(1) 100 LOVED BOOKS. PBS series The Great American Read premieres May 22. One hundred books, one winner:
THE GREAT AMERICAN READ is an eight-part series that explores and celebrates the power of reading, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels (as chosen in a national survey). It investigates how and why writers create their fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what these 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.
- How many have you read? Take the quiz. At 31 books, I’ll probably register one of the lowest scores around here.
- Click on the link to see The Great American Read’s list of America’s 100 most-loved books. It includes 26 books (and series) classified as SFF.
- George R.R. Martin was delighted to find his A Game of Thrones series on the list.
(2) AMAZING OPENS SUBMISSIONS WINDOW. Steve Davidson announced “General Submissions for Amazing Stories Opens Today”. See detailed guidelines at the link. Davidson had more to say on Facebook:
(3) COMPTON CROOK AWARD. Nicky Drayden announced on April 19 that her book Prey of Gods won the 2018 Compton Crook Award. [Via Locus Online.]
(4) RINGO’S WORLD. John Ringo’s April 16 Facebook post about his withdrawal as ConCarolinas special guest continues gathering moss, now with over 900 likes. Today Ringo showed everyone what they’ll be missing with a new comment that explains to his sycophants why ConCarolina’s Guest of Honor can’t compete with him.
No. Because nobody but people who pay close attention to the industry and awards has ever heard of her.
Her Amazon rankings are pretty low. Her bookscan ratings are low. That indicates she’s not particularly popular just heavily promoted and ‘popular’ with the ‘right crowd’. (Which is a very small crowd.)
James Patterson is a big name. JK Rowling is a big name. Hell, China Meville is a big name.
Seanan McGuire is not ‘a big name’.
I have no clue where we stand representationally in sales comparison to me but I suspect I sell more books. Just a suspicion, though, and it probably depends on the series.
Honestly, I suspect A Deeper Blue sold more books than all of hers combined.
(5) ENCHANTED MUSEUM. Atlas Obscura reveals the “Hidden Elves at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science”.
Back in the 1970s, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science hired artist Kent Pendleton to paint the backdrops for many of the museum’s wildlife dioramas. Little did it know that Pendleton’s penchant for hiding tiny mythical creatures in these paintings would add a whole new dimension to the museum experience.
It all began with eight elves—or gnomes, or leprechauns, depending who you ask—hidden in Pendleton’s wildlife dioramas. An elf hiding in the lowland river. An elf riding a dinosaur along a cretaceous creekbed. Another elf sat on a rock in the Great Smoky Mountains. And others, hard to spot but definitely there, in various backdrops throughout the museum.
In 2018, Pendleton told the Denverite: “It was just kind of my own little private joke. The first one was so small that hardly anyone could see it, but it sort of escalated over time, I guess. Some of the museum volunteers picked up on it and it developed a life of its own.”
(6) THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE. Kevin Standlee is running for office in his home town:
I’m Kevin Standlee, and I’m running for a seat on the Board of Directors of the North Lyon County Fire Protection District, which serves the city of Fernley, Nevada.
I grew up in a fire station. As the child of a US Forest Service officer, I lived a lot of my formative years on a series of fire outposts in the Sierra Nevada….
June 12 is Election Day.
(7) HISTORIC DUNES. ABC News tells about “Visiting the desert where ‘Star Wars’ was filmed”.
There’s a reason the original “Star Wars” movie was filmed in the deserts of southern Tunisia. This stark, remote landscape looks like another planet.
One of Tunisia’s vast desert regions is even called Tataouine (ta-TWEEN), like Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tattoine.
And the underground home where Luke Skywalker first appeared living with his uncle and aunt is a real hotel in the town of Matmata, one of various desert locations used in the movies.
Masoud Berachad owns the Hotel Sidi Driss. He says visitors have dropped off since Tunisia’s democratic revolution in 2011 and attacks on tourists in 2015.
Still, devoted “Star Wars” fans keep the hotel in business….
