been available as ebooks, but were not getting the mass distribution. This may be the first one getting the big push due to it being Seanan and being in hardcover. It will be interesting to see how it does.
I think t hey should have done something to differentiate the tor.com fiction being published as ebook and print from the free fiction made available online on the tor.com website. Note that there have also been several works published first free online at the tor.com website that later were then published elsewhere as limited editions (Charlie Stross’ Equoid” is one).
The talk about the number of decimal places needed for various things reminds me that my then-boss (this was about 10 years ago) said that 6 decimal places on a GPS location will put you within six inches of the point. We used 8 places….
Better push it up to 12 then – we don’t want one of those Y2K situations when we roll out nanotechnology…
Fritz Leiber.
You know, I totally understand the love people direct toward Robert Heinlein.
And I read my fair share of Heinlein’s juveniles.
He and Andre Norton filled in uncounted hours of my formative years.
But fifty or so years on, Fritz Leiber remains closer to my heart.
Conjure Wife, The Big Time, and Our Lady of Darkness survive, for me, in a way that nothing of Heinlein’s has.
The Wanderer, admittedly, maybe not so much so.
But I think Ghostbird’s analysis is on point:
Ghostbird on April 1, 2016 at 6:08 am said:
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.
This seems to me to be both true, and perfectly okay.
Having just completed my first nomination form (and that was huge) I find my perspective on the inner mechanics of nominating has somewhat changed.
Going into it, I had assumed nominating work to be a simple matter: order the things you’ve read in terms of quality, take first five.
Well, not so much.
On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything I nominated isn’t award quality.
There are no dogs – sad, rabid, or merely figures of speech – among my nominations.
Heck, for all I know there may be some overlap with the yappy lists, since I did not consider their choices at all in making my own.
But when confronted with my list of possibie nominees, all of which had made it over the bar in terms of quality, other factors come into play.
For one thing, the longer list of works read didn’t fall neatly into a discernible order of quality.
Rather, out of the larger mass of things bookmarked as Good Stuff, a smaller number made it over the final bar of Wow This is Really Good.
At that point, sorting out five wasn’t a simple matter of picking the “best” five, because they were all fine works, but differently fine.
After all, “best” is a rather fraught quality; they were all best in some respect.
So elements beyond just the stories themselves started making the difference.
Things like simply the flavor of a work, my own irrational preferences for some kinds of narratives over others, or my own impression – or lack thereof – the author.
So, yeah, I can understand how fans could end up voting The Wanderer as the best novel of its year.
(Sometimes love makes you do strange things.)
Chip, unless The Wanderer came out in the last three weeks or so of 1964, I would’ve been 3 when it did so. And while I did figure out the whole reading thing sometime that year, based on a particular incident* it would’ve been September or later, and so I wouldn’t have had much time to get around to it then. Particularly given the competition from Dr. Seuss & Co.
*My parents discovered I could read when I read something out of the newspaper to them. They confirmed that neither had previously read it to me, tested me on some definitely never read to me before material, and apparently didn’t think more of it (other than perhaps “Oh, that’s why he’s not been pestering us to read to him whenever he’s awake.”
Then a few days later, my mother got a frantic call from my nursery school, asking if she knew I could read. She said yes, and was told that she should’ve let the school know about it. Seems they’d pinned progress reports to all our shirts to take home, and I’d been taking advantage of this new material to read all of them. Out loud. Thus I probably didn’t figure out reading until school had started in September.
@Chip Hitchcock: I’m not sure there is an earlier SFnal example of that big multiple-viewpoint disaster novel form. George R. Stewart had some non-SF that’s similar.
Well, I “finished” writing the novel (by which I mean that I have stopped writing it at a point where I am willing to submit it around … although should I have introduced the main characters in the opposite order? was that one description awkwardly expository? did I need to explicitly disclose that thing about the heartbeats? AAAAAAAAAA let it go for now let it all go …)
Anyway, I figure that means I can let myself post again, so now it’s time to microreview some of the reading I’ve been doing lately! Woot!
