(1) NEW SCIENTIST’S NEW REVIEWER. Congratulations to Abigail Nussbaum who is now writing a column for New Scientist.The first installment discusses three space operas: Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion, Joe M. McDermott’s The Fortress at the End of Time, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: Home.
At the moment we are inundated with intriguing, often envelope-pushing space opera, and Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion is exemplary. Where most space opera, acknowledging its icy origins in Last and First Men, exists at a chilly remove from humanity, The Stars Are Legion is fleshy and messily organic.
(2) NAMIBIA. From the BBC, “The astonishing vision and focus of Namibia’s nomads”. Some of these names will ring a bell if you read Binti. The article analyzes whether people’s response to optical illusions is a cultural artifact.
Nestled in a grassy valley of north-eastern Namibia, Opuwo may seem like a crumbling relic of colonial history. With a population of just 12,000, the town is so small that it would take less than a minute to drive from the road sign on one side of town to the shanty villages on other. Along the way, you would see a hotchpotch collection of administrative offices, a couple of schools, a hospital and a handful of supermarkets and petrol stations.
For many of the people living in the surrounding valley, however, this small town is also the first taste of modern life. The capital of the Kunene region, Opuwo lies in the heartland of the Himba people, a semi-nomadic people who spend their days herding cattle. Long after many of the world’s other indigenous populations had begun to migrate to cities, the Himba had mostly avoided contact with modern culture, quietly continuing their traditional life. But that is slowly changing, with younger generations feeling the draw of Opuwo, where they will encounter cars, brick buildings, and writing for the first time.
How does the human mind cope with all those novelties and new sensations? By studying people like the Himba, at the start of their journey into modernity, scientists are now hoping to understand the ways that modern life may have altered all of our minds. The results so far are fascinating, documenting a striking change in our visual focus and attention. The Himba people, it seems, don’t see the world like the rest of us.
(3) WEIN OUT OF SURGERY. All those well-wishes and prayers did some good for Wolverine co-creator Len Wein. Sent from his Twitter account after he came out of the ICU —
Out of surgery, beard had to be trimmed because breathing tube slipped out. Gets some of his height back. Expecting pain, but great result.
— Len Wein (@LenWein) March 8, 2017
(4) LONE WOLVERINE AND CUB. Daniel Dern sent along a mini-review of Logan:
A man re-unites with the daughter he hadn’t known he had, and they take a road trip, discovering shared interests en route.
Way bloody violent, but no infrastructure (e.g. NYC bridges) damaged. A
nd preceded by a Deadpool squib.
(5) EASTER COMES EARLY. “All the hidden eggs, ties to ‘X-Men’ and more in ‘Logan’” from Good Morning America.
It goes without saying, spoilers ahead, don’t read if you haven’t seen the film!
Wolverine’s past as a cage fighter seen in 2000’s “X-Men” — When he gets angry, Charles brings up how the team took Logan in all those years ago, when Logan was lost and fighting for money. Hard to believe that was 17 years ago, and since then, we’ve not only had multiple films, but duplicate versions of Sabretooth, Professor X, Storm and Magneto, among others.
(6) K.O.’D. And for those of you needing a memory-jog, CheatSheet lists “10 Marvel Characters Who Have Defeated Wolverine”. First on the list –
Deadpool
Who can win in a fight between invincible fighters? Both Wade Wilson and Wolverine are blessed with healing powers that have made their many face-offs truly unpredictable. Each hero (or anti-hero?) has won his fair share of fights. But in one memorable instance, while Wolverine’s healing abilities were still recovering from an encounter with Magneto, Deadpool outlasted his handicapped opponent, and eventually defeated him by stabbing his lungs with a sword
(7) MYTHCON GUESTS. Mythcon 48 will celebrate 50 years of the Mythopoeic Society with the help of two newly announced GoHs:
The Mythopoeic Society and Mythcon 48 are pleased to announce that William Fliss, Archivist at the Marquette University Special Collections and Archives, and Laura Schmidt, Archivist at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, will be our Guests of Honor for this very special conference. Mythcon 48 will be held July 28-31, 2017, in Champaign, Illinois. The conference theme is All That Is Gold.
