(1) FOR THE LOVE OF SPOCK. A teaser trailer has been released for the Leonard Nimoy documentary.
(2) KEENE LEAVING HWA. Brian Keene cites over a dozen major organizational failures by Horror Writers of America in “Why and When I Will Begin Boycotting the HWA”, a list that ends —
*And most recently (as of today) allowing an avowed white supremacist and fascist who has previously demonstrated a bias against others based on their race, religion, etc. to participate as a Bram Stoker Award Jury member — an award which will include candidates of various races and religions…..
…Effective 1/1/17 (when the new year’s memberships become active) I will no longer work with anyone who is a then-Current member of the HWA, including writers, publishers, editors, etc. I will not give cover blurbs, introductions, or anything else. If I am asked to be in an anthology, and the anthology is being edited by a then-current HWA member, I will decline. If I am asked to submit a novel, and the publisher is a then-current HWA member, I will decline.
So… if you’d like to work with me in 2017, or you’d like my help with something going forward, I’m very happy to — provided you are not a member of the HWA as of January 1, 2017. Consider this an eight-month notice, which I think is more than fair.
I realize that this decision will put me at odds with both dear friends and fellow mutually-respected peers. That’s okay. It won’t be the first time that has happened. But this is my decision. I am not a Conservative or a Progressive, and I hold the extremists in both camps with contempt. But I am a human being, and a father, and I know what is right and what is wrong. Discrimination of someone based on their race, religion, creed, etc. is wrong.
We endorse things by our participation in them. This current debacle — and previous debacles — are not things I endorse, and I will not, in good conscience, contribute my name, my money, my talent, my draw, or my platform to them.
(3) BE MY GUEST. This is not a problem File 770 has, however, Melanie R. Meadors’ advice to prospective guest bloggers makes a lot of sense — “How to Write a Publicity Query Email That Won’t get You Blacklisted by Bloggers” at Bookworm Blues.
8. Offer them content that will draw readers to their blog. Bloggers are not your bitches. They aren’t working for you. They have a blog because they want people to read them. The harsh reality is that book spotlights get skimmed or skipped. No one cares. Anything that is easy for you, the author, is usually the least effective. Bloggers want content. They want an author’s unique view of things, they want to offer their readers something to entertain and inform them. They want something that will be shared on social media. And really, that’s what YOU want, too. You are doing a publicity tour so that you can actually reach readers. Not just so you can check off a box that says “stuck crap up on the internet.” Spotlights don’t reach readers in a memorable way. Posts that make them laugh, let them hear your voice, and show them who you are hit readers in a positive way that will make them click on the link to your work so they can learn more. That type of content is good for bloggers and is good for you. Tell them what type of post you are interested in, and if possible, even offer them a topic.
(4) STANDING UP. Randall at Catalyst Game Labs wrote his “I’m Standing Up” post before Ken Burnside’s appeared, but he subsequently linked to Burnside which is how I came across it:
I’ve certainly not been perfect. I can look back across a lifetime of con attendance and gaming and cringe now and then at stupid comments I’ve made. And for that, I publicly apologize to any woman who ever felt as though I didn’t respected her, or made her feel as though she is less valuable as she is to our hobby, community, and industry.
And perhaps for that very same sense, there are men who feel ashamed to stand up. Well shake it off. Do the right thing. Stand up. This will only change if we shine a bright enough light down into those repugnant currents. If we get enough people saying this is not okay we just might push those currents down where they’re too afraid to come out any more.
Now let me be absolutely clear, here: Harassment or bullying of any sort against anyone for any reason—be it gender, race, religion, you name it—is not okay. And if I hear anyone around me gatekeeping with that tired old mantra “you’re not a real gamer,” I’m gonna slap that down. Catalyst employees know this and swiftly take care of any such situations. (If anyone has ever had any issues that were not treated appropriately by one of our employees or Catalyst agents, feel free to email me [email protected] and I’ll immediately follow up). So this filth laps onto far too many. But it seems pretty clear to me over the research I’ve done that women, by a large margin, take the brunt of this hurt.
For anyone that feels even a moment’s regret over any of this, or experiences they’ve had, please spread this post. Plenty of others are doing the same and doing it well. But we need to do it more. I’m adding my voice to theirs to swell the chorus and shine a light on those currents.
And for all those amazing gamers that make the hobby brilliant for millions of people all over the world, thank you!
I’m a white, male gamer. And I’m standing up.
(5) ASIMOV DEBATE. The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate topic “Is the Universe a Simulation?” was discussed by panelists on April 5 at The American Museum of Natural History.
