(1) SOLO MENU. Bold NEW menu inspired by Solo: A Star Wars Story. Fat, salt, sugar, and Star Wars. What could be better?
(2) USAGE. How many Lego is two? Ann Leckie gives her answer. The thread starts here:
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/982040323814821889
(3) GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS. The Guggenheim Fellows named for 2018 include fiction writer China Miéville, nonfiction writer Roxane Gay, and in Fine Arts, Elizabeth LaPensee, a writer, artist and game creator who earlier won a Tiptree Fellowship.
(4) WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. The 34th Annual L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards Gala for the winners of the Writers and Illustrators of the Future will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 8. Celebrities attending include Nancy Cartwright, Marisol Nichols, Catherine Bell, Jade Pettyjohn, Stanley Clarke and Travis Oates.
(5) NESFA SHORT STORY CONTEST. The New England Science Fiction Association is running the fifth annual NESFA Short Story Contest. The deadline for submissions in July 31.
The purpose of this contest is to encourage amateur and semi-professional writers to reach the next level of proficiency.
Mike Sharrow, the 2018 contest administrator, sent this pitch —
Attention aspiring writers! Do you like to write science fiction or fantasy stories? Are you a new writer, but not sure if you’re ready for the big time? Then you’re just the kind of writer we’re looking for! The New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA for short) is running a writing contest. Prizes include free books, and a grand prize of a free membership to Boskone. More important though is that we offer free critiques of your work. Our goal is to help young & aspiring writers to improve their writing, so you can become our new favorite writer! Check out our website for details.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 5, 1940 — One Million B.C. premiered
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. Steve Vertlieb reminds everyone, “Bloch would have turned one hundred one (101) years of age today. Wishing one of Horror fiction’s most legendary writers a joyous 101st Birthday in the Heavenly shower stall of The Bates Motel in Heaven.”
- Born April 5, 1926 – Roger Corman
(8) COMIC SECTION.
- Mike Kennedy says this Tom the Dancing Bug is either a loving tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey or scary as hell. Or maybe both.
(9) KGB READINGS. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Livia Llewellyn and Jon Padgett on Wednesday, April 18, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar in New York.
Livia Llewellyn
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies and two Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections, Engines of Desire and Furnace. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Instagram and Twitter.
Jon Padgett
Jon Padgett is a professional ventriloquist. His first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine. He has work out or forthcoming in Weird Fiction Review, PseudoPod, Lovecraft eZine, and in the the anthologies A Walk on the Weird Side, Wound of Wounds, Phantasm/Chimera, and For Mortal Things Unsung. Padgett is also a professional voice-over artist with over forty years of theater and twenty-five years of audio narration experience. Cadabra Records will soon be releasing 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, a story written and narrated by Padgett.
(10) AVOIDING UNPRODUCTIVE GENERALIZATIONS. Annalee Flower Horne suggests this is a subject where it helps to get more specific – jump on the thread here.
https://twitter.com/leeflower/status/981949979987099648
(11) GARDEN OF HOLES. Theory said there should be smaller holes around the monster Sgr A*; now there’s confirmation: “Dozen black holes found at galactic center”.
“The galactic centre is so far away from Earth that those bursts are only strong and bright enough to see about once every 100 to 1,000 years,” said Prof Hailey.
Instead, the Columbia University astrophysicist and his colleagues decided to look for the fainter but steadier X-rays emitted when these binaries are in an inactive state.
“Isolated, unmated black holes are just black – they don’t do anything,” said Prof Hailey.
“But when black holes mate with a low mass star, the marriage emits X-ray bursts that are weaker, but consistent and detectable.”
(12) EARWORMS FOR WHALES. Bowheads appear to have more-complex songs than the famous humpbacks: “The whales who love to sing in the dark”.
Over the course of three years, the whales of the Spitsbergen population produced 184 unique song types. The vocalisations were detected 24 hours a day throughout most of the winter each year.
“The alphabet for the bowhead has got thousands of letters as far as we can tell,” Prof Kate Stafford, lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, told BBC News.
“I really think of humpback whale songs as being like classical music. Very ordered. They might last 20 – 30 minutes. An individual [bowhead] song might only be 45 seconds to 2 minutes long, but they’ll repeat that song over and over again,” the University of Washington researcher added.
