(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS. Pat Cadigan has a great update — “That’s Right, Cancer, I Said You Better Run ‘Cause There Ain’t Nothin’ For You Here”.
Yes, in case you can’t tell, the level of cancer in my body continues to decline. I did a little math and the current level is 3% of what it was when I started chemotherapy in January 2015. I saw one of the doctors on my consultant’s team, a young Asian doctor that I’ve seen before. He was so genuinely happy for me, I kinda choked up.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I had the bad luck to have my cancer recur in the worst possible form but the good luck to have the drugs work better than anyone expected them to. I’d like to tell you attitude is half the battle. I mean, then I could really pat myself on the back (no pun intended, I swear) and say I kicked cancer’s arse. The truth is, I got lucky; the drugs work. My attitude lets me enjoy it.
I would like to be more profound but at the moment, I’m just kinda dazed. Six months ago, I was terminal, at least as far as anyone knew. Today I’m no longer dying of cancer, I’m living with my technicolor Doc Martens boot on its neck.
You know, I don’t think that will ever get old.
(2) OVER TIME. An interview with Lois McMaster Bujold in the New Zealand Herald.
Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen is precisely to do with what happens when a woman refuses to be constrained by the assumptions of the people who think they know her. Cordelia is 76, in a future society where she can expect to live to 120.
“This, of course, has metaphorical import for our own times, with more people living longer. What should we do with ourselves? Is something genuinely new possible, that isn’t just a variant of things we were doing earlier in life?”
It will not spoil the book if I tell you the answer is that it depends on your perspective; which does indeed change with age.
Bujold, 66, remarks she was once part of a book club discussion of her fantasy novel, The Curse Of Chalion, with a group of junior high students, “where it gradually became apparent that the hero was far more alien to them by being an old man of 35 – practically like their parents! – than by being a demon-ridden medieval fantasy nobleman.”
(3) SPECIAL DEFECTS. From LiarTown USA —
(4) SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT SPANISH SF. Science Fiction Studies, published three times per year by DePauw University, is looking for contributions to the monographic issue on Spanish SF, to be guest edited by Sara Martín and Fernando Ángel Moreno. (Via Europa SF.)
By ‘Spanish SF’ we mean SF novels and short fiction written specifically in Spain, excluding other Spanish-language areas.
Science Fiction Studies is particularly interested in articles dealing with writers Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo, Rafael Marín, Rodolfo Martínez or Javier Negrete and with SF women writers (excluding Elia Barceló).
All submissions must be in English and conform to SFS submission policies, which includes a rigorous peer-reviewing process.
Abstracts (150-200 words) are due by March 30, complete papers by 1 September (maximum 7000 words).
Please, email your proposals to Sara Martín : Sara[dot]Martin[at]uab[dot]cat
(5) NEW GAME IN TOWN. The “Storium” play-by-post forum has just gone live. A number of fairly-well-known writers and game companies have kicked in worlds, including File 770 regular Ursula Vernon, Seanan McGuire, Chuck Wendig, etc. Chris Meadows has details in “Storium storytelling game launches for public view” at Teleread.
The Kickstarter game worlds include quite a few intriguing settings, including some by fairly well-known authors or game companies. For example, the default universe for the HERO system “Champions” RPG is one of those worlds—so if you have some favorite old characters from a “Champions” setting, why not bring them back to life? Hugo-winning webcomic artist and author Ursula Vernon has a humorous setting called “Weird Fruit” (pictured above), and multiply-Hugo-nominated author Seanan McGuire has a setting called “Chambers of the Sea” in which merfolk take part in Atlantisian politics. Matt Forbeck has adapted his Monster Academy young-adult series into a Storium setting as well.
And that’s only scratching the surface. Well-known gaming or fiction writers such as Tobias Buckell, Robin D. Laws, N.K. Jemisin, J.C. Hutchins, Richard Dansky, Elizabeth Bear, Sam Sykes, Mur Lafferty, Kenneth Hite, Chuck Wendig, Stephen Blackmoore, Jordan Weisman, and Charles Stross have settings either ready or under preparation. Steve Jackson Games and Green Ronin Publications are also readying Storium worlds based on their “In Nomine” and “Mutants & Masterminds” RPG settings, respectively.
(6) YOUR TUMBLR DEEP THOUGHT OF THE DAY. From Weird Deer, this quote by Erin Bow:
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
(7) HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. Max Florschutz launched his blog Unusual Things a year ago this week.