Gold in fantasy:
- Greed for gold:
- Tolkien’s dwarves and gold lust, economic systems in fantasy and fantasy gaming
- Gold as a color: color symbolism in fantasy and heraldry
- Gold as an element: gold and other fantastic elements and materials like mithril, octarine, meteorite metal, unobtanium, or the list of semi-precious gems in Tolkien’s “Errantry”…
- The Golden Age: in fantasy and myth, of fantasy as a genre
Digging for Gold in the Archives:
- Primary and secondary materials about the Inklings and other fantasy authors in the archives at Marquette University, the Wade Center, Oxford University, and other locations
- Fan material and society archives
- Materials in collections at the University of Illinois, especially the Center for Children’s Books
- Archives, libraries, writing, and research IN fantasy
(8) A SUCCESSFUL BOOKSELLER. Detroit Bookfest has a long interview with the owner of “John K. King Used & Rare Books in Detroit, internationally voted one of the World’s Best Bookstores!”. It’s just full of anecdotes like this —
“When we can, we try to shake each book to see if any stray ephemera falls out. Sometime in the late 1980’s, our employee Tom Schlientz was shaking out a book one day and some Mark Twain photos fell out. These ended up being personal unpublished photos that were taken by Twain’s friend. The photos featured Twain riding in a wagon with a little girl and a horse. They were taken sometime around the turn of the century in Hartford, Connecticut. We sold the photos.”
(9) PUT THIS ON YOUR MEDIEVAL RADAR. Steven H Silver heard that Michael Flynn would like more people to be aware Medieval Science Fiction edited by Carl Kears and James Paz and published in 2016 by Boydell and Brewer, an academic press in the UK. The site where it can be downloaded requires registration for a “one month trial account” — here – and I don’t know how many fans are going to want to do that.
(10) THE TOOLKIT OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Young Neil Gaiman was sure he could lift it — “Looking for Thor’s Hammer: Neil Gaiman On ‘Norse Mythology’”.
Neil Gaiman was 6 years old when he first met the Norse god Thor — although he wasn’t the red-bearded hammer-slinger of legend. “Marvel. Marvel’s Thor came first,” he says. “I was reading the reprints of Marvel’s Thor in an English comic called Fantastic. … Dr. Don Blake found this stick in a cave, banged it down and transformed into Thor, and the stick transformed into the hammer.” Gaiman says he spent a lot of his first decade looking for likely sticks, “just on the off chance that they might the Thor stick, and might transform into a mighty hammer. But none of them ever did.”
Not long after that, he picked Roger Lancelyn Green’s classic Myths of the Norsemen to learn more about his favorite characters — and found himself fascinated by a vision of Asgard that was nothing like Marvel’s sci-fi space palaces. “It was a bunch of huts with a wall round them. Thor was now red-bearded, irritable, muscly, zooming around the sky in a chariot pulled by goats, and not necessarily the brightest hammer in the bag.”
(11) FOLDING MONEY. A story at ecns,com, the official English-language website of China News Service, mentions the Hugo — “Hugo Award winner Hao Jingfang releases interactive fiction” – while publicizing the author’s new non-sf work.
Hao Jingfang, who won the last year’s Hugo Award, has released a piece of interactive fiction she composed with five other authors in Shanghai.
The story,”The Beginning of Han,” was uploaded to an interactive literature website qiaobooks.com late last week. It cost 9.9 yuan (about 1.4 U.S. dollars) to read.
With 400,000 characters, it is about Liu Bang, founder of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC – 24 AD). Through different option, readers can find their way to nearly 50 endings.
“Interactive literature is increasingly accepted by readers,” Hao said. “While we are talking about different possibilities, we acquire new knowledge.”
Hao won the Hugo Award with “Folding Beijing” in the category of best novelette at the 74th World Science Fiction Convention. She plans to donate the gains from the new fiction to a welfare project in Tibet.
The writer said she is interested in an earlier dynasty, the Qin (221 – 207 BC), and did not rule out the possibility of writing another interactive fiction based on that history.
