(1) AN APPEAL. [Item by rcade.] In a series of tweets Tuesday, Astounding Award winner Jeannette Ng asks for more nuanced takes on problematic elements of literary works and less pat conclusions about what they reveal about the author. Thread starts here.
One of the commenters references the literary critic F. R. Leavis.
Leavis was an influential British critic who took the position that a great work must be a demonstration of the author’s intense moral seriousness and that by reading it “the reader would acquire moral sensibility — a sense of what was true and good — which transcended social differences,” according to the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
(2) HE HAS THE ANSWER – DO THEY HAVE THE RIGHT QUESTION? “Fans campaign for LeVar Burton to host ‘Jeopardy!’” reports the New York Post.
… “Leaving this here in the event that the powers that be are listening,” Burton, 64, tweeted Monday alongside a petition started by a fan of the beloved “Star Trek” actor. The document boasted over 130,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning.
The petition comes amid a feverish push on Twitter for the wholesome television icon to host the gameshow.
(3) NEXT ON NETFLIX. Yahoo! assures fans “Jupiter’s Legacy Trailer Packs Superpowered Family Drama”.
…We also get brief snippets about the origin of Sheldon (a.k.a. The Utopian) and his cohort’s powers; the trailer ominously teases the long-ago events “on the island” that turned a group of mere mortals into superhuman beings. (This group would then bear the name The Union). More will reveal as the series approaches, and we’re looking forward to unwrapping some of these mysteries once it hits Netflix on May 7.
(4) BUSTED. In “Cracking the Case of London’s Elusive, Acrobatic Rare-Book Thieves”, Marc Wortman tells Vanity Fair readers
Impossible,” said David Ward. The London Metropolitan Police constable looked up. Some 50 feet above him, he saw that someone had carved a gaping hole through a skylight. Standing in the Frontier Forwarding warehouse in Feltham, West London, he could hear the howl of jets from neighboring Heathrow Airport as they roared overhead.
At Ward’s feet lay three open trunks, heavy-duty steel cases. They were empty. A few books lay strewn about. Those trunks had previously been full of books. Not just any books. The missing ones, 240 in all, included early versions of some of the most significant printed works of European history.
Gone was Albert Einstein’s own 1621 copy of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s The Cosmic Mystery, in which he lays out his theory of planetary motion. Also missing was an important 1777 edition of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, his book describing gravity and the laws of physics. Among other rarities stolen: a 1497 update of the first book written about women, Concerning Famous Women; a 1569 version of Dante’s Divine Comedy; and a sheath with 80 celebrated prints by Goya. The most valuable book in the haul was a 1566 Latin edition of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Copernicus, in which he posits his world-changing theory that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. That copy alone had a price tag of $293,000. All together, the missing books—stolen on the night of January 29, 2017, into early the next day—were valued at more than $3.4 million. Given their unique historical significance and the fact that many contained handwritten notes by past owners, most were irreplaceable.
Scotland Yard’s Ward was stunned. He couldn’t recall a burglary like this anywhere. The thieves, as if undertaking a special-ops raid, had climbed up the sheer face of the building. From there, they scaled its pitched metal roof on a cold, wet night, cut open a fiberglass skylight, and descended inside—without tripping alarms or getting picked up by cameras.…
(5) BOOKS FOR PRISONERS ASKED. [Item by rcade.] The shelves of the Appalachian Prison Book Project are running low on science fiction and fantasy, the charity revealed recently in a tweet:
The project sends free books to people imprisoned in Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
They seek new and used paperbacks only and have more detailed donation guidelines on their website.
“We receive about 200 letters every week from people incarcerated in our region,” a project coordinator told File 770 in email. “It’s a wide range of requests. Generally, people choose a few genres they are interested in to ask about in their letter. We have sci-fi and fantasy as two separate categories on our genre list, and we don’t include subgenres, so people choose whatever genres they want to read.”
Asked if there are particular preferences within SFF, the coordinator replied, “We occasionally get requests for specific authors, but unless they have a specific title in mind, most people list themes and topics. For example, thay may want to read books about time travel or vampires or wizards or interstellar exploration. It’s our volunteers who search through our donated books to find the best fit for them.”