Views
So, where to start? How about with the number of views Unusual Things has landed in its first year of operation? A quick look at the site’s stats board and some simple addition says …
10,207 Views
Hey, you know what? That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Ten thousand views, while nothing to those with heavy advertising budgets and ten thousand fans, is pretty good for a one-year blog on writing, a subject not a lot of people care about.
Actually, let’s dig into that one a bit more. What’s been the post with the highest number of views, the one that’s caught the most attention?
I’m Not a Fan of Science-Fiction and Fantasy? from May 30th, 2015, with 741 views.
You might remember that post. That was the post where I reacted to a number of statements from the Insular crowd during last year’s Hugo insanity, statements that, well, in line with their given moniker of “Insulars,” was all about how certain “casual” fans needed to be kept out of the Hugos, suggesting that they weren’t “real” fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy because they hadn’t passed some invisible, societal conscientious litmus test that made them a “real fan.”
(8) CHAINS OF LOVE. There’s everything else, so why wouldn’t there be books where “Science Fiction Romance Goes To Space Prison”? Victoria Scott tells you about several of them at Amazing Stories. Ann Aguirre’s Perdition, for example, gets this valedictory:
OK, I have to warn you that “bleak” is an understatement. This series has some of the darkest stuff I’ve ever read, much more to the horror side than I normally will go (I have nightmare issues, ok?) but I found the characters so fascinating, I was compelled to read on. I was rooting so hard for Dred and Jael to make it – as a couple, out of Perdition, on to a Happily Ever After – that I was willing to stay with them through all the travails. The grim world of Perdition is well drawn and comprehensively thought out, and learning the many details of the worldbuilding backstory was another good reason to continue reading.
(9) NOT PLAN 8 OR PLAN 10. Before he can discuss Plan 9 From Outer Space, Jay McDowell needs to explain what a Bad Movie is:
A real, honest to goodness, grade Z modern Bad Movie is a movie where the creator, be it due to A) technical ineptitude (Manos: The Hands of Fate); B) budget limitations (pretty much anything cranked out by Roger Corman and/or AIP [American International Pictures]); or C) the creator’s overinflated sense of self (vanity projects like Battlefield Earth, Star Trek V, and Glitter), failed spectacularly and inadvertently, made a movie that has become endearing to the viewer. Simple, run-of-the-mill bad movies are, usually, movies that are just bad and not in a fun way; they’re sub-par or heavy handed with their message or, perhaps worst of all, purposely trying to be a true Bad Movie.
(10) WILL SHE PREORDER? My daughter has mentioned several times how excited she is that the eighth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Pts. I & II, is on the way. Will I ever get a clue that I’m supposed to buy it for her? 🙂
Directly following the play’s premiere in London, a play script will be released in both print and digital finally, finally, FINALLY giving readers the story of Harry’s life 19 years after he defeated the Dark Lord.
The book will be published by Little Brown Book Company on July 31, 2016, marking Harry’s 36th birthday.
(11) BAEN NEWS. Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf sent readers a message: they’re going to synchronize the release dates of ebooks and paper books.
From the publication month of April 2016 onward, the release dates will be the same (that is, the ebooks will not be available two weeks earlier than the paper books).
We will not be changing the time the Monthly Bundles are initially offered for sale, we will continue to offer eARCs as usual, and all other policies regarding ebook bundles will remain in place. We will not be making the period you can buy Monthly Bundles shorter, but longer.
The April 2016 bundle contains the ebooks that will be available in print on April 5th. The final versions of these ebooks would have been scheduled to go live as ebooks on all retail venues on March 16, 2015, and will now be available in their entirety April 5, 2016. At that point, the Monthly Bundle will become unavailable for sale.
We will continue to publish two newsletters per month to help you keep track of our offerings, one highlighting the print books which will come out two weeks in advance of the release date, the other highlighting ebook and website offerings on (or very close to) the release date itself.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 3, 1920 – James “Scotty” Doohan
(13) KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY. Rod Roddenberry is executive producing CBS’ new Star Trek series.
Roddenberry Entertainment President Rod Roddenberry and Chief Operating Officer Trevor Roth are serving as executive producers on the new Star Trek television series.
Other executive producers include Alex Kurtzman, Heather Kadin and Bryan Fuller, who was previously announced as showrunner.
(14) AT LSE. Literary Festival 2016 at the London School of Economics featured a number of discussions about sf/f-related topics.