Covenant’s End, by Ari Marmell. I don’t think Marmell has ever quite lived up to the promise of his debut novel, The Conqueror’s Shadow. Nonetheless, Thief’s Covenant, the first book in this YA adventure series about a thief and her personal god, was a fun book with an engaging main character. The subsequent books, however, have each been a little less memorable, and this fourth and final installment had such a straightforward A to B to C plot that it felt more like it was tying up loose ends than anything else. I’d finish the series if you got up to this point, but only to find out how those loose ends get tied.
All The Birds In The Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. This book, however, I can give a thumbs up. A story about the intertwined lives of a witch and a scientist, it grapples with both personal questions of scorn and isolation, and big questions about the world and the place of people in it. The thumbs up is mainly for the two main characters, their lives and their feelings, and that is the bulk of the book. The overall plot, however, ends on a note I found a little bit of a letdown. I didn’t mind that it was ambiguous, that was very much in keeping with the tone of the book. It did give me a slight, “Oh … that’s it?” feeling, however, which I wish it hadn’t. Nonetheless, a solid book, written with lovely prose and featuring insightful character work.
Truthwitch, by Susan Dennard. I … really wanted to like this book. Epic fantasy with a strong female friendship at its center? Sounds great! But, it never grabbed me, because it never gave me a reason to care about these characters. Starting in the middle of the action with no explanation of the world is something I greatly enjoy and approve of, but in this case showing me these characters only at atypical moments meant I never saw them at their best. Being told that one character is a careful planner doesn’t mean much when she’s never given time to concoct a careful plan. The result was that one character came off kind of mean, one character came off as a nonentity, important characters who were key to moving the plot were described but seldom or never seen, and I ultimately just didn’t care.
@Lauowolf – Now you understand….
Understanding is good.
Welcome to the “secret cabal”.
Lee Whiteside on April 1, 2016 at 12:33 pm said:
@Lauowolf – Now you understand….
Understanding is good.
Welcome to the “secret cabal”.
So where’s my magic decoder ring?
How am I supposed to follow my super sekrit SJW orders if I can’t convert all this silly book discussion into proper instructions?
I’ll just have to wait until the cat tells me what to do.
Regarding the new McGuire novella — I think it also has interior art in addition to the cover art, so they are going for a high end presentation. I’m not fond of the price point, but the sample chapters are very good.
Man, I need to go catch up with ERASED some time. I put anime on hold when Fire Emblem: Fates came out, and when I was finally willing to put that down, I ended up plowing through all (current) episodes of Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju instead of playing catch-up. Too bad it’s not sci-fi or fantasy, because that’s the most award-worthy show of the season by a mile, IMO.
The first few episodes of ERASED were great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m dragging my feet to pick it back up again, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I was so excited about that show before I took a break for video games, I don’t know what happened, but somehow I lost interest. D: The other shows I paused were Assassination Classroom and Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. AssClass I did get caught up in, and I know I’ll carve out time for Grimgar at some point, but getting back into ERASED just seems so difficult. This should be right up my alley, and I was excited before. I don’t know why I’m not now. =/
@kyra: I loved the ending of “All the Birds…” but that was mainly because I talked it through with someone else and that helped to crystalise my understanding. Not that I’m offering my interpretation because I think it’s deliberately left open for the reader to disentangle to their own satisfaction.
And yes, the ambiguity of the whole thing is excellent. It’s a lovely reminder of how tribalism colours our worldview even as we like to think that we can rise above it.
Darren Garrison said:
I was thinking that way myself at one point, but the last episode of the anime makes it clear that va gur arj gvzryvar, gurer ner ab shegure nggrzcgrq zheqref hagvy Fngbeh jnxrf hc, for reasons that take a while to explain.
@Kyra
Yay, novel! Waiting to say ‘we knew her back when’. 🙂
FWIW, Mark Lawrence has announced the second Self Published Fantasy Blog-Off.
A competition of/for self published fantasy novels.
Given the general conversations about traditional publishing and self-publishing in these environs, I thought it might be worth noting.