The charity’s Voices from the Inside page shares testimonials from grateful prisoners about the books they’ve received.
A prisoner in Whiteville, Tennessee, praised a 2002 vampire novel by Simon Clark: “Thank you so much for my copy of Vampyrrhic! I loved it! As I have said before not many people want to fool with us old convicts.”
Donations of books should fill no more than two medium-sized boxes and be sent using the U.S. Postal Service to this address:
Appalachian Prison Book Project
PO Box 601
Morgantown, WV 26507
(6) CALLING 1984. Not that 1984. I mean the year that gave us Ghostbusters and the line “I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us. Mr. Stay Puft!” “Ghostbusters: Afterlife unleashes a mini Stay Puft army in first clip” – SYFY Wire sets the scene.
The iconic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is coming back in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but he’s a lot smaller and more numerous than you remember. In the first official clip from director Jason Reitman’s long-delayed film, seismologist Mr. Grooberson (Ant-Man‘s Paul Rudd) comes across a army of mini Stay Puft men while shopping for ice cream.
They’re wreaking absolute havoc in the store, riding around on Roombas and roasting each other on BBQs (their chaotic antics bringing to mind Joe Dante’s Gremlins and composer Rob Simonsen subtly pays homage to Elmer Bernstein’s eerie score from 1984). Don’t be fooled by their cuteness, though — Grooberson attempts to poke one of the Stay Puft men in the stomach — à la the Pillsbury Doughboy — with painful results.
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- April 7, 1933 — On this day in 1933, King Kong premiered. It was directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The screenplay was written by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose from an idea by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace. It stars Fay Wray, Bruce Cabot and Robert Armstrong. Critics mostly loved it, the box office was quite amazing and the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an astonishing ninety eighty percent approval rating. It has been ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the fourth greatest horror film of all time. You can watch it here as it’s very much in the public domain.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born April 7, 1882 – Ogawa Mimei. (Personal name last, Japanese style.) Called the founder of Japanese fairy tales. The 2018 collection under that name has “The Mermaid and the Red Candles”, five more. See another story here – I mean that, do see it. (Died 1961) [JH]
- Born April 7, 1915 — Stanley Adams. He’s best known for playing Cyrano Jones in “The Trouble with Tribbles” Trek episode. He reprised his role in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “More Tribbles, More Troubles” and archival footage of him was later featured in the Deep Space Nine “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode. He also appeared in two episodes of the Batman series (“Catwoman Goes to College” and “Batman Displays his Knowledge”) as Captain Courageous. (Died 1977.) (CE)
- Born April 7, 1915 — Henry Kuttner. While he was working for the d’Orsay agency, he found Leigh Brackett’s early manuscripts in the slush pile; it was under his guidance that she sold her first story to Campbell at Astounding Stories. His own work was done in close collaboration with C. L. Moore, his wife, and much of what they would publish was under pseudonyms. During the Forties, he also contributed numerous scripts to the Green Lantern series. He’s won two Retro Hugos, the first at Worldcon 76 for “The Twonky” short story, the second at Dublin 2019 for “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”. (Died 1958.) (CE)
- Born April 7, 1928 — James White. Certainly the Sector General series which ran to twelve books and ran over thirty years of publication was his best known work. I’ve no idea how many I read but I’m certain that it was quite a few. I’m not sure what else by him I’ve read but I’m equally sure there was other novels down the years. It appears that only a handful of the novels are available from the usual suspects. (Died 1999.) (CE)
- Born April 7, 1930 – Ronald Mackelworth. Five novels “usually involving complex but rarely jumbled plotting” (John Clute), a score of shorter stories. Here is a Barbara Walton cover for Firemantle. (Died 2000) [JH]