There’s a podcast of “To Boldly Go: what Star Trek tells us about the world”, with participants Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University, London and author, Duncan Barrett, a best-selling author, Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE, Steven French, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, and Bryan Roberts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE.
And tweets about several other items have been collected at Storify.
.@MikeSav47032563 begins our #LSELitFest event. Says ideas of utopia are crucial to sociological study of inequality pic.twitter.com/5eipZuIgIG
— LSE Inequalities (@LSEInequalities) February 25, 2016
(15) SCOTT KELLY RETURNS FROM THE ISS.
Astronaut Scott Kelly arrived in Houston early this morning where he was reunited with his family after a whirlwind year-long mission in space.
Waiting for Kelly, 52, in Houston were his two daughters and girlfriend, along with his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and his sister-in-law, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
After living for nearly a year aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is two inches taller than his identical twin brother Mark.
One of the main goals of his groundbreaking mission is to study how well humans can endure — mind, body and spirit — on a long-duration spaceflight.
From his perch 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the earth’s surface, Kelly snapped hundreds of beautifully abstract photographs of our planet’s landforms and waterways. He spotted hurricanes ominously swirling on sapphire-blue oceans. He gazed out at the aurora’s glittering fog. He consistently turned Earth’s lands and waters into an abstract artist’s dream, with shots of beaches, deserts, forests, and everything in between.
(16) GHOSTBUSTERS TRAILER BONUS. Russ discovered this website was apparently hidden in the trailer… http://www.paranormalstudieslab.com/#/
(17) THAT’S BAT-MA’AM, TO YOU. In 1974 Yvonne Craig gave an equal pay pitch to a captive audience…
Will Batgirl save Batman and Robin from the bomb? Or will she stand for her rights and get the same pay as a man? If they say no to equal pay…bombs away! 1974 Public Service Announcement by the U.S. Department of Labor–Wage & Hour Division.
[Thanks to Will R., John King Tarpinian, Steven French, JJ, Robotech_master, and robinareid for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]
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There can only be one
Until there are two.
By the way, that’s DICK GAUTIER as Batman, in the PSA!
(11) BAEN NEWS. “we will continue to offer eARCs as usual”
Oh, okay, so in other words, they won’t be synchronizing release dates of ebooks and paper books. 😉 Thanks for clarifying, Ms. Weisskopf.
(15) SCOTT KELLY RETURNS FROM THE ISS. So much to “WOW!” about here, but those photos are really amazing. The colors are pretty freaky in some of them.
Some number of Fifth!
This a tasty Pixel Scroll.
(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS. Pat Cadigan has a great update
Hurrah!
(2) OVER TIME
David Larsen regularly reviews SF/F for the NZ Herald weekend magazine supplement. Also, that last paragraph? Another example that different forms of publishing are not mutually exclusive despite what some zealots want us to think.
That Batgirl ad is fantastic.
Great that Scott Kelly is home safely, but does anyone know what happened to the Gorilla suit?
It certainly could be me: I read File770 first thing in the morning (while drinking that first cup, not after having consumed it), and If the way I feel right now anything to go by I didn’t get a good night’s sleep last night, so I’d really like to know if this makes sense:
“…the ebooks will not be available two weeks earlier than the paper books…one highlighting the print books that will come out two weeks in advance…”
Oh and hey – where’s the link to the source for this one?
Is that just a fubar, OR, will the books themselves be coordinated but the newsletters won’t be?
This is giving me an early morning headache. I’ll come back to it later after the SECOND cup later, In the meantime, maybe someone else from an earlier time zone can help explain it to me.
…and where,s the link to the source?
@nickpheas . I want to know precisely how much it cost to put that costume into orbit….
Apologies. An edit went bad with my first post this morning. The question about the link isn’t supposed to be in the middle of the post, but only at the end. Stupid tablet. Stupid having to wake up early in the morning. What idiot thought up THAT idea?
The thing that really worries me about the gorilla suit is that with a space helmet, and they’ve definitely got them to hand, you get the famous Robot Monster, and with that the end of civilisation as we know it.
(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS.
Wonderful news! Cadigan is a great person and a smart, tough, interesting writer.
5) Storium
I was a KS backer for it, played and ran a couple of games, but ultimately decided the mechanics and the system, as designed, was not for me.
@Steve I got that message about the ebook/print book realignment in an email from Baen books, myself.
Steve davidson: Oh and hey – where’s the link to the source for this one?