(12) CAMPBELL OBIT. William Campbell (1920-2017) has passed away, reports Andrew Porter. Campbell was a freelance illustrator and cartoonist, the creator of the “Weird-ohs”, “Silly Surfers”, and “Frantics” plastic model kit series for the Hawk Model Company, which were popular in the early 1960s.
(13) COMIC SECTION. In Soonish, a character finds the safest place to announce his shameful secret: “Moonshot”.
(14) WHAT TO SAY? Theodora Goss, in “Writing in Troubled Times”, says she’s been finding it difficult to write for social media.
I’ve never found it this hard to write before. Oh, I’m writing . . . I have a book due, and I work on that! I’m working on it as fast and hard as I can. But I’ve always found it easy to write, and to write all sorts of things. Now, all I want to do is work on the book, which allows me to go in deep, to disappear into another time and place, to spend time being my characters rather than myself. All I want to do is escape into my own writing. Not communicate.
Perhaps the problem is, I don’t feel as though I have any particular wisdom to offer.
The sorts of problems I see in the news, I can’t fix, and have no fix for. I’m not the right person to tell you, call your congressman. Yes, call your congressman, but what I write about, what I think about, are deeper systems of values. I write about trees, and rocks, and birds. I write about fairy tales. I write about schools for witches. My writing is about what we should value, about the deeper magic of life. Not political positions, or not immediate ones, although I think politics infuses my writing. How could it not, when I was born behind the Berlin Wall, when my parents lived through 1956 in Hungary, when my grandparents lived through World War II? It’s always there . . . but I have little of value to say on current legislation.
(15) FORERUNNER. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one reason we have a Best Dramatic – Short Form Hugo. But its impact was far greater than that — the BBC says “We should thank Buffy for today’s ‘Golden Age of television’”.
But Buffy had another destiny as well – as the harbinger of the current ‘Golden Age of Television’. When the show premiered in 1997, it seemed at worst a joke, at best a novelty destined for a short life. Instead it contained the seeds of a startling number of trends to come for the medium. Of course, Buffy was a watershed moment for the portrayal of young women on television, giving us a witty, smart heroine uniquely equipped to do no less than save the world. And it brought vampires back well before the age of Twilight. But it also innovated in more artful ways: combining fantasy and grounded realism in a way that prefigured everything from Alias and Lost to Jane the Virgin and the many superhero shows we have today; displaying a postmodern self-consciousness that’s ubiquitous in current programming; and experimenting with the form of television itself via a silent episode and a musical episode. In short, Buffy showed us what television could do, and was about to do.
(16) TONGUE TWISTERS. John Boyega raises suspicions that star gibberish will make a comeback in the next Star Wars movie — “John Boyega Hints ‘The Last Jedi’ Carries On ‘Star Wars’ Tradition of Making Actors Wrestle With Awkward Dialogue”.
Judging by star John Boyega‘s latest tongue-in-cheek Instagram post (see below), the tradition of saddling its actors with serious mouthfuls of sci-fi-speak promises to continue with The Last Jedi, this winter’s highly anticipated sequel to 2015’s The Force Awakens:
(17) BRINGING BOOKS TO THE UNSUSPECTING. Well, I guess we all do that. But we don’t all get on TV. Emma Watson tells about her work as a “book ninja” on The Jimmy Kimmel Show.
(18) HELP UNWANTED. It was one thing for Hermoine to help Harry and Ron with their homework, and quite another to help Dan and Rupert with their lines. Kimmel razzed Watson about an embarrassing habit she had as a kid, as illustrated in an old outtake of her shooting a scene for Harry Potter.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Mark-kitteh, Steven H Silver, John King Tarpinian, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]
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(9) PUT THIS ON YOUR MEDIEVAL RADAR
Boydell & Brewer are one of my money-sinks when I hit the book room at the Kalamazoo medieval studies congress. Palgrave tends to hit me up more on a per-book basis, but B&B reliably have more titles of interest. Fortunately, I don’t consider non-fiction to be part of the official Mount TBR.
(9) PUT THIS ON YOUR MEDIEVAL RADAR.