- Born April 7, 1935 – Marty Cantor, age 86. Long-time fanziner; self-knowledge entitled his Hugo-finalist (as we must now say) fanzine Holier Than Thou; with another, No Award, I could tell him “You are worthy of No Award, and No Award is worthy of you.” While he & Robbie Bourget were married they were elected DUFF (Down Under Fan Fund) delegates together, publishing two reports, one each, bound head-to-tail like an Ace Double; they were Fan Guests of Honor at Alternacon. MC later chaired Corflu 34 (fanziners’ con; corflu = mimeograph correction fluid, once indispensable), published Phil Castora’s memoir Who Knows What Ether Lurks in the Minds of Fen? Arrived among us in his forties, an exception to yet another theory. Earned LASFS’ Evans-Freehafer Award Los Angeles Science Fantasy Soc.; service). [JH]
- Born April 7, 1939 — Francis Ford Coppola, 82. Director / Writer / Producer. THX 1138 was produced by him and directed by George Lucas in his feature film directorial debut in 1971. Saw it late at night after some serious drug ingestion with a red head into Morrison — strange experience that was. Other genre works of note include Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a episode of Faerie Tale Theatre entitled Rip Van Winkle, Twixt (a horror film that I’m betting almost no one has heard of), Captain EO which featured Michael Jackson, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers Creepers 2. (CE)
- Born April 7, 1945 – Susan Petrey. Six novels, nine shorter stories. Her vampires are non-supernatural. Interviewed in Lightspeed. Good writing and an early death prompted a Clarion scholarship in her name. (Died 1980) [JH]
- Born April 7, 1946 — Stan Winston. He’s best known for his work in Aliens, the Terminator franchise, the first three Jurassic Park films, the first two Predator films, Batman Returns and Iron Man. (He also did the Inspector Gadget film which I still haven’t seem.) He was unusual in having expertise in makeup, puppets and practical effects, and was just starting to get in digital effects as well upon the time of his passing. I think we sum up his talent by noting that he won an Oscars for Best Visual Effects and Best Makeup for his work on Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Died 2008.) (CE)
- Born April 7, 1951 — Yvonne Gilbert, 70. Though best remembered for her controversial cover design of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1983 single “Relax”, she did a number of great genre covers including Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea for Bantam in 1991 and Beagle’s A Dance for Emilia for Roc in 2000. (CE)
- Born April 7, 1981 – Lili Wilkinson, Ph.D., age 40. A novel and two shorter stories for us; many others (I’m not counting e.g. Joan of Arc). Won a stopwatch in a Readathon. Established Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. [JH]
- Born April 7, 1982 – Zoë Marriott, age 39. Nine novels. Sasakawa Prize. Two cats, one named Hero after the Shakespearian character (hurrah! she’s so cool! – JH), and the other Echo after the nymph in Greek myth. Finishes a list of favorite songs with Spem in alium (hurrah! hurrah!). [JH]
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(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Shoe’s answer to a science question might qualify as science fantasy.
(10) SO THE ONE THING CAPTAIN AMERICA AND VOX DAY HAVE IN COMMON IS THEY BOTH DISLIKE THIS GUY? The Captain America comic portrays Red Skull as suspiciously close to Jordan Peterson…and Peterson decided to lean into it. Which is kind of hilarious. “Captain America supervillain the Red Skull has been behaving a lot like Jordan Peterson lately, thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates” at Slate.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian professor of psychology who was embraced by right-wingers in 2016 after refusing to honor his students’ requests to use their preferred pronouns, then leveraged his YouTube channel and fear of political correctness to build a career as a self-help guru to the alt-right. He also appears to be the basis for the current incarnation of Marvel’s Nazi supervillain the Red Skull, who has returned to the comic book universe courtesy of Between the World and Me writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is currently wrapping up a 2½-year run on Captain America, and in Captain America No. 28, which was released on March 31, the Red Skull has a YouTube channel that looked very familiar to Peterson, except for the red skull part…
If for some inexplicable reason you want a more serious look at the topic, there’s Camestros Felapton’s “A short Twitter diversion on Jordan Peterson” and The Mary Sue’s “Jordan Peterson Mad He Inspired Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Red Skull”.
(11) LATE NIGHT. In Stephen Colbert’s “Quarantinewhile…” segment a University of Illinois gymnast sticks his vault and then brandishes his COVID-19 vaccine certificate, immediately followed by a reference to our favorite AI researcher, Dr. Janelle Shane, who taught AI to generate pickup lines. (For the background, see Vice’s article “A Scientist Taught AI to Generate Pickup Lines. The Results are Chaotic”.