(8) CURSED CHILD IN NEW YORK. David Rooney goes into great detail – perhaps too much – in his “‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’: Theater Review” for The Hollywood Reporter. Here’s a relatively spoiler-free excerpt:
…Pockets of racist outrage exploded online when it was first announced that a black actress had been cast as Hermione, which Rowling shot down in her no-nonsense style by pointing out that the character’s ethnicity was never mentioned in the books. In any case, only the most bigoted idiot could find fault with the brilliant Dumezweni’s performance, her haughtiness, quicksilver intellect and underlying warmth tracing a line way back to the precociously clever girl Harry first met on the train all those years ago.
Thornley’s Ron, too, is readily identifiable as the perennial joker of the trio. He’s acquired substance and a charming mellowness over the years, though a glimpse of him in a time-warped present tells a heartbreakingly different story. Miller takes the early indicators of Ginny’s strength and builds on them, shaping a smart, grounded woman capable of handling Harry’s complicated baggage. And Price’s Draco is still peevish and moody, his bitterness exploding in an entertaining clash of wands with Harry, but he’s found a softer side in maturity as well.
At the center of it all is Parker’s Harry, grown up and more confident but still pensive and troubled as ever, plagued by memories of the orphaned boy who slept under the stairs at his aunt and uncle’s home, and the reluctant hero he was forced to become. It’s a finely nuanced performance, with gravitas and heart, particularly as he wrestles with and eventually overcomes his struggles as a parent. Even with the sweet sentimentality of the closing scenes, what lingers most about Parker’s characterization is the stoical knowledge he carries with him that every moment of happiness contains the promise of more pain to come.
Of equal importance in the story are Albus and Scorpius, and while Clemmett is affecting in the more tortured role, at war with himself as much as his father, the discovery here is Boyle. His comic timing, nervous mannerisms and endearing awkwardness even in moments of triumph make him a quintessential Rowling character and a winning new addition. “My geekness is a-quivering,” he chirps at one point, probably echoing how half the audience is feeling. It’s stirring watching these two young outsiders conquer their self-doubt to find courage and fortitude….
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Daniel Dern doesn’t want Filers to miss xkcd’s cartoon “Misinterpretation.”
- Lise Andreasen asks, “Things men weren’t meant to know?”
????by @tomgauld pic.twitter.com/ahOG6EltU4
— New Scientist (@newscientist) April 23, 2018
(10) GENESIS. In “How Stan Lee Became the Man Behind Marvel” Chris Yogerst of the LA Review of Books reviews Bob Batchelor’s biograpahy of the comics icon.
STAN LEE WAS FINISHED with comics. “We’re writing nonsense,” he once told his wife Joan. “It’s a stupid business for a grownup to be in.” After riding the early success of comic books, Lee was concerned about the future of the medium. He wanted to write more intelligent stories, something adults could connect to.
Following his wife’s advice, Lee decided to write one last story. With characters that were grounded in reality, stories that channeled Cold War tensions, and a narrative influenced by popular science fiction, Lee created the Fantastic Four. This was the type of story Lee would have wanted to read. If it was successful, maybe he would stick with comics a little longer.
Popular culture historian Bob Batchelor’s latest book turns a critical eye on the life of Lee, who ultimately became “the man behind Marvel.” Batchelor’s Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel focuses on where Lee came from, what influenced him, and how he became the immortal face of the comic book industry. In other words, to use the vernacular of the superhero genre, Batchelor gives us Lee’s origin story.
(11) AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #800.Here’s another variant cover for the upcoming milestone issue.
It’s all been building to this – the biggest Peter Parker and Norman Osborn story of all time, and the first Marvel comic EVER to hit 800 issues! In celebration of the 800th issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and the now historic run of Dan Slott, Marvel is excited to show a variant cover from legendary artist Frank Cho and colorist David Curiel!
Witness the culmination of the Red Goblin story as Slott is joined for his final issue by epic artists such as Stuart Immonen, Humberto Ramos, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Nick Bradshaw!
(12) SKYWATCH. Bill Gates among backers of proposed live-video-from-space satellite constellation called EarthNow:
EarthNow takes advantage of an upgraded version of the satellite platform, or “bus,” developed originally for the OneWeb communications service. Each satellite is equipped with an unprecedented amount of onboard processing power, including more CPU cores than all other commercial satellites combined. According to Greg Wyler, Founder and Executive Chairman of OneWeb, “We created the World’s first lowcost, high-performance satellites for mass-production to bridge the digital divide. These very same satellite features will enable EarthNow to help humanity understand and manage its impact on Earth.”