(13) GIVING MARS HIVES. NASA will throw a little cash at this idea: “NASA Wants To Send A Swarm Of Robot Bees To Mars”.
A Japanese-American team of engineers is working to send a swarm of bee-inspired drones to the Red Planet with new, exploratory funding from NASA. Yes, bees on Mars. The team calls the concept “Marsbees.”
NASA selected the idea as part of its “Innovative Advanced Concepts” program, which annually supports a handful of early concept ideas for space exploration. The team of researchers will explore the possibility of creating a swarm of bees that could explore the Martian surface autonomously, flying from a rover. The rover would act as centralized, mobile beehive, recharging the Marsbees with electricity, downloading all the information they capture, and relaying it to Earth’s tracking stations. They describe the Marsbees as “robotic flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.” Those oversized wings, in relation to their bodies, compensate for the density of Mars’ atmosphere–which is much thinner than Earth’s.
(14) BLACK PANTHER OVERCOMES ANOTHER BARRIER. According to The Hollywood Reporter: “‘Black Panther’ to Break Saudi Arabia’s 35-Year Cinema Ban”.
Black Panther is set to make some more history.
Marvel’s record-breaking superhero blockbuster — which has already amassed north of $1.2 billion since launching in February — will herald Saudi Arabia’s long-awaited return to the cinema world, becoming the first film to screen to the public in a movie theater in the country since it lifted a 35-year cinema ban.
(15) INCREDIBLES 2. Bravo, Edna is a fresh pitch for Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles 2, which opens in theatres June 15.
Icon. Artist. Legend. Edna Mode is back, dahlings.
(16) ROWAN ATKINSON. Universal Pictures followed up yesterday’s teaser with a full-length Johnny English Strikes Back trailer.
[Thanks to JJ, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Steven J. Vertlieb, Matthew Kressel, Jeff Smith, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]
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(13) I foresee no problems whatsoever with this plan. It will definitely not result in the planet being invaded by robot bees from Mars at some future time.
(14) They certainly picked a great film for the historic occasion!
Also on the Guggenheim Fellowship list, in Fine Arts, is Elizabeth LaPensee, a writer, artist and game creator who earlier won a Tiptree Fellowship. (The Guggenheim is much more lucrative.)
Jeff Smith: Thanks for the assist, I’ll add that in.
(13) To the tune of Yesterday
Robot bees, were tired of flying into trees,
Now they live were there ain’t no seas,
Oh Mars is fine for robot bees
Suddenly, the bees aren’t where they are supposed to be,
There at the poles digging furiously
Oh robot bees teraformingly
Why they had to fly
To the poles
And nearly freeze?
They found, something bad
Now I’m sad
For robot bees
Robot bees, fighting ancient martian zombie fleas
Trapped for eons in a polar freeze
Oh robot bees are hard to please
Monster fleas wiould conquer Earth quite easily
But they can’t defeat a robot bee
Our last defence is an apiary
Why they fight so tough
Is it enough,
To kill the fleas?
They sting twice as hard
They’re battle scared
Those robot bee-ee-ee-ee-ees
Robot bees, fought on Mars apocalyptically
They went and saved humanity
Oh robot bees beat zombie fleas
robot bees beat zom-bie fleas….
Ha, the song was just a ruse to grab fifth!
14) I’m shocked, absolutely shocked that an absolute monarchy picked the most pro-monarchy film out there. Realistically, I’m sure timing of rights negotiations had something to do with it, but still- it’s interesting this is the one movie with a hero king.
THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE KNOW YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTHMEN. WE HAVE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO YOUR CONTINUING ACTS OF AGGRESSION, BUT BEES? ROBOT FUCKING BEES, NOW?(13) GIVING MARS HIVES
Huh, I guess they’ve read Dogs of War as well.
@Camestros, Niall
Why don’t we have a like button around here?
13: As long as they don’t develop a hand held launcher for the bees when manned landings start it should be fine.
And 2: Of course we’ll keep doing it.
(2) Anne Leckie:
And thank God for it. We could hardly keep going blithely on our way, stealing whatever we find useful or entertaining in other languages, if we had English Police. As one of Leckie’s commenters said, as long as we hold the line on apostrophes, I’m fine with nearly anything else.