—
Regards,
Dann
I did an April Fool on my blog in 2004 that tricked some readers for the perfect amount of time (this was Ken MacLeod’s report, for instance), but others for way too long. After that, I decided not to do them any more. The people who are most likely to fall for your April Fools pranks are the people who most trust you, and I realized those were the very people I didn’t want to bamboozle.
> “I loved the ending of ‘All the Birds…’ but that was mainly because I talked it through with someone else and that helped to crystalise my understanding.”
Hm. Maybe I should do that. 🙂
(1) I think I might like a book about their research more than the fiction.
(5) (appropriately enough) We need a Career or Grand Master Hugo for Kevin.
(9) Ha ha ha ha! What JJ said.
(15) I think this author has taken the contents of my brain and written them better. I could not agree with this more. Watch “Supergirl”, y’all. As a DC comics buyer in my youth (b/c of the Reeve movie!), I am so disappointed in these recent movies. Feh. Bleh. Pleh.
(20) Already gone, even if it were real.
Am already regretting things I should have put on my ballot.
I can see why… certain people… like slates. Doing a full Hugo ballot up right is HARD WORK as lauowolf found. You have to read a bunch of stuff, and then you have to make really tough decisions for that last place on your list, where all sorts of intangibles come in and you wrestle with yourself. That’s way more work than a lot of Puppies want to do. And being authoritarian, they like when someone tells them what to do.
Not Quite Taterona Kempi, by Ryan W. Norris, in the current issue of Analog is well worth reading.
Researchers from 50 million years in the future study an archive that the extinct human race left on the moon. Two young researchers try to decipher a particularly difficult document, and we get to read along with them, so the story alternates between the near future and the far future.
More microreviews:
Shifting Shadow, by Patricia Briggs. Short stories set in the world of her popular “Mercy Thompson” and “Alpha and Omega” urban fantasy novels. I’m a big fan of the series, but most of these didn’t really wow me. It was nice to finally read the short story that kicked off the Alpha and Omega series, but I liked the eventual books better. The story I liked best was Gray, a nice little self-contained vampire piece. I would probably only recommend this one to Patricia Briggs completionists. On the other hand, I am one of those, so.
Flora’s Fury, by Ysabeau Wilce. An engaging end to an engaging trilogy. Somewhat surprising as an end, though, since hardly any of the big background plot elements are brought to a conclusion. That was likely the point, though — this is the story of the maturation of one person against the background of sweeping events. The events keep going after the individual resolves some of her difficulties. Thumbs up.
Pazuzu’s Girl, by Rachel Coles. The daughter of the ancient god Pazuzu runs into trouble when his vengeful ex comes calling. Some parts of this really worked. Some parts … didn’t. The author knows how to tell a story, and the plot moves forward. But a number of sequences just left me shaking my head and going, “No, that does not make sense in the world you’ve created.” I feel like this one would have benefited a lot from another pass with an editor. Still, an author with some potential. I was amused by what butterflies talk about (sex, mostly.)
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, by C. D. Rose. Not SFF. At first, I had no idea what to make of this or why it was written. I slowly realized that it was an examination of all the various ways that an author’s work, or perhaps any artist’s work, can be lost to the world as if it had never been. (Not, perhaps, the best thing to read while writing a book …) Amusing, and interesting once I got the gist of what it was trying to say, but for all that it seemed a little slight.
When Hilde and I went to the 1981 World Fantasy Con, sculptor Dale Enzenbacher had a bronze statuette of the Wanderer’s catgirl in the dealer’s room. Beats any of the cover versions by a mile:
Tigerishka
(Liked it so much we bought it.)
Bruce, I can’t get that link to work, so I don’t know whether to ask you to consider leaving me that in your will.
John A Arkansawyer: “Bruce, I can’t get that link to work”
Hmm. I sent the photo from my camera to my Google Photos account, which I rarely use. It might have access restrictions. I’ve created a “shared album” and copied the photo over to there. Can you access -this- link?
Tigerishka (shared album)