(12) CHINA’S ANSWER TO SPOT? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] IFL Science introduces a “Video Showing ‘Robot Army’ Released By Chinese Robotics Company”. The story includes two tweets with embedded videos. The one with a large number of robot dogs where they just stand up then lay back down appears to me to be real. The other one, where they do tricks together, is pretty clearly CGI layered over the real world.
Unitree Robotics appears to be China’s answer to Boston Dynamics, designing and manufacturing mobile, autonomous four-legged robots that are able to handle obstacles and right themselves after a stumble.
Their products are all variants of a similar dog-like design, including BenBen, Aliengo, Laikago, and A1….
(13) A TIDY PROFIT. AP’s story entitled “Man, a steal! Rare Superman comic sells for record $3.25 million” says that Comicconnect.com sold a copy of Action Comics #1 yesterday for $3.25 million, beating the old record of $3.2 million.
One of the few copies of the comic book that introduced Superman to the world has sold for a super-size, record-setting price.
The issue of Action Comics #1 went for $3.25 million in a private sale, ComicConnect.com, an online auction and consignment company, announced Tuesday.
It narrowly bested the previous record for the comic, set in the auction of another copy in 2014 for slightly over $3.2 million.
The comic, published in 1938, “really is the beginning of the superhero genre,” said ComicConnect.com COO Vincent Zurzolo, who brokered the sale.
It told readers about the origins of Superman, how he came to Earth from another planet and went by Clark Kent.
The seller of this particular issue bought the comic in 2018 for slightly more than $2 million.
(14) DISCOVERY’S NEW SEASON. “Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Trailer Faces an Unknown Threat” promises Coming Soon.
Paramount+ has released the first trailer for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery, which is set to premiere later this year. The video features Sonequa Martin-Green’s Captain Burnham as she leads the crew against an unknown threat that could possibly destroy all of them without any warning.
(15) BURGER COSPLAY. [Item by Daniel Dern. Except for tasteless quote selected by OGH.] Given Kevin Smith’s sf activities, e.g., writing comics like the (wonderful) Green Arrow Quiver series (plot arc?), some involvement with the semi-recent WB “Crisis” episodes (or at least one of the aftershows) and other stuff i can’t remember – let’s mention “Kevin Smith talks fast food ahead of his Boston pop-up restaurant ribbon-cutting”. (I saw this info as an article in today’s Boston Globe, but I know the MSN link isn’t paywalled..)
Boston’s House of Blues will transform into a pop-up Mooby’s, the fictional burger chain that appears in various Kevin Smith movies, April 8-16.
Fans will remember the mascot, Mooby the golden calf, that enrages Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s characters in “Dogma.” Chris Rock’s character eats at a Mooby’s in the same film. Mooby’s also appears in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and “Clerks II.”…
Q. So why Boston?
A. House of Blues reached out, and said: We’d do that. We never pressure anybody. We just wait for folks to reach out. The good thing about Mooby’s is it’s fake, so [no matter what building you dress up] people can’t say: ‘Well this don’t look like Mooby’s!’ Well what does? How many Mooby’s you been to exactly? Give us a day, and Derek will make it a Mooby’s.
Q. What’s your favorite menu item?
A. There’s a chicken sandwich in ‘Jay and Silent Bob Reboot’ called ‘Cock Smoker.’ We have that on our menu. It’s awesome to watch people try to order it in person. Generally everything is done on the reservation system in advance, but in LA, toward the end of the run, we opened it up [to walk-ins] and had four older ladies, each of giggling harder than the next when they ordered ‘Cock Smokers.’ I won’t get rich off restaurants, but that is wealth that you can’t measure.
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Godzilla Vs. Kong” on Honest Trailers, the Screen Junkies say the film has such poor continuity with its two predecessors that it has “characters who forgot to mention they were related,” “characters they forgot to mention entirely” and a major plot point that didn’t appear in the two earlier films. And watch out for Brian Tyree Henry as an annoying exposition-spouting podcaster! BEWARE SPOILERS.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Jennifer Hawthorne, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, John Hertz, Alan Baumler, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day rcade.]