Use cases are said to include:
- Catch illegal fishing ships in the act
- Watch hurricanes and typhoons as they evolve
- Detect forest fires the moment they start
- Watch volcanoes the instant they start to erupt
- Assist the media in telling stories from around the world
- Track large whales as they migrate
- Help “smart cities” become more efficient
- Assess the health of crops on demand
- Observe conflict zones and respond immediately when crises arise
- Instantly create “living” 3D models of a town or city, even in remote locations
- See your home as the astronauts see it—a stunning blue marble in space
(13) TODAY’S COPYEDITING TIP. From Cherie Priest:
Nice try, BBC, but none of us are including the word “planet” when we relate this story to friends. https://t.co/QeBYY9Ik6T
— Cherie Priest, Allegedly (@cmpriest) April 23, 2018
(14) LOSING FACE. Motherboard says “This Is the Facial Recognition Tool at the Heart of a Class Action Suit Against Facebook”.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit against Facebook can move forward, paving the way for what could turn out to be a costly legal battle for the company.
As Reuters reports, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook improperly collected and stored users’ biometric data. It was originally filed in 2015 by Facebook users in Illinois, which passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in 2008. The law regulates the collection and storage of biometric data, and requires that a company receive an individual’s consent before it obtains their information.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook ran afoul of BIPA when it began using a tool called Tag Suggestions, which was originally rolled out in 2011. Like many Facebook features, it’s designed to make your user experience better while also providing the company with your data—in this case, very specific facial features.
(15) KNOT OF THIS WORLD. Gizmodo’s Kristen V. Brown advises “Forget the Double Helix—Scientists Discovered a New DNA Structure Inside Human Cells”.
The double helix, though, is not the only form in which DNA exists. For the first time ever, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure that looks more like a twisted, four-stranded knot than the double helix we all know from high school biology.
The newly identified structure, detailed Monday in the journal Nature Chemistry, could play a crucial role in how DNA is expressed.
Some research had previously suggested the existence of DNA in this tangled form, dubbed an i-motif, but it had never before been detected in living cells outside of the test tube. Researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, though, found that not only does the structure exist in living human cells, but it is even quite common.
(16) ROCKET MAN. In his book What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, author David Hofstede ranked William Shatner’s 1978 performance of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” at #17 on the list. Details from the Wikipedia —
At the 5th Saturn Awards Ceremony, which aired as the Science Fiction Film Awards in January 1978, Taupin introduced William Shatner’s spoken word[29] interpretation of the song. It used chroma key video techniques to simultaneously portray three different images of Shatner, representing the different facets of the Rocket Man’s character….
How can you not want to watch it after a build-up like that?
(17) MAKING A BIGGER BANG. Wil Wheaton has been having fun —
Since last week, I’ve been working on the season finale of The Big Bang Theory, and today we shot Amy and Sheldon’s wedding.
It was an incredible day, and I am still in disbelief that I got to be in multiple scenes with Kathy Bates, Laurie Matcalf, Jerry O’Connell, Brian Posehn, Lauren Lapkus, Teller, Courtney Henggeler, and this guy, who is not only one of the kindest people I’ve ever worked with, but is also from a science fiction franchise, just like me!
You're not so bad yourself @wilw. Let this episode be dedicated to the countless @bigbangtheory fans who love the #STARS– both #TREK & #WARS & begin to heal a divided galaxy…#MayTheLivingLongAndProsperingBeWithUs https://t.co/9FetGyLRSj
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) April 19, 2018
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, JJ, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, Carl Slaughter, Lise Andreasen, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
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Robert Wood asks It’s also more than a little strange that Ringo is now going after McGuire, who as far as I can tell, stayed out of the debate about the conference despite being asked to take a stand on it.
I suspect he’d go after whoever was selected as guest if it wasn’t him.
My local bookstore carries nothing from Baen Books as their books simply don’t sell no matter who the author is. On the other hand, both Mieville and Macguire are deeply stocked and sell very well.