What may have started as a science fiction speculation—that perhaps the universe as we know it is a computer simulation—has become a serious line of theoretical and experimental investigation among physicists, astrophysicists, and philosophers.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, moderated a panel composed of David Chalmers, Professor of philosophy, New York University; Zohreh Davoudi, Theoretical physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Gates, Theoretical physicist, University of Maryland; Lisa Randall, Theoretical physicist, Harvard University; and Max Tegmark Cosmologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(6) BILLIONS BEYOND FANDOM. Martin Morse Wooster passed along two fannish points from a profile of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman by Nicholas Lemann in the October 16 issue of New Yorker.
1. In middle school in the mid-1980s, Hofmann was a game tester for Chaosium, located near Hofmann’s home in Emeryville.
“Hoffman got himself into one of the groups, and then returned to Chaosium, offering to correct errors he had found in a set of role-playing scripts for Dungeons & Dragons that the company had published. He wrote a detailed memo and took it to Steve Perrin, a major game developer (All the World’s Monsters, RuneQuest, Elfquest) who was working at Choasium at the time. ‘He looked at it and said, ‘This is good feedback,’ Hofmann says. So they gave me another scenario pack to review. He also began writing reviews for Different Worlds, a gaming magazine that Chaosium published, and getting modestly paid for his work.”
2. Peter Thiel, a friend and college classmate of Hofmann’s, said that Hofmann “was entranced by Snow Crash, a science-fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992, which takes place in a twenty-first century California where government has collapsed and people create avatars and try to find a new way to live through a technology-based virtual society called the Metaverse….
….Hofmann was playing with a set of ingredients that he had first explored at Stanford, with Thiel and others–fantasy gaming, computer technology, philosophy–and thinking about whether there was a big idea that could enable him to have a major effect on the world, first through a business and then through the creation of an entire social system.”
“So sf and fandom is responsible for LinkedIn!” says Wooster, and he asks, “Can we collect royalties?”
(7) FIRST LINES. Rachel Swirsky studied her first lines and other authors’, now the third installment in her series answers the question “First Lines Part III: What Can They Do?”. Here are two of her seven points:
After giving close reading to a dozen first sentences, half mine and half others, I’m ready to make a list of things that a first line can do (although probably no first line should try to do all of them).
- Include a mystery the reader wants to solve by reading the next sentence.
- Set a fast reading pace.
(8) FINNISH WORLDCON’S FIRST PR. Worldcon 75, to be held in Helsinki in 2017, has issued its first Progress Report. Download it or read it online here. The contents include:
- Tips on small talk with the guests of honour
- Finland: An assortment of notes and information
- The word for Worldcon is Maailmankongressi
- Finnish fandom: Some unique characteristics
You can go directly the online magazine (done in a format where you digitally flip pages) by clicking here.
(9) TOHO BRINGS BACK GODZILLA. Kotaku says “Japan’s New Godzilla Movie Looks Awesome”.
For the first time in over a decade, there’s a new Godzilla movie coming from Japan’s Toho Studios. This one’s being directed by none other than Neon Genesis’ Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Terhi Törmänen, David K.M. Klaus, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Oh, I am SO there on 7/29…. until then, well… I’ll be in my bunk.
Second!
Thirdeth!
Good on Randall for joining the anti-harassment chorus.
Pre-fifth?
Actual fifth?
Ah, LinkedIn. Or, as I like to call it, Facebook for Unemployed People.
(9) TOHO BRINGS BACK GODZILLA.
…whoa. Now I’m imagining Godzilla rampaging to the Evangelion track “Decisive Battle”. That’s pretty cool.
(Here’s hoping it won’t end in red goo 😉 )
@Jim
Oi. It’s also Facebook for People Currently Employed but Looking for Headhunters
(3) BE MY GUEST. This is not a problem File 770 has
The standards are low (I post here), but there are standards…
PSA:
Not sure if either of these have been mentioned but one of the current Humble Bundles is a Wordfire Press sci-fi bundle (the other is the whole Demon Wars Saga by RA Salvatore as audiobooks -116 hours of listening, if you’re into that sort of thing)
On Storybundle there’s a collection of 10 fantasy novels from Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. (The Aurora Award bundle is also still active for anyone who still wants that)
(9) TOHO BRINGS BACK GODZILLA
The shots of arrayed tanks in that trailer really remind me of the first ep of Eva.
All right, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a novelette in the April/May Double Issue of Asimov’s — so I gave in and told Amazon to put me on a 30-day free trial subscription.
The question now is whether I will be able to keep up with Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons et al, when I am really a novel reader and struggle to get myself to read short fiction.
We could probably stand being told Mankind is the 18th Godzilla, though.
I am so looking forward to Summer 2017 and Helsinki.
@JJ
It’ll be fine. It’s just like having a slightly out of control novel tbr, except that they put dates on the covers to shame you with.