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First!
I’m posting chocolate this week so anyone who claimed it in the last round should send me their address soon, so I can post your chocolate. Send me an email here.
Ooo. Chocolate.
2)I’d watch Burton as Jeopardy Host. For sure.
A new force of nature? https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/56643677
1) Good to hear Jeanette’s call for nuanced analyses of works. Works like the Turner Diaries aside, we can’t just view authors through simplistic either-or filters.
Paul Weimer says Ooo. Chocolate.
Your address I’ve got as you know. You’re getting Taza chocolate.
Now watching more of season seventeen of Law and Order
Scrollier Than Thou.
Mike Kennedy: Those Chinese robots were very interesting. Thanks for the link!
3) Am more than a bit disappointed that Jupiter’s Legacy is not, in fact, a continuation of Jupiter Ascending.
I was interested to read Jeannette Ng’s remarks. I wonder, however, if she would apply this to the late Astounding/Analog editor John W. Campbell, whom she denounced (with justification) for his obnoxiously racist editorials when she received the Astounding Award in 2019. Would she concede that his legacy as an editor and writer (for his “Don A. Stuart” stories) has any value in spite of its worst aspects?
Carl Rosenberg: Ng, as I understand it, is challenging a tendency to condemn artists for having anything “problematic” in their work, or perhaps, to believe an artist’s moral worth can be assessed from their work.
What Ng said about Campbell from the stage in 2019 wasn’t interpreted from the fiction he’d written. It was a reaction to Campbell’s lifetime of explicit statements about his own moral positions — nothing needed to be inferred or guessed about that.
Jeannette Ng addressed Campbell’s legacy as an editor in her acceptance speech when she said, “[H]e is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists.”
8) Pedantic quibble: Susan Petrey was profiled, not interviewed, in the 2014 issue of LIGHTSPEED where her story “Spidersong” was reprinted, some 34 years after her unfortunate early death.
Here’s the link to LIGHTSPEED’s “Author Spotlight” for Petrey.
12) Those murderdogs remind me of the murderdogs in the current TV series adaptation of War of the Worlds (recommended if you can handle grim).
@ Martin Wooster: De nada.
(14) Looking forward to it, even if I suspect, that “soon” means “fall”. Happy to be wrong though.
10) I have no idea what Petersen is saying on social media. However, I read his 12 Rules for Life, and I sincerely hope that’s not what’s being referred to as “self-help for alt-right”. I have plenty of criticism for the book: it’s too verbose, full of personal anecdotes I wasn’t really interested in, and the writing style gets quite exhausting. Had this been condensed to an essay in Harper’s Magazine, however, the 12 rules would have been viewed as common sense put on paper.
14) Stopped watching Discovery halfway through first season because it was too dark and depressing for me, but I am wondering: did they finally get the beds right? Or is still everyone sleeping on those narrow hard slabs with a semi-hard slab for a pillow and no blanket, instead of those delightfully inviting beds of TOS, TNG or Orville?
I have of late, I know not wherefore, lost all my sense of smell.
While I mostly agree with Ng, I have to say that considering how many ages we’ve had where the problems of problematic people were completely ignored, I don’t actually mind going too far the other way for a while! Maybe help restore the karmic balance a little. 🙂
I actually mind being unjust to artists and their work. I accept that vigorous rethinking brings excesses, but that doesn’t make excesses and errors good. I’d like to avoid them, and I’d like even more to avoid the reaction against them which inevitably comes.
In other news, I don’t much like the cyclical nature of human experience.
Maybe I should review the chocolate. It would expand my reviewing oeuvre
(its not so far fetched. I got some maple root beer recently and a couple of friends were intensely interested in how it tastes and how I could describe it)
@Cliff — that is a classic symptom of COVID-19, so you should look into the possibility.
Unless somebody found a trunk the Susan Petrey book I’m aware of is the single collection of stories.
@ David – sorry for the false alarm, I was just riffing on the earlier idea of famous literary quotes modified for covid. I actually received my first jab a couple of weeks ago and feel fine.
Not awake yet.