1: We should bear in mind that the selection here is the result of a poll. According to the ‘about’ section on the site:
PBS and the producers worked with the public opinion polling service “YouGov” to conduct a demographically and statistically representative survey asking Americans to name their most-loved novel. Approximately 7,200 people participated.
The results are simply based on the poll, given certain criteria (only one book per author, series count together), except for this bit:
Each advisory panel member was permitted to select one book for discussion and possible inclusion on the top 100 list from the longer list of survey results.
But there are only thirteen people on the panel, so at most thirteen additions.
I think some people are raising questions that only really make sense if the list was created by a group of judges: I find this often happens when a list of this sort is published. (Non-Hugo people often think the same about the Hugos, of course.) As it’s a poll, you can’t really ask ‘why did they include this and not that?’, and so on. And a poll is guaranteed to produce a weird medley that does not, as a whole, fit anyone’s idea of what is best.
@ StephenfromOttawa – When I was a kid my local library had the original Bobbsey Twins books. Or rather, they had the first half of the series in the original. I remember the foreword talking about the “updates” – it said that “today’s readers” (the 50s, IIRC, which was already 20 years in my past) won’t know what a magic lantern is, so it’s updated to a slide projector.
Now, both of those were old tech to 1970s me, but magic lanterns were cool and exotic far-past tech, as was everything else about the 1910s, while slide projectors were those boring things grandparents pulled out to show off long-past vacations.
@Jamoche Similarly, I get a kick out of technology depicted in old movies, like the lie detector and the photograph transmission over phone lines presented in Call Northside 777.
Having seen the Huston/Bradbury movie first, when I read the book I was surprised by the many chapters about whales and whaling.
Melville was state-of-the-art when it came to info-dumps.
(2) Dear foreigners: This list is on PBS, a network financed by a dwindling amount of Federal tax money, corporate/foundaton funds, and Donations From Viewers. It is wholly owned and operated by the American people. Of course it’s not going to have foreign books on it. Except for all the British ones. And German ones. And Russian ones. And British ones. This paragraph has been brought to you by the letters U and S, and the number 50.
@Anne Goldsmith: Nobody reads “Pilgrim’s Progress” except in certain college majors b/c it’s heavy going. The “Left Behind” books are TERRIBLE, but they’re fast-moving potboilers with lots of action and a much easier road to Christian salvation than PP’s. They’re awful but have sold a ton and spawned some bad movies.
I really tried with “War and Peace” and “Moby Dick” several times, but I couldn’t. Even summaries of those two kinda make my eyes glaze over.
(4) As far as big name authors’ behavior at cons, I met Stephen King one year at Worldcon. Just standing around in the hallway like every other dork with a badge. He and the accomplished Mrs. paid their own way, and he was in a hall costume one day! This was after half a dozen bestsellers (not counting the Bachman books), three movies and a mini-series, plus comics and short stories. And he was as excited to meet other authors, and considerably surprised anyone recognized him!
Stephen F’ing King. One of the most famous genre writers ever, and a nice man. I’d read and enjoyed his books by then (else I wouldn’t have recognized him from the jacket photos) but became a real fan of his. And this gracious behavior was during his addiction years, even. Yep, drunk and stoned, he still was a polite human being in public.
That’s how an actual big-name author behaves.
@Sean Wallace: So that chart shows Ringo’s big-name-ness has remained flat or declined since 2008, when Seanan’s career took off and vastly surpassed his. She’s been a bigger name than him for 10 years, which means she’ll outsell him fairly soon. I guess that means more people have heard of her than him. And that doesn’t even count all the fans/sales for Mira Grant, correct?
@Contrarius: And even “March Upcountry” isn’t original; it’s lifted from the Greek original of the same name which was the hit book of ~370 BCE and still in print. Plus he wrote it with someone else. Seanan writes all her stuff alone.
@Lurkertype —
All sorts of books have stolen their basic ideas from Anabasis, so I don’t think that’s really a good reason for condemning or slighting this one in particular. 😉
eta — my review of March Upcountry on Goodreads
@Contrarious — I pretty much agree with your review. Hope you read the other three and enjoyed them. I did.
WRT ‘Roarke’s Drift’ — S.M. Stirling pretty much stole it whole cloth with hardly bothering to file off the serial numbers in his ‘Island in the Sea of Time’ series. It was well done, but even I, no student of history at all, recognized it.