Mike didn’t post a link because this item came from the Baen e-mail newsletter I forwarded to him (yes, I’m a damn dirty SJW Baen book buyer and reader — you know, those people that the Puppies claim don’t exist!).
The item can be found partway down the page here.
This isn’t really related to anything specific, but the video below is just one of the best things I’ve come across recently. I love music, I love making things, and I love strange yet useful contraptions, so this really ticks a number of boxes all in one go – and I felt I had to share.
7 Happy Anniversary: “Insulars”? I’m not quite sure if this is some honestly confused bystander or a Puppy trying out the next Christ On A Rabbit Farm.
Whatevs.
@Christian Brunschen – that thing is incredible. If you listen closely, I swear you can hear the ghosts of Heath Robinson and Professor Branestawm cheering it on from Valhalla.
JJ – thanks. Should have realized it was a email press release but – not enough coffee.
And BTW, I buy – AND read – several Baen books a year myself. Have also been known to “allow” reviewers to review them on the site (and did so myself on the COF blog but that’s ancient history and therefore does not count).
@Steve: You can also find the news posted in the left-hand sidebar of the Baen.com main website, and I wrote an article about it for TeleRead to try to clear up the confusing language from Baen’s announcement and make it a little easier for people to understand.
When you think about it, it’s fairly easy to understand why they would have wanted to harmonize the official release dates. If a book was scheduled to hit print in January, having the e-book version come out in December of the year before could affect its eligibility for award nominations. This fix will not entirely solve that problem—Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan novel, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, was published in January and February of 2016, but was declared eligible for the 2015 Nebulas because its EARC was out in October. Nonetheless, it will at least reduce the number of edge cases for any Baen books that don’t get EARCs.
Absolutely great news from Pat Cadigan, a really great person.
Looks like the titles are running up against the scrolltown pixel-limits.
Chris Meadows: When you think about it, it’s fairly easy to understand why they would have wanted to harmonize the official release dates… Nonetheless, it will at least reduce the number of edge cases for any Baen books that don’t get EARCs.
I don’t think that it solves the problem at all. The e-books were only coming out a couple of weeks before the print books; now they’ll come out together. But the “eARC”s will still be coming out months ahead of time, and anytime that gap falls over a year-end boundary, the book will have the same problem as Gentleman Jole.
I’m utterly mystified as to what problem this “fix” is actually supposed to solve.
@Steve Wright,
It is delightful! Also, there are a bunch of progress videos that are quite interesting and entertaining.
What is extra good about the machine is that the noises made by the crank, and when flipping the levers, are also entirely in the rhythm of the music and have obviously been carefully considered not a byproduct, but an integral part of the performance.
Also, one could say that this is what happens when someone doesn’t lose their marbles but collects them and puts them to good use.
Chris Meadows,
While I have absolutely no doubt that Mr. Glyer accurately quotes whenever he does so AND I’ll go the extra mile and also state that I’m positive that he does not selectively quote in order to introduce bias, I still like to see things in the original, which is the only reason I asked.
Reading the quote literally made my eyes cross this morning – I couldn’t process it. At another time of the day I might have just absorbed it and moved on.
I don’t have a problem at all with the stated intent. In fact, I say “good for Baen, trying something”.
Would it be uncouth of me to point out that the Baen press release which some here (including myself) found hard to parse was written by someone nominated for a Best Editor Hugo Award?
It doesn’t exactly inspire a high degree of confidence; that’s all I’m saying.
@JJ: A couple of weeks before but in a different month, and potentially a different year. It wouldn’t matter if they came out one day apart if one of them was before the end of the month and the other was after the end of the month. It simplifies things to have them both be in the same month; at least, I’m assuming that’s why they went ahead and made the change.
I don’t think all Baen books get EARCs, so this would at least reduce the number of problems for non-EARC books. It’s also possible that some awards might choose not to count EARCs at all, given that they’re unpublicized, unproofed advance sales that aren’t widely known about except by Baen’s closest fans. At any rate, just because they can’t eliminate the problem entirely doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to try to reduce it as much as they can.
@Christian: Some people argue over whether those are actually marbles or ball bearings—which puts me in mind of one of Jerry Clower’s best anecdotes. (Just listen and wait for the punchline.)
(Geez, how did you get that YouTube video to embed in your comment? The iframe code didn’t work in mine.)
It might improve relationships with traditional retailers who don’t much like it when direct web sales compete with them, and really don’t like it when the web sales get a head start.
@Chris Meadows,
To embed the youtube video, all I did was paste the link – bare, not surrounded by any tags; it seems that case is handled specially by WordPress, embedding the video.