Medical stuff upcoming on Tuesday. Hope to find it’s all just a massive overreaction.
Want chocolate.
2
Odd this is necessary, but it’s probably a good feeling for him to be so supported. If I were a jeopardy! producer and burton’s rep called me about his interest in hosting, Id grab my calendar, you know. He seems a natural fit. What do I know?
Dear Jordan,
Quoting you and putting those quotes in Red Skull’s mouth is not parody.
It is an indictment.
Lis Carey on says
Not awake yet.
Medical stuff upcoming on Tuesday. Hope to find it’s all just a massive overreaction.
Want chocolate.
I got you a really cool chocolate bar. It’ll go out later this week when all the chocolate goes out.
Jeannette Ng’s call for smarter takes on problematic elements in books comes from the same place as her sharp critique of Campbell. In both cases she looked at something and called for smarter thinking into what it means.
With Campbell we as a community had been treating his name like an honor through inertia, as if the place of esteem he held 50 years ago was never worth reevaluation. I discovered SF as a child in the ’70s and I’ve not thought much about him beyond the broad strokes: powerful editor, mentor to future big names in the field and name on a trophy.
Ng took him and his ideas seriously. Her speech opened the floodgates on a lot of stuff I should’ve paid more attention to instead of accepting that he was worthy of association with SFF’s most talented new writers.
Joye Murchison Kelly, whose death I posted about a couple of days ago, has a nice obituary in the Washington Post.
I am old enough to have lived through the end of JWC’s career arc–I was a regular reader of Analog from c. 1961 onward–and I also have followed commentary on SF/F since then, so I recall how Campbell was perceived toward the end of his life and how his reputation has evolved since then. It was never unmixed admiration, and discomfort with his political views was as common as dismay at his support of crank technological and pseudoscientific notions.
What drove and maintained respect were his editorial skills–and the fact that his magazine paid good rates and remained a highly visible venue–Astounding/Analog was a market an aspiring writer would want to crack. (For years, in the 1950s, Jack Vance sent his stories to ASF first, and for years JWC rejected most of them.)
In the memories of readers and writers–especially those who, fifty years ago, had lived through the previous two decades of change the field had seen–Campbell had been a positive force, even if, for those left-of-center, a mixed blessing. Bully, blowhard, bigot, egotist, crank. Also somehow able to discover, encourage, and promote writers and to maintain a magazine across three decades.
We’re better off without hero-worship. “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?”
@ race
Jeannette Ng’s call for smarter takes on problematic elements in books comes from the same place as her sharp critique of Campbell. In both cases she looked at something and called for smarter thinking into what it means.
Hear hear, well spoken.
@Cat Eldridge–Thank you!
Have we done this Pixel Schroll title:
‘ “Of Mike, and Godstalk and Scroll” (later expanded to “DreamScroll”) ‘
Sorry about the typo above – had a problem with the keyboard.
(1) I wonder how events would have transpired if Ms. Ng had engaged in that sort of reflection before becoming the catalyst for removing John Campbell’s name from the Campbell Award. His many flaws still leave him well short of “Turner diaries” territory, IMO.
(10) I almost emailed Mike with this version of the story.
I used to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ columns a few years back as they provided a useful contrast as well as a unique perspective. Currently, I find John McWhorter’s perspective to be more illuminating.
Mr. Peterson’s fans have been having some fun on Twitter. Mostly “Hail Lobster” and memes with some of Mr. Peterson’s more innocuous aphorisms. [Not all of his ideas are necessarily innocuous, IMHO.] FWIW here are his “12 Rules” and “12 More Rules” that theoretically inspire the Red Skull. Dangerous and revolutionary stuff here…
12 Rules
“Stand up straight with your shoulders back.”
“Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping.”
“Make friends with people who want the best for you.”
“Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today.”
“Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.”
“Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”
“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).”
“Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie.”
“Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”
“Be precise in your speech.”
“Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding.”
“Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.”
12 More Rules
“Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.”
“Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.”
“Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.”
“Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”
“Do not do what you hate.”
“Abandon ideology.”
“Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.”
“Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.”
“If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.”
“Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.”
“Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.”
“Be grateful in spite of your suffering.”