We should do a whole scroll on identifying famous history of the past that has been repurposed into MilSF stories.
Because there really are no new stories…
Both the review and the biography start out by crediting Stan with the solo creation of the Fantastic Four, which means neither writer did proper research.
@techgrrl1972
The big four seems to be Roarke’s Drift, Anabasis, the Mongol hordes, and the various barbarian attacks on Rome. With honorable mention to The Nika Revolt as a good excuse to gather together all the wrong thinkers and shoot them.
(1) 27 read, which seems to be a pretty standard figure among UK filers; 3 or 4 more on Mt. Tsundoku.
@Robert Reynolds:
We still are.
I haven’t read either the “Left Behind” books or the “50 Shades” books – but I’ve read blog posts that take them apart, so (a) I don’t have to read them and (b) I already know they’re poorly-written examples of genre fiction. (For “Left Behind”, read Slacktivist on Fridays.)
@Peter J: That was my first thought about 1283 and Eddie, also.
We had a big battered box of NANCY DREW, HARDY BOYS and BOBBSEY TWINS books (plus a few others), and the best part was that a bunch of them were from when my mom was a kid in the 1930s, and a bunch from when my older sisters were kids in the 60s. So depending on which edition you read (and there were duplicates), Nancy was Titian-haired with a roadster (with a rumble seat!) or a redhead with a convertible, and so on.
I think we only had the old-school BOBBSEYs, though.
@Laura Haywood-Cory: “For my money, this is the point at which my stomach turned and stayed that way (TW: rape)”
Yeah, that passage ties into a more series-wide assumption that I always had trouble with: the idea that, left to themselves in a low-resource, high-tension situation, of course the first thing on people’s minds is going to be putting their interlocking parts together. 🙄
@Contrarius: “I did enjoy the first two Prince Roger books and intend to read the other two in the series. They are a Weber/Ringo collaboration, and there’s no telling which author was more responsible for them.”
I can answer that: Ringo wrote from Weber’s outlines. (Firsthand confirmation, not guesswork.) That’s how most of the Baen “A/B” collaborations work – the more experienced author hands an idea (to some level of development) off to a newer/apprentice author, who does the actual writing. The old hand gets a chunk of royalties, the new guy gets experience, name recognition, and bigger sales. It’s a pretty canny system.
Mike Glyer: “Melville was state-of-the-art when it came to info-dumps.”
Good point! Moby Dick is what I point to whenever people complain about infodumps in modern SFF. If it was good enough for Melville…
@Lurkertype: “Stephen F’ing King. One of the most famous genre writers ever, and a nice man. I’d read and enjoyed his books by then (else I wouldn’t have recognized him from the jacket photos) but became a real fan of his. And this gracious behavior was during his addiction years, even. Yep, drunk and stoned, he still was a polite human being in public.”
That tallies with my experience. He sent me an incredibly gracious and useful response to some fan mail I sent him as a pimply teenager in high school. Plus, no snob would form a band of fellow writers and call it the Rock-Bottom Remainders. I still recall their rendition of “Can’t Judge a Book by Lookin’ at the Cover.”
@ PJ Evans: It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d just invaded the place and built castles everywhere, but stopping us using dragons in court cases – that’s too much. He got off lightly only having a potato named after him, if you ask me.
@Rev. Bob —
Interesting info. In any case, in this instance it worked out pretty well.
@Peter J: I’ve seen some of those castles. (I was, as an actual Evans, snickering to myself when I was walking through Caernarfon Castle, as I’d never have been allowed in when it was newish.)
@ Other Patrick Dennis fans — I was premature, Genius isn’t out on Kindle for another week … so I have just pre-ordered a novel that’s probably older than I am. I have forbidden myself from adding more dead trees to my shelves, especially expensive and out-of-print ones, so I hope I live long enough to see Kindle editions of his other books besides the Auntie Mame ones and Little Me. According to his bio there are a dozen, and I’ve only read three. Although I do seem to recall the one that was sort of like Little Me, a fake humorous bio of an excruciatingly dense First Lady.
#1: I got 33 books. Not just from being a Lit-jock in college. But seriously, Pilgrim’s Progress?