The redirect takes you to a page which says:
“Start your
FREE MONTH
by click image below!”
As if that isn’t bad enough, then I read the comments below it:
“Finally I get this ebook, thanks for all these [exact title of this book] I can get now!”
“I was suspicious at first when I got redirected to the membership site. Now I’m really excited I found this online library….many thanks Kisses”
“My friends are so mad that they do not know how I have all the high quality ebook which they do not!”
I’m not sure why the authors decided to load the book to this website as opposed to, say, Dropbox (I’m guessing that they’re getting some kind of kickback money for it), but I am seriously questioning their judgment — and no, I won’t be registering and downloading it. 😯
JJ on March 7, 2017 at 9:34 pm said:
The Large South American River has it, for a price.
P J Evans: The Large South American River has it, for a price.
Ah, it turns out that this dodgy foreign website is just a honey trap to earn referrer fees for its owner by getting people to register for Playster.com. And I’m pretty sure that the book’s copyright owners (who are selling it for $86 on Amazon) haven’t made it available for free on Playster (a search on that website does not show the book in the results).
Has either Silver or Flynn, or anyone else, actually successfully downloaded the book in this way?
Tor.com’s Book Club Free Book of the Month is out, available until midnight somebody’s time on March 13:
Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe
(omnibus of the first two novels in The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator)
(2) Interesting, and I like that the article explicitly mentions that there are cultural differences between groups. BTW, Finnish native speakers have a different way of handling movement and spatial relationships than those of Indo-European languages, something the Worldcon 75 programming team is aware of.
(10) Reading this, it puts into focus one of the things we’re I’m uneasy with Gaiman’s take on the norse mythology (note: haven’t read it, this is based on reviews only), that is, what happens when the ambigious, amorphous, and often contradictory visions of the characters in a mythological cycle gets filtered into one coherent modern narrative, especially by a person of (in this case) Gaiman’s stature?
(15) I think the Buffy influence goes even deeper than just in the tropes it employed. I don’t watch much television, but wasn’t the seasons-long story arc rather uncommon before BtVS? Not unknown (Babylon 5 was mid-run), but the dominant style was I believe much more episodic. I think Buffy occupies a key place in changing that norm for a longer-form style of television storytelling.
15) Awesome! *runs off to read article about best show ever*
16) For me it’s the lines where Han’s trying to explain about how traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy. One wrong calculation and uh bad stuff and um boom.
17) How cool. I may take that up (with used paperbacks, I’m afraid). 🙂
18) Funny.
Heather Rose Jones: Fortunately, I don’t consider non-fiction to be part of the official Mount TBR.
Right there with you. 🙂
Karl-Johan Norén: I think Buffy occupies a key place in changing that norm for a longer-form style of television storytelling.
Very true. Even now, almost no one does it as well. Each episode has to have a beginning, middle, and end and it has to work to the greater whole that is the season long arc. A lot of shows have episodes that are just middles or otherwise mess up either the individual episode or the larger arc. But, overall, it has been a good thing. I agree with your sidenote – it can’t be given to Buffy like it sprang from the brow of Zeus – there was something in the air in the 90s and you can find precursors even earlier but I think Buffy was among the earlier ones, did it best, and perhaps made people really realize it could be a “thing.”
(15) @Jason: Yeah. What I missed to include was that I think Buffy was the first modern television show with seasons-long story arcs which was an unqualified commercial and critical success.
(16) TONGUE TWISTERS. Time obscures much; I don’t think of the original trilogy, at least, as having much techno-babble; I do think of Star Trek, though.
(18) HELP UNWANTED. Hehehe, very cute.
– – – – –
Meredith Moments (for the U.S.). Several! Anyone read these and have Thoughts To Share?
Greg Bear’s War Dogs, first of a MilSF trilogy, is $2.99. I forgot I had this on my “books of interest” list. I’m not much into MilSF, but hey, aliens and tech and some action!
J. Patrick Black’s Ninth City Burning, which is some sort of SF-fantasy hybrid (intriguing!), is $1.99. This one intrigues me a lot.