Anime director and Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata has died.
He was probably best known for Grave of the Fireflies, although Pom Poko and the Academy Award nominated Tale of Princess Kaguya are probably of more genre interest.
The French language, of course, does have a governing body, the Académie française, whose forty members officially decide what is or is not proper French.
How many French speakers pay attention to this august body and its pronouncements? It could be as many as forty.
Morning.
Let’s try that again, this time ticking the box.
Clearly, actual thought is too much to ask of me right now.
A piece I wrote about some of Takahata and Miyazaki’s pre-Ghibli TV work: https://mostlyfilm.com/2017/08/22/the-roots-of-ghibli/ — though the only genre piece I said much about was mostly Miyazaki’s work.
10) This thread from Annalee appeared, at least from my timeline’s point of view, to be a response to a post by Patrice Sarnath made about how American cons were not up to the snuff that her experience of UK cons was. Said author is in fact from the US.
http://www.patricesarath.com/the-writing-life/follycon-wrapup/
Paul Weimer: This thread from Annalee appeared… to be a response to a post by Patrice Sarnath
She appears to have gone to a number of U.S. cons. It would be interesting, as Flower Horne pointed out, for her to be specific about which cons’ programming she found lacking, and specifically why.
Two letters to the convention community
“The pressure from media cons and the aging of fandom means that cons are threatened as never before. We need to bring in the anime fans, the cosplayers, and the media fans and show them that they can have as much fun here — and for far less money — than at a big ComiCon or Comicpalooza… But let’s try to get our mojo back, hmm?”
@Bookworm: not just a hero king, but a young hero king, who recently have taken over from his father. Sounds like sweet music for the Saudi crown prince.
(13) Hm. Kage Baker had robot bees (called biis) in “Empress of Mars.”
(15) I want a standalone Edna Mode movie.
13) Are they going to use the Boston Dynamics BigDogs for transport/launch platforms?
Andrew, I want a standalone Edna Mode movie.
The Devil Fears Edna?
Edna-Porter?
Can a bee be said to be
Or not to be
A Martian bee
When electric bees
Are flying free
Over some dry Martian sea
D’you see?
La dee dee, one two three,
Eric the Martian bee.
A B C D E F G,
Eric the Martian bee.
Is this electric droney-bee,
From Planum Solis to Planum Lunae,
An explorer from some space colony?
No! It’s Eric the Martian bee!
Andrew says Hm. Kage Baker had robot bees (called biis) in “Empress of Mars.”
If you’d like to hear Kage reading Empress of Mars, we’ve got it courtesy of her here. Nightshade Books recorded it for a limited edition book and CD package that never got done.
@Cassie B. – Exactly!
@Nigel: Applause
@Cat: Thank you. By the way, I remember you from the larryniven-l discussion list.
Cat Eldridge: If you’d like to hear Kage reading Empress of Mars, we’ve got it courtesy of her here.
Thank you. What a gift, and a delight, to hear her voice and sly humor — though it makes me grieve for her loss all over again.
To bee, or not to bee: that is the question.
Michael Caine: We’ve been fighting a losing battle against the insects for fifteen years, but I never thought I’d see the final face-off in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They’ve always been our friend. – The Swarm
JJ says Thank you. What a gift, and a delight, to hear her voice and sly humor — though it makes me grieve for her loss all over again.
You’re welcome. She was, in emails and on the phone, amazing in conversation. Her last few years were rough on those of us who know her health was very bad.
Her theory that parrots are actually space dinosaurs is extremely amusing and based on the antics of Harry, her parrot, who now lives with Kathleen, her sister. I’ll dig that story up and post a link here.
“O PIxel, where is thy Scroll?”
(2) Evolving language? Blasphemy! The English language was dictated by God to King James, and it behooves us to keep it just the same as it was. (Perhaps I have fallen short in this regard, but I have been forgiven. It is thou must change thy ways!)