I read Ringo’s “A Hymn Before Battle” several years ago and thought it was fine, didn’t detect any political bias that I remember. Decent MilSF. The final battle was good, but (SPOILERS because I don’t know how to rot-13) let me just say I wonder why so many MilSF books rely on ground-based infantry battles instead of just dropping a big space rock (or even an expendable spacecraft) on a target from orbit if they just want to destroy everything anyway? Kind of like the last Godzilla movie, where I wondered whether having a nuclear blast in Los Angeles would really cause more destruction than the monsters fighting each other and destroying everything.
I got curious about who had the bigger discography, so I went to Wikipedia and counted.
John Ringo: 25 novels, 20 collaborative novels, 1 anthology.
Seanan McGuire: 30 or 33 novels (I couldn’t decide about the Velveteen Rabbit books as I know nothing about them), 9 novellas, and 12 linked stories that sound like a book.
How the hell does anyone write that fast? And her books are good, too? That’s a bit boggling. If she can pull it off, more power to her. Perhaps I should see if she’s got short fiction out there to try. Anyway, that’s roughly the same sized corpus for both, giving a fifty percent discount across the board to the twenty collaborative novels.
He’s been at it longer and she’s publishing faster, so she’ll have more books published soon if things don’t change. I wouldn’t know who has more sales. I could argue it one way or another and back again, but numbers are more important than reasoning in matters of fact. But who knows both sets of numbers? Does Macy’s tell Gimbel’s?
@John A Arkansawyer
Seanan McGuire has quite a few free stories available (epub, mobi, PDF) on her website. Go here and here.
John M. Cowan on April 24, 2018 at 6:44 pm said:
I got the impression that Ringo loves that “redneck non-com saves the world” story-line, because he uses it for everything. (“A Hymn Before Battle” wasn’t bad – but he clearly wasn’t keeping track of his own plot points: the Posleen “vomit” eggs at one point and have ovipositors at another; upstate NY is too cold for them, but Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia are not; the Posleen have spaceships that go everywhere on earth, but they can’t cross oceans to get to islands. Dude, WTF?)
@Bonnie McDaniel: It looks like some of the InCryptid (I’ll forgive that pun, maybe) stories are early on and essentially spoilerless. Would that be a fair trial?
@techgrrl1972
David Drake does a lot of that.
@Bonnie McDaniel–
The links on those pages are not working for me. They open as new tabs filled with code. Am I overlooking something obvious? Should simply clicking on them be working? (Yes, not your page, but if there’s something obvious I’m overlooking and you know what it is, I don’t have to figure out if I’m going to attempt to bother her about something really stupid that a more adept person wouldn’t be having a problem with.)
@John M. Cowan: FYI, I usually use http://www.rot13.com/ for my ROT13 needs.
AIUI, Piper repurposed at least two famous battles in “Lord Kalvan” – the battle of Barnet, from the Wars of the Roses (the “Dralm-damned battle”), and Antietam/South Mountain, from the US civil war.
Johan P: Actually I find it interesting how many of the classics I read in my teens and how few I’ve read since. Teenagers have time. Some more than others; I spent the last 4 years of high school in unchallenging schools in small towns where the neighboring large library was the only thing that kept me sane — and this was long enough ago that there wasn’t enough SF to keep me busy. (I was reading a dozen average books a week.) This was even with being as heavily involved in school theater as the faculty would allow. (I read The Brothers Karamazov after doing props for the play.) Once I got to college I was in a city with a lot of other things to do (including the world’s largest lending library of SF and at least 8 shows a year to work on rather than 2), and then I had to adult.
@Contrarius: collaborating with Weber would not, to my taste, do anything about Ringo’s deficits. To each their own….
@various: interesting to see that there have in fact been 1-volume editions of LotR. Today I am one of the 10,000.
@Arkansawyer: How the hell does anyone write that fast? Have you ever heard her speak? Twice the speed of anyone else on the panel, and it was all material. I think her verbal mind just runs in a different gear from most of ours. I wonder whether she keeps multiple stories going at once, so she can torture Toby if she’s run out of ideas for InCryptids for half an hour.
@Lis Carey: They appear to be links directly to the ebooks. If the links are showing you the binary files, either something wrong with her server or your browser (or both, yay computers!).