Kirby Crow’s Hammer and Bone, a dark fantasy anthology, is $2.99. I’ve never read Crow’s short fiction (and I don’t read a ton of short fiction), but I read a few of Crow’s books quite some time ago and enjoyed them.
C.A. Higgins’s Lightless, first of an action-SF trilogy, is $1.99. As I finish up Waypoint Kangaroo, I’m thinking this may be up my alley.
Kendall: J. Patrick Black’s Ninth City Burning, which is some sort of SF-fantasy hybrid (intriguing!), is $1.99. This one intrigues me a lot… C.A. Higgins’s Lightless, first of an action-SF trilogy, is $1.99. As I finish up Waypoint Kangaroo, I’m thinking this may be up my alley.
I’ve got Ninth City on the pile, but will not get to it until after the Hugo deadline. I thought that Lightless (2015) was very good as a debut novel, but nevertheless had some weaknesses. I was a bit disappointed in its followup, Supernova, in that I felt that it was less, rather than more, successful than its predecessor. I’m not sure that I would classify them as “action” SF — they are a lot more political / scientific than action, in my opinion. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts after reading them.
Interestingly, my request for Waypoint Kangaroo has just come into the library, and I may or may not get to it before the Hugo deadline. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that one, also.
Is this how Tor are continuing to destroy science fiction?
I immediately grabbed this as it’s been so long since I read it and I think my brother has the physical copies somewhere, and I’d love to read it again.
I’m partway through a first time read of the Book of the Long Sun though, so that will have to be tackled first. Shortly after I started reading that I decided that a) it was brilliant, and b) I have to be in the right setting and frame of mind to fully appreciate Wolfe, and that this most likely involves a rainy day and an armchair.
rob_matic: Is this how Tor are continuing to destroy science fiction?
I have it on Good Authority that the SF Genre will completely disintegrate and implode this Friday, due to the influence of the Tor Sekrit Kabal and the inability of readers, authors, and editors to come to a consensus on what constitutes “excellence in the SF genre”.
(15) FORERUNNER
I’d perhaps argue that Buffy cemented the perception that Babylon 5 (and probably some other shows, but that’s the one I remember) had suggested, that season-long arcs could be successful with the TV audience.
I don’t think the initial attraction of Buffy was in the arcs though, it was just that it had a magical mix of tropes, action, self-aware humour, and characters.
Early Buffy had a rather odd viewing history in the UK. It was originally picked up by satellite broadcaster Sky (so, limited viewership) with a deal to pass it to BBC2 for repeats (so, free to air). Season 1 pretty much bombed on Sky and they passed on their right to show season 2 first. BBC2 then started showing it with (IIRC) two timeslots – an early evening slot plus a latenight repeat – and with some word of mouth it took off like a rocket. The timeslots helped it hit two different audiences. My rpg group, by common consent, paused our regular weekly D&D marathon to watch the 6pm show, which was pretty much unprecedented behaviour for us. When the BBC started showing season 2 almost immediately after season 1 we were delighted. Unfortunately after a rather short number of season 2 episodes the BBC continuity announcer finished one episode with “and that’s the end of the current season, the next season will be back next year”. We yelled at the TV in disbelief – it blatantly wasn’t the end of the season, and the BBC were lying to us goddammit. It turns out that the success of the show prompted Sky to exercise a contractual clause and yank back their first showing rights. Grrr.
It’s weird how the timing of shows used to be such a big deal – now I watch very little live TV with recording or streaming being so easy.
Maybe after that things will go back to how they were in the 80s, when you could pick up something like The Shadow of the Torturer and know from the cover that you were getting fantasy with a hero and a quest, and with none of those off-putting literary complexities.
The author photo on the flyleaf of my edition shows Wolfe being attacked by a Thesaurus Rex.
Niall McAuley: The author photo on the flyleaf of my edition shows Wolfe being attacked by a Thesaurus Rex.
Damn you, you sent me into a 5-minute laugh-o-rama morphing into a coughing spasm which involved snorting Diet Coke up my nose and eventually required me to pull out the albuterol inhaler which I almost never have to use. 😀
Achievement Unlocked!