Regards,
Dann
Quality, Speed, Price. Pick any two.
Burton would be a fun guest host, but I assume they will be looking for someone younger permanently. They want another generational host in there. Someone who’ll be in place for 20-30+ years.
@Cliff,
Whew!
That form of criticism which is biographical in nature misses the point that books are individual entities. Books may, or may not, express the personality or beliefs of the author. The idea that you can only critique a book based on the author’s personal life violates the individuality of the book. It is primarily a response to the need for a school of criticism that arose massively after World War II, when a great many soldiers had a single, autobiographical novel to write. I don’t think it is an appropriate tool for application to each and every book or story.
John W. Campbell, Jr., frequently said that he wrote a lot of his editorials, and published a lot of his peculiar ‘scientific’ articles with the main intent of putting the wind up his authors and challenging them to do what these days we would call ‘thinking outside the box.’ The writers complained a lot and satirized him, but they also took up the challenge of trying to write what he wanted. That Campbell bought what he ‘liked’ from that pile of submissions is evidence, on the one hand, of what kind of stories he liked, and on the other, what he figured his readers wanted to read.
If what he did contributed to the isolation of SF from the problems which, fifty years later, we are working to address, that is not surprising. For every Ralph Ellison being published there were hundreds of Grace Metalious imitators.
Examining the stories and the assumptions contained in the stories will certainly help illuminate the landscape which now begins to open up to ideas and possibilities which in Campbell’s day were well beyond the horizon.
But I would caution that it is seldom a good idea to want to change the past to match the goals of the present. That is what Dr. T. Bowdler did in his attempt to make Shakespear more ‘wholesome’ in the light of Victorian views on ‘what ought to be.’ Science Fiction has a history or writing prefaces to works set in the far future which advise the reader (of that far future) that the material they are about to read expresses the views and attitudes of a time long gone by, a time with primitive views which have been abandoned. Quite often the purpose of the preface is to satirize those times long gone by, but quite often also it is to prepare the reader (in our times) with a satirical view of the attitudes of the people of that far future.
What Campbell did understand was that this is not The Best of All Possible Worlds, that we, right now, might not be the the peak of evolution, that our current (50 years ago) society might not be the best we could do. That it was important to consider other possibilities, and that some of those possibilities might not be very attractive to us in time and place.
Reading Astounding in the Campbell era (while the United States was in the grip of McCartheyism and in dread fear of Communism) did not feel like a Right Wing experience. If anything, it felt way more Left, more radical, more dangerous, in its embrace of the What If… Seen from today it obviously looks quite different.
But Science Fiction is, and always has been, about the possibilities of the Future. It seems to me that the more time we spend worrying about the things we did in the past, the less time we may spend painting our own, hopefully better landscape of what the world could be.
Lis Carey says @Cat Eldridge–Thank you!
You’re most welcome.
Everyone who requested chocolate is getting it. It’s been packaged up and is ready to be posted.
I’m always confused by what people mean when they say this kind of thing in response to something like an award being renamed, a statue being removed, or an important personage of the past being viewed anew through modern eyes.
The past didn’t change when Campbell’s name was taken off an award. The present changed. Continuing to honor someone is a decision that belongs to us now. We don’t owe anybody in the past an obligation to continue to esteem the same people they did. The future doesn’t have an obligation to keep honoring our heroes either.
@John W. Campbell: If you fuck a goat, but only to challenge others to ‘think outside the box’, you’re still a goatfucker.
@ Soon Lee – thanks for the concern.
There are things I admire about Campbell as an editor and writer (his Don A. Stuart stories), but I agree with Patrick’s basic point. To portray Campbell as a contrarian who was trying to be a provocative devil’s advocate and try ideas on for size, etc., overlooks the question of why this contrariness so often went in reactionary directions. Did Campbell ever consider daring, provocative ideas in the other direction–women’s liberation, opposition to systemic racism, replacing capitalism with socialism, etc.?
@Carl Rosenberg: Indeed, the tenor of so many of his editorials can be summed up as “I don’t think we’ve given pointless cruelty a fair shake”. And I can’t recall any that go the other way.