For me, clicking them in Firefox on Windows gets me download prompts for the .epub and .mobi files (as binary files Firefox doesn’t know about or that I’ve previously told it “always download” – not sure which); for the PDFs, it displays them directly.
Anyway, I suggest trying right-click, then select the option to save/save link/save target/download (exact phrase depends on your browser) if you’re on a regular computer. If on an iPhone or iPad, try tap-and-hold, which should give a prompt to do various things with the files (like open in various apps you have). On Android, uh, I’m guessing something similar?
Hope this helps!
@Kip W: “. . . or View-Master set or had a pack of bubble gum cards . . .” – LOL!
@Peer: “To kill a mockingbird In self defense.” – ALSO LOL!
@StephenfromOttawa: “I just read Moby Dick last year.” – Oh, by Miéville? 😉
Thanks, @Goobergunch. Let me be clear:
Va gur svany onggyr, VVEP, gur rarzl nyvraf ner zbivat npebff gur pbhagelfvqr gb trg gb gur pvgl gurl jnag gb nggnpx. Jul gur urpx qba’g gurl whfg ynaq va gur zvqqyr bs gur pvgl, be ng yrnfg evtug bhgfvqr?
ZnexB Xybbf, jub jevgrf n terng ZvyFS frevrf, unf ng gur raq bs bar bs uvf obbxf (qba’g erpnyy gur anzr) fraqvat n engure fznyy fcnprfuvc penzzrq jvgu jngre gb vapernfr vgf znff fgenvtug ng n uhtr nyvra fuvc, ohg ng n uvtu rabhtu fcrrq (1/10gu bs yvtug fcrrq, be znlor yrff) gung ol gur gvzr vg uvgf gur zhpu ynetre fuvc, vg’f tbvat snfg rabhtu gb boyvgrengr vg. Abg n synful fcnpr onggyr, ohg orggre.
And I’ll take Seanan McGuire over John Ringo anytime.
@John AA: “30 or 33 novels (I couldn’t decide about the Velveteen Rabbit books as I know nothing about them)”
The “Velveteen vs.” books compile multiple short stories to tell a larger story. IMO, they work fine as novels, but they’re a little more… modular? than you might otherwise expect. Her serialized “Indexing” books are similar in that respect.
Pretty fair, yes. The first cycle (“The Flower of Arizona” through “The Star of New Mexico”) is complete and works rather well as a compiled arc. And yes, the links Bonnie provided should work as-is.
Piper also used the Sepoy Rebellion for Uller Uprising.
To be fair it’s not just MilSF that files the serial numbers off history. For me the worst is Guy Gavriel Kay. My girlfriend absolutely adores his work and I’ve tried to give it a fair shake. The problem is I know enough of the source material the similarities become annoying and the differences are jarring. Not exactly consistent, complaining about both sides of the equation, but both of them hit me when I read his novels.
John A. Arkansawyer:
I loved A Confederacy of Dunces. It might just be that I read it at just the right time. Haven’t read it in 20 years, but I remember it fondly and fairly well.
@John A Arkansawyer —
I’ve read the first InCryptid and was not thrilled. OTOH, since the series is on the Hugo shortlist this year, reading it would be good prep if you’re voting.
McGuire has never really been my thing. I can recognize that she’s a good writer, but somehow she and I just don’t quiiiiiite mesh. Nonetheless, I would suggest trying some of her October Daye books if you want to check her out as an author.
@Chip Hitchcock —
Considering that I dnfed books by both Weber and Ringo writing alone, in this case I think the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
Also, isn’t Weber pretty much stealing all the good US Civil War battles in his Safehold series? I’m not enough of a history nerd to pick them apart, but I thought I recognized similarities to The Wilderness Campaign because I’ve read “Guns of the South”.
😉
Had 48 from the list. I blame my excessively rigorous prep school for a number of them.
I’ve read ~40 / 100. Fuzzy memory from “hit by a truck” brain damage so gave myself any I “think” I read back in school days. I can’t say I enjoyed that many of them. Was surprised it was that many.
@Lis
Huh. They’re working for me, but I’m looking in Edge.
As for the stories themselves, I prefer the Toby Daye ones.