Since no-one else seems to have mentioned it, Gareth Thomas, who played Roj Blake in Blake’s 7 has died at the age of 71.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36041534
@NickPheas
I just saw that as well. Bummer.
I’m far too excited for this year to worry about 2017. Balticon next month, AwesomeCon in June, I close on my house at the beginning of August, I’ll be at WorldCon in middle of August, the finances should finally allow me to play on Black Friday and Christmas, and then I’ve got tickets for Hamilton come January.
Blood Mage has taken a weird turn. The first book was Grimdark/GD Adjacent/ but this one seems to be slipping into New Weird.
;;godstalk::
@JJ: Oooh, I’m reading that issue now!
Haven’t reached Rusch’s story yet, but Van Pelt’s “Three Paintings” was excellent.
@JJ: Perhaps more to your point: you can’t read it all. Can’t be done. (Don’t forget Tor.com, Apex, Uncanny, The Dark, Giganotosaurus, Fireside, Lackington…)
And if your struggling to read, it’s not something you should be forcing yourself to do!
Find a few you really like. A few magazines, or a few reviewers whose tastes you enjoy reasonably often. Or try a different magazine each month. Any pattern that works for you, works.
It’s good enough 🙂
Today’s read — A Crown for Cold Silver, by Alex Marshall
A fantasy novel of the grim & gritty school, about an ex-general/ex-queen returning to an active role in world events after a 20 year retirement. It was … hmm. I mean, I liked it. The characters were interesting, there were some neat twists and great moments. But somehow it just never grabbed me and shook me. I’m not sure I can exactly articulate why, which is frustrating. I might or might not get the sequel.
@Jim, @snowcrash:
And it’s Facebook for the friends of unemployed people. Which is why I have a long-abandoned profile.
@Kyra,
It took me like 30-40 percent of the book to actually care about what was going on to the characters, and then after the non-ending I promptly stopped again. I’m not going to be picking up the sequel.
@Kyra – I wanted to like that one but, ultimately, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about what was going on with the old or the characters. At the time I blamed my mood while reading it, but I’ve decided that it just wasn’t for me. I do think it could have been edited to be shorter and more compelling. Sometimes bigger isn’t better.
I’m far too excited for this year to worry about 2017. Balticon next month,
I shall also be at Balticon. Are any other Filers going? Should we have a File meet-up?
@Kyra, the characters were a little too flawed for me, and then I started to get annoyed at the lack of communication between certain of them. I liked a lot of the world building tho, and the plot certainly had twists.
I think people are articulating what failed for me about the book much better than I did. 🙂
> “I started to get annoyed at the lack of communication between certain of them.”
Yes. As one example, the book had already gone one too many times to the well of “X tells Y a lie about Z, and Y believes it” when it went there yet again.
> “It took me like 30-40 percent of the book to actually care about what was going on to the characters, and then after the non-ending I promptly stopped again.”
Yes. The Very. Slow. Build. of “why am I interested in what these jerks are doing?” made it hard to get into. But then, to give the author credit, I STARTED to care about what these jerks were doing, which is why I’m not writing the book off completely. And then we were suddenly done OK bye.
I think one of the problems is that I was more interested in a non-POV character (Taipan Purna) and an infrequent POV character (Ji-hyeon) than I was in one or two of the frequent POV characters (like Sullen). And I had gradually become interested in Maroto, but became so irritated with him at the very end that I’m not sure I care what happens to him in the future.
> “At the time I blamed my mood while reading it, but I’ve decided that it just wasn’t for me.”
Yeah, I kind of had the same reaction. I had a “this is similar to a kind of thing I usually like a lot, why isn’t it doing it for me? was I in the wrong mood?” moment soon after I stopped.
> “I do think it could have been edited to be shorter and more compelling.”
I think this is probably true. The whole Raniputri thing could have been cut without losing much of anything, I wouldn’t have minded less time spent with Sullen or Portolés, and it took an awfully long time to get to one big reveal I saw coming from a mile away (it was obviously going to be Ji-hyeon).
I seem to have volunteeree to Svecon this summer. You have a bad influence on me. I used to be so happy staying at home.
Bad influences: I’ve done three cons in recent memory, two of them including volunteering, one without. Much more fun with the volunteering.
New announcement from MAC2:
Hugo Award Nominations Shatter Records; Finalists to be Announced April 26
I’m pretty sure that many nominations is good for everyone but the puppies.
That’s a really phenomenal number of nominations. I am curious whether the 5% rule comes into play. Of course, by the time that data is released, I will have entirely forgotten that curiosity.
Also, I just joined MAC2. Supporting, because I prefer two weeks at Pennsic to one week at Worldcon.