And in other news, occasional Filer Nick Mamatas is the curator of the new
Lovecraft Storybundle
Lovecraft is not my thing, but I am quite sure that it will hit the sweet spot of a number of Filers.
Quick note on (13) — the comic is actually named Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). “Soonish” is a book the cartoonist co-authored that is coming out soon; there is a banner for it across the top of the comic right now, making it look like the title.
While not season-long, the use of multiple-episode story arcs on television can probably be credited to WISEGUY(1987-1990).
(Though some credit might also be given to Patrick McGoohan’s THE PRISONER. Individual episodes could stand alone, but there was an overall progression/arc to the entire series as well.)
I’d put Hill Street Blues as one of the earliest American TV series with ongoing threads. My impression is that British TV series were more likely to have continuing story lines though series were shorter, 13 episodes typically, and the concept of syndication didn’t exist, the BBC and ITV made their own programmes and only showed repeats of their material.
@Bruce Arthurs
What about Hill Street Blues (1981-1987)? It often had multiple 4-5 episode arcs running side by side.
ETA: ninja’d by Anthony
[eyestalk]
To me, Hill Street Blues (and I think ER) ran on a different line, where every episode contained three-four different story lines (that sometimes intersected), usually centered on one or two characters, and each story-line lasted for maybe 4-5 episodes. Ie, a full story arc could compromise maybe 40 minutes. It was also far more related to the soap operas, where the character interactions in various situations were more important than the plot.
Buffy (and I guess B5) however usually had one seasons-long story arc together with some of the shorter story arcs, so the main one gets a whopping 200 minutes or so, and with a much stronger focus on a plot.
OT: Is anyone else getting “bad browser request” errors when trying to access File 770 with Chrome?
No. All is fine with both vanilla and Opera flavours of chrome (both up to date).
Karl-Johan Norén: exactly – all kinds of shows through all time, practically, had threads, multi-part episodes, etc. You even had stuff like Twin Peaks which was like a single season but then got lost in the second and cancelled. The first season was more like a mini-series where it was truly done and the second was wha-huh? And, yes, soap operas had never-ending story arcs. Both sort of have the problem of most TV in that they don’t know when they’re going to end so they rarely actually tell sustained complex stories. Most TV is a middle and/or is minor. The idea of a seasonal unit, while not unique to Buffy, was a pretty important thing and distinguishes that from a lot of similar stuff.
Now that I’ve read the article, I’d say it was quick and light, but pretty cool. However, another thing Buffy should get a huge amount of credit for but actually gets too much is regarding the idea that “The ‘kick-ass heroine’ became something of a trope – a welcome one – thanks to Buffy.” I agree that it’s a welcome trope but perhaps has become too much of one. And it slights Princess Leia who was a kick-ass heroine in 1977, as well as Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. (Obviously more – probably including some from comic books which I was never into – but those are the big ones in my estimation.) But in TV terms (with enduring appeal and esteem) Buffy was essential.
Probably my favorite bit was quoting Greenberg: “Buffy established that it was okay to have a show which was both fun and intelligent – that you could be engrossing, mainstream, pop entertainment while still having something to say, still having a specific point of view about the world… And as legacies go, I think that’s a pretty good one.”
This is absolutely key to me – something to say, intelligent, but never losing sight of the story (except in season 6) and being fun!
The precusors I think of are generally in cop shows rather than SF. Homicide: Life on the Streets definitely had series long themes/overall bad guys. Murder One had Entire series dedicated to a single story.
(9) PUT THIS ON YOUR MEDIEVAL RADAR
Since it says
just above the download button, I imagine it’s not there. Experience teaches me that you download a one-page review or the publisher’s blerb for your trouble.
Five years ago, you used to be able to find scans of obsolete 1950s instruction and service manuals freely shared. I took mine down, and only share them one-to-one now, after finding them sold on sites with the obvious watermark and creative-commons link removed (but not the less visible one). Now they are pretty much all “on” these type of sites where the nice big download button downloads rubbish if you’re lucky or malware if you’re not.