Other comments remind me that I just happened on something good. Cathy told me that Amazon Prime picked up Monty Python. I hadn’t realized the full implications of it until I was packet surfing last night: “Mission: Impossible” (the original series) led me to a recommendation for “Stanley,” a Buddy Hackett sitcom, and that in turn led me to a recommendation for “At Last: The 1948 Show”! There are eight episodes—I didn’t know there were that many! I watched the first, and it includes the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, which is my favorite bit of Python, even though it’s from this series and they never did it on the show (they have done it in their live shows). As I was leaving, I saw that they also have “Do Not Adjust Your Set,” which also includes the Bonzo Dog Band, so last night was a good one indeed.
And just before I woke up, I dreamed of Graham Chapman and Terry Jones, in sketches nobody else on earth has ever gotten to see. One involved clumsiness in a lighthouse with millions of spiral steps (“Let’s do that again!”), and the other involved an array of humans impersonating a blossom and its eventual decay. Sort of conceptual.
Also: Dr. Poo! (content warning: it’s from VIZ comics, 1990s—contains references)
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CVpK352m5q8/UpBYvzMVYFI/AAAAAAAACBs/iK7RYPDmZws/s1600/doctor+poo+scan.jpg
Camestros, Niall, Nigel, et al.: Applause, applause.
(1) Add a jug of coffee and all the major food groups will be covered: sugar, salt, caffeine, and grease.
Tor.com is giving away free e-copies of Martha Wells’ Hugo-nominated novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries #1, until midnight Monday, April 9.
I love this novella with the passion of a white-hot sun. 😀
JJ, a footnote: I went to take advantage of the offer (as I generally do) and was told I’m not enrolled in the program. This is far from the first free Tor book I’ve clicked on, so it looks like they’ve purged their rolls. Of course, it was simplicity itself to get back onto the yellow rubber line, but I was still a little miffed. (You know how easily I miff when I forget my miffscreen and miffstick.)
There are robot bees in Queen City Jazz, too, though on a slightly different scale.
There’s an episode of the past season of Dr. Who which features nanotechnology gone rogue ion (IRRC) a future Mars colony. When the nanotechnology swarmed, it looked a lot like bees.
All Systems Red, the first Murderbot novella is this month’s free Tor ebook: https://www.tor.com/2018/04/06/free-ebook-all-systems-red-martha-wells/
Look out, Martians!
. .
.
@10 (and @JJ’s links): she sort of breaks her own theme by saying “There *are* generalizations that can be made about US Cons, their culture, and their format” a few tweets down; unfortunately, she doesn’t say what those are, to say nothing of producing evidence that those generalizations don’t apply to programming in (e.g.) the English-speaking world or even more widely. But I agree with her observation that Sarath isn’t seeing what US cons do; I don’t know anything of ConDFW, but from what I’ve heard I’d expect Armadillocon to be as in-depth as the Eastercon panels cited — if not there are certainly the cons that Flower Horne cites. (I’d also point to Potlatch, but their website is a couple of years out of date so I don’t know whether they’re still going.) In fact, I wonder how many non-Texas cons Sarath knows (aside from WFC); her report could be read as assuming that Texas is typical of the US as a whole. I also note that Eastercon is the UK national convention; my guess is that it makes more room for various kinds of specialized programming, just as a Worldcon does, where the US regionals that I know of commonly have more specific tones — which you can do when you have multiple cons in an area; e.g., Readercon is not Arisia, although I know people who go to both. (From some ancient comments about Texans’ not considering distance as much of a barrier as US-easterners do, I wonder whether ConDFW figures Armadillocon has enough of the programming Sarath wants to cover all of the I-35 corridor.) And wrt Sarath’s “Two Letters”, I wonder whether the kind of programming she asks for will draw ComicCon attendees — or whether trying to make a regional please everyone will end up with it pleasing no-one. I also wonder whether she’s ever volunteered to be on program planning; conventions frequently welcome people with new energy, provided they don’t come in with an I-have-your-only-salvation attitude.
So, just watched the season, and presumably series, ender of the Magicians.
Am I the only one who thought it was absolutely awful in the wrong way? And is it the way the books end? If so, why does Grossman have anything like a good reputation?