@Lis
Huh. They’re working for me, but I’m looking in Edge.
As for the stories themselves, I prefer the Toby Daye ones.
Charon D. I am probably being wicked for snickering over the juxtaposition of people (a) being snide about the books on the (1) list which they’ve never heard of; (b) being snide about certain folks being dismissive of authors/books they’ve never heard of.
Only a couple of people have said that there were books on that list which they didn’t recognize, and neither of them were snide about it; they just mentioned that there were some of which they hadn’t previously heard.
I give up.
Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. The best I can do is open the PDF, and download and save
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the cover.
Just the cover.
Fuck this shit. It is not worth it.
John A. Arkansawyer: How the hell does anyone write that fast?
Chip Hitchcock: Have you ever heard her speak? Twice the speed of anyone else on the panel, and it was all material. I think her verbal mind just runs in a different gear from most of ours. I wonder whether she keeps multiple stories going at once, so she can torture Toby if she’s run out of ideas for InCryptids for half an hour.
I’ve seen her at several cons now, and I’m convinced that she’s a savant of some kind. I don’t think that her brain ever shuts down, and I suspect that she does not sleep much. She does massive amounts of research for her books (she’s on a friendly first-name basis with folks at the CDC and can call them at any time, and she’s got “in”s with zoologists, biologists, and herpetologists at several institutions which study and/or work for the conservation of living creatures).
She’s absolutely brilliant: as Chip says, she talks 90 miles an hour, and she can think on her feet and come back with a clever retort in an instant. It’s clear that she’s always thinking about things — possibly in parallel. It’s my understanding that she has all of the characters and storylines in her universes intricately plotted out well ahead of what’s already been published, has at least one story in each of her various universes in-process at any given time, and that she works on them in kind of a round-robin fashion.
I myself would have believed that her books must be absolute shyte given her prodigious output, but having read a considerable number of them, I can attest that they’re not. Some of them are better than others — but that’s praising with faint damns. Every single one of them is solidly plotted and researched.
It would be fascinating reading, if a researcher was able to shadow her, dig into, and document how she thinks and works. But from what I know of her, that sort of undivided scrutiny would quash her completely.
Ugh… be sure to save copies of what you type before you hit “post”; I just wrote up a lengthy comment, only to have it disappear into the ether. I am hoping that it will magically appear later, as some duplicates did yesterday. 🙁
1) I think I can probably lay claim to the low score here at 9 (maybe 10 — there’s one I might have read in high school, but I don’t recall for sure). What it boils down to is that I don’t tend to read best-sellers, and that’s what a lot of the list is.
4) She’s a bigger name than you are, boy. And a bigger draw.
6) Good luck, Kevin!
@ Laura: I also saw a number of books by authors for whom I’d read other things of theirs, but not the one on the list.
1) I think I can probably lay claim to the low score here at 9 (maybe 10 — there’s one I might have read in high school, but I don’t recall for sure). What it boils down to is that I don’t tend to read best-sellers, and that’s what a lot of the list is.
4) She’s a bigger name than you are, boy. And a bigger draw.
6) Good luck, Kevin!
@ Laura: I also saw a number of books by authors for whom I’d read other things of theirs, but not the one on the list.
ETA: Sorry for the double post. It hung the first time, and when I resent it they both came thru.
Lis, I had problems with the files on McGuire’s InCryptid short fiction page, too.
If I hover over the links, the filename shows as “.epub”, but when I right-click and do a “Save as”, it saves it as a “.zip” file — which Calibre refuses to import.
But I found that if I changed the “.zip” filetype suffix to “.epub”, then Calibre will import it just fine. See if that will work for you.
@ Ghostbird: Anonymous reading is indeed a good way to remove a lot of unconscious bias. Look what happened to the makeup of symphony orchestras after they started doing blind auditions, where the judges couldn’t see the ethnicity or gender of the candidates. There are some videos of symphony orchestras from the 60s on YouTube, and holy shit look at that sea of white male faces. You don’t see that any more.
Caveat: There are some authors whose style is going to be recognizable (at least to people who are familiar with them) even under a veil of anonymity. I would bet on myself to recognize the writing of Oor Wombat under any circumstances; there’s nobody else IME who has a voice even remotely like that.