Mike, if you want to leave that link up, please at least check with B&B that it’s legit.
The show I remember establishing long story arcs was Deep Space Nine.
This week AVClub.com is doing an array of BtVS-related stories: here’s the introduction.
Regarding season-long arcs: Doctor Who season 16 was a set of six loosely linked stories as the Doctor assembles together the Key to Time.
It may be useful to refer to the SF writer as Michael F. Flynn to avoid confusion with other Michael Flynns who may be in the news.
long story arcs: ummm, how about Time Tunnel…?
China Mieville’s Three Moments of an Explosion is currently $1.99.
For that matter, Sliders had an overall ongoing story arc about the travelers trying to find their way back home.
Talk about fortuitity — I had no idea when I sent in the item on the Himba that it would fit so neatly with the lead Pixel. I do wonder how unacculturated Himba would do when shown gorilla-in-a-basketball-scrimmage tape; would they catch that detail, or be even more focused on counting passes?
@Karl-Johan Norén: Finnish native speakers have a different way of handling movement and spatial relationships than those of Indo-European languages, something the Worldcon 75 programming team is aware of. Sounds fascinating — another reason to regret that I’m not going.
@steve davidson: how so? The episodes were mostly “fall into another bit of famous history”; can you point to real connections between episodes? Note also that Time Tunnel got canceled after one season; much of the discussion covers who made it work well enough to be renewed.
Meredith Moment: Kobo is offering The Fifth Season for $2.99.
(As an aside, I really really hate the way that Kobo advertises book sales in their emails. They put little thumbnails of the cover, with the price, but do not write out the author and title. Which means, if the cover is busy and/or the font is difficult, that it can be difficult or impossible to know what the book being advertised actually IS….)
For that matter, Sliders had an overall ongoing story arc about the travelers trying to find their way back home.
Under that standard Gilligan’s Island and The Land of the Lost had ongoing story arcs as well.
There was the Fugitive with that whole man with one arm thing.
And when will Fred finally win the fight and their cat stay out for the night?
@ Karl-Johan
(10) Reading this, it puts into focus one of the things we’re I’m uneasy with Gaiman’s take on the norse mythology (note: haven’t read it, this is based on reviews only), that is, what happens when the ambigious, amorphous, and often contradictory visions of the characters in a mythological cycle gets filtered into one coherent modern narrative, especially by a person of (in this case) Gaiman’s stature?
Sort of like what Ovid did? (I share your valid concern, but it isn’t a new problem by any means.)
@Chip Hitchcok: If you can access academic journals, look for the research by Frode Strømnes. He was the Norwegian psychologist who set out to investigate why all his Norwegian relatives avoided the Finnish television productions shown regularly on Norwegian television.
Found an improved reference: “The Externalised Image: A Study Showing Differences Correlating with Language Structure Between Pictorial Structure in Ural-Altaic and Indo-European Filmed Versions of the Same Plays”, published 1982.
Authors Frode Strømnes, A Johansson, and E Hiltunen.
The Morning News tournament of books has started: http://themorningnews.org/tob/2017/the-throwback-special-v-sudden-death-v-the-sport-of-kings.php
Its a fun format. Of genre interest is Undergound Railroads and all the birds in the sky (The book with the non-SF – cover that outsold all Torgensen-novels)
And what’s a “Five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” if not an arc?
I think there’s a difference between an internal arc and a premise like “getting home” that will necessarily end the whole series once finished. The latter tempts the writers to never solve the problem and keep the story in stasis.
Whereas Buffy ended arcs and created new states for the story – it moved from Buffy the child to Buffy the young adult to Buffy the surrogate mother etc. (I use Buffy as it’s an active example in play in the thread, but I don’t claim it did this perfectly – it kept many things in stasis as well)
Have you seen the Improve any novel by changing its second line to “And then the murders began” thing on Twitter?
Mine is:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. And then the murders began.”
@Soon Lee: My contributions to that thread:
to wound the autumnal city. And then the murders began.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. And then the murders began.
“I remember throwing away a child. And then the murders began”.
Hmm, that’s actually pretty accurate for The Stars Are Legion