(Attempt to be spoiler free for the general rant)
I mean, it’s The Magicians. I wasn’t expecting things to end well for the characters. The whole point of the whole thing has been to rather imaginatively take apart many beloved tropes, and point out the flaws in our fond fantasy traditions. I’ve wanted to just throw out about half the characters at least half the time (though of course who I want to kill and who I kind of like for now changes sometimes by the episode, which is a good thing).
So screw them over in some way? Sure. I’d have been weirded out if it didn’t. I was expecting an ending where several people might die and those who live, even if they succeed (not a given), manage to make themselves miserable … again.
I was not expecting them to pull out one of the most hackneyed, overused, oldest, dullest, and WORST tropes of all time, and moreover, one I’ve seen since childhood. The series to this point has at least had some imagination about how to mess up and torment the characters. This felt less like the series’ natural middle finger to all the tropes of fantasy and watcher expectations, and more like a big fat middle finger to all the watchers, period. It’s the kind of thing which retroactively ruins the entire show. (And being a writer, my brain spent far too much time last night that could have been put to use sleeping rewriting endings which mess with all the characters much much worse. Honestly, it would be *so* easy…)
The ending of the Librarians annoyed me, too, for pulling a similar hackneyed shenanigan, but that was at least a series that embraced and adored its hackneyed tropes.
(13) I’ll be interested to see if they can make this work, but I’m not optimistic. A regular airplane needs to be almost supersonic just to take off on Mars.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
Since I met Sarath at a World Fantasy Con, I think her experience is wide ranging. Also, she doesn’t talk about US cons in the post Paul Weimer links, she talks about Texas cons. Her two letters linked by JJ don’t include any comparison to overseas, and they also don’t imply these things she’s asking for don’t happen in the US or have never happened; she’s giving general advice how to try and make cons good/better.
@Lenora Rose — Magicians S3? (Which, to be clear, I haven’t watched yet — I’m waiting to get it on Blu-ray.) FWIW, the series has been picked up for a fourth season.
“Start out Filing but I’ll take my time,
A friend of a Scroller is a friend of mine….”
[click]
(10) Since this appears to have begun with a review of Follycon it’s worth saying that (IMHO) it had a particularly good programme by Eastercon standards, particularly with respect to academic items and media criticism. Using this as the basis for reviews of UK cons is an overgeneralisation which tends to flatter us.
My particular favourite at the con was Smuzz’ analysis of how Dr Who had evolved over the years in parallel with changing British attitudes to class. It was also just as funny as you would expect from Smuzz.
@Kip W: JJ, a footnote: I went to take advantage of the offer (as I generally do) and was told I’m not enrolled in the program.
This happened to me also, even though I specifically enrolled in their ebook program just a couple of weeks ago.
Well, if there’s a fourth season they *might* be able to pull off something that redeems this. It’s if this is the ending of the story (and anything like how the book trilogy ends) that it stinks. If it’s another midstory plot bit – there are ways around it.
(To be clear, albeit in ROT13, since there’s a LOT that happens in the last few minutes:
vg’f abg gur Yvoenel engure guna bhe “urebrf” jvaavat, be gur zbafgre trggvat ybbfr (gubhtu lbh’q guvax gur yvoenel jbhyq unir fbzr pbzzba frafr nobhg gung), be gur yvxr, be rira gur zbafgre genpxvat qbja “Oevna”; vg’f tvivat gurz nyy n zrzbel jvcr gb erfrg gur fgbel. Vg pna or qbar va gur zvqqyr (Urpx, vg unccraf gb bar crefba irel rneyl va gur svefg frnfba bs *guvf* fubj) ohg vg’f n fgvaxre va na raqvat.
Vg jbexf jura vg’f qbar va gur Tbbq Cynpr orpnhfr vg’f n zvq-fgbel cybg cbvag, nyorvg n frnfba raqre, naq V jbhyq unir ungrq vg gurer vs gurer jnfa’g n frpbaq frnfba sbe gur fnzr ernfba. V’ir orra fvpx bs gung “rirelbar sbetrgf” raqvat fvapr gur ynfg Qnex vf Evfvat obbx, gunaxf.)
It’s renewed for another season — if it’s that fond of taking apart tropes, maybe that’s why it did this one in the first place?
Robot bees, physiologically,
Must, ipso facto, not bee be.
But yet these bees have got to be
Vis a vis, their entities. D’you see?