Also, the musician / builder refers to it as a “marble machine” – I’m not sure that the choice of material has any particular bearing on the issue 😉
Any Blake’s 7 fans out there?
Big Finish are running one of their weekend sales with an awful lot of reduced audio goodness.
https://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/blake-s-7-special-offers-across-the-entire-range
NickPheas on March 4, 2016 at 4:33 am said:
I suspect this sort of thing, more than any awards consideration, is the real reason. Publishers make decisions like this due to Business reasons. And as lovely as awards are, Business trumps.
(7)
You mean “Unusual Things,” not “Usual Things.”
(15) shifty typo: “WitH”
Hope this clicks the old tickybox. I mean, helps.
3. The newspapers always spin at least ten times before presenting a third rate murder as a headline.
That machine reminds me of two convergent (in my opinion) things.
One is mechanical musical instruments—I subscribe to the Mechanical Music Digest, online—a hobby largely engaged in by aging people who periodically die and whose uncaring families then auction off their carefully acquired treasures. MMA members wonder if the field is aging out, and don’t know where the next generation will come to tend and delight in the gorgeous wood-and-metal assemblages of gears and cogs and motive power to produce haunting sounds in (usually) wonderfully dated idioms. From their number come the technicians who keep fairground organs playing, and hold back the encroachment of boom boxes perched atop silent mechanisms.
The other is steampunk.
Why don’t they get together? I can’t help thinking that some gearheads (and the makers that intersect with their Venn diagram) would find antique self-playing instruments to be a kind of wonderland.
Robert Whitaker Sirignano
I skip past the headline, trying to read the subsidiary articles on the page and guessing whether they’re from a real newspaper or made up for the occasion.
@Christian Brunschen: In case you didn’t know it, Vintergatan is swedish for The Milky Way (direct translation: Winter Street). And it was a very nice video! 😀
[tick-tock]
Having thought about it, the controversy over marbles vs ball bearings seems like a false dichotomy. They are, in my estimation, marbles of the variety referred to by Professor Harold Hill as “steelies.”
Breaking cover to draw filer’s attention to Sebastian Baczkiewicz Pilgrim radio plays which are currently available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer.
They are modern day tales steeped in British folklore – as the intro says:
I’ve been following these for years and have just listened to the final story with a tear in my eye. They’re well written and brilliantly acted with a wide range of fantastic English regional accents (the voice of Gallowstone Hill is my favourite!)
There are 24 episodes (18 hours!) altogether. The bad news is that they start to drop of the player in fifteen days so if they sound like your cup of tea now’s the time to listen. Also, if you are not in the UK, they are only available via a computer, so no mobile listening.
(I’ve been following File770 for around a year now and have enjoyed the news and commentary enormously but, on-line as in real life, I’m much more likely to listen than to talk)
@Hampus Eckerman,
Jodå, jag är väl medveten om det – inklusive att de (medvetet, misstänker jag) stavar på kanske lite gammalmodigt vis med ‘W’ istf det modernare “V’. 🙂
Relatedly, of course, we’re all awaiting the outcome of the current Mars chocolate recall that includes Mars and Milky Way bars among others …
// Christian
Please join me in founding the “No More Metal Marbles Society”….
Go, Cadigan! That is fantastic!
I have always been a big fan of failure-as-mulch, myself. Ok, that idea didn’t fly, toss it in the chipper and see what grows out of it…
@steve davidson,
Whatever the marbles were made from, I don’t think the piece performed in the video can be characterized as “metal” by any stretch of the (musical) imagination. If that had been the intended genre, I’m sure the instrument would have ejected the marbles towards the audience in a much more forceful manner, and of course it would have burst into flames at the end of the performance.
The composition of the marbles has bearing, being material to the discussion and instrumental in producing the music.
Yay for Pat Cadigan! Keep your foot on cancer’s evil throat!
@Kip W: Excellent 🙂 I think when it comes to puns you’ve managed to beat most of us!
The Walls Around Us, Nova Ren Suma’s highly praised YA novel from 2015, is $1.99 today.
Also, for anyone curious as to who’s in the Campbell Award writers’ showcase anthology, l’ve posted the table of contents.
Christian: Haha, f-n omöjligt att minnas vem som är svensk! 😀
That’s wonderful news about Pat Cadigan.
@Hampus, jag är det ju iofs också bara till cirka femtio procent, och så bor jag i utriket också 🙂