@alexdvl
Maybe. It depends on number of slate voters, slate discipline, and how scattershot the non-slate votes are. Probably good news but not necessarily.
I know there are folks here who have run the math. Anyone remember the estimated proportion of slate to non-slate voters necessary to neutralize a slate in straight up first past the post voting?
Hmm. I think 4k voters is still in the danger zone considering the possible puppy turnout, but it’ll depend heavily on factors like coherence (hopefully very low from the sad side, inevitably high on the rabid) and whether less popular categories get more attention from non-slate voters. We simply won’t know for sure for a fortnight.
Even if every puppy voter from Sasquan carried on to nominate this time then the vast majority of that increase must still come from non-slate voters, which shows a great response.
From the Brian Keene link, one of the things he mentioned was “Forgetting to hold elections for officers in 2016.” and seriously, how does that even happen.
I am happy to allow the puppies the particular Xanthos victory condition of “We have driven levels of nominations up to record levels.”
Chaos Horizon produced a scenario with 3620 voters (and is probably feeling quite smug right now!) in which rabid picks were successful if they piggybacked on either sad or normal picks, but not otherwise.
This is hopefully bad news for the estimable Mr Tingle, but not necessarily for JCW. Depends on who those extra 400 are.
Lowell Gilbert on April 14, 2016 at 7:31 am said:
Remember that the rule applies only within each category, so it’s not a requirement that the 4th and 5th-place finalists have 5% of 4000 (200) nominations, but that they have 5% of the nominations cast in that category. Thus the threshold is different in each category.
(Note: I have no inside information. The announcement I posted to THA.org this morning quoted above is from a MAC II press release.)
The record-shattering number of nominations may go some distance to explain the stress on the confirmation-email process! If I had to make a wild-ass guess, I’d say the increase comes very simply from the increased general awareness of what nomination is all about and that it’s for everyone, not just for people who have read exhaustively in the field.
> “Chaos Horizon produced a scenario …”
For novels. I would not assume those predictions are applicable to other categories; there are a number of reasons they wouldn’t be.
I will be at Balticon as well.
Yeah… the five percent rule might mess up the down ballot. :/
More viewing: Here are the rest of the spring anime premiere links and and reviews, except for Big Order which is debuting today.
@Kyra
True, number of noms made within each category and diversity of choices comes into play quite heavily.
@Stoic Cynic
Yes, I ran the math. The numbers were upsetting, so I never published them for fear of discouraging people from voting. Given a couple of assumptions, organic voters needed to submit 7,000 ballots to prevent the slate voters from sweeping the written-fiction categories. Since we only got 4,000 (and that includes the slate votes too), it doesn’t look good.
However, let’s look at those assumptions.
Assumption #1: The slate vote will be 586, and they’ll manage slate discipline in all five slots of all four categories. (Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story.)
That 586 number comes from the number of people at Sasquan who voted Vox Day for best short-form editor, all of whom were presumably eligible to nominate this year. If only half of those people nominated in all five slots, then the slate would still sweep all but Best Novel. To fail to dominate all four categories, the slate has to fail very badly indeed.
Of course the slate may do much worse than that, since even last year we saw that discipline dropped off as they went down the slate. Many slaters may have lost interest since then. The ones who’d imagined they were a majority might have dropped out after the Sasquan final vote last year. We really have no idea how many of them will really vote in all five slots.
The number of votes for “Space Raptor” will probably be our best clue as to the actual number of hard-core slate voters, the ones who just want to destroy the Hugos.
Assumption #2: The organic vote will follow the same power-law distribution it followed in the previous four non-slate years.
With extremely high correlation (0.95 or better), nomination votes in prior years followed a power-law distribution, with different exponents for different categories. This makes it easy to predict how much an increase in nominating would increase number of votes for the #1 spot. (Or the #n spot, for that matter–they all scale the same way.)
So for best novel, if you doubled the number of nominations, then then number of votes for the #1 choice would go up by a factor of 2^0.62 or 1.54. For Best Novella, it’s 2^0.7 or 1.63. Best Novelette is 2^0.54 of 1.46. And Best Short Story is 2^0.59 or 1.50.
As a rough estimate, number of votes for the top category goes up as the square root of total nominations. That means that if the slate doubles its number of votes, the organic voters must quadruple theirs in order to keep up. This happens because organic votes are spread out over many different works while the slate votes in lockstep.
What would break this assumption would be if this year people paid closer attention to the various nomination lists and concentrated their votes among fewer works. It would be enough if the recommendation lists simply reminded people of excellent works they might have otherwise forgotten to nominate. “Oh yeah! I remember that one! I loved it!” Works that in a normal year wouldn’t have earned so many votes, particularly in the shorter-fiction categories might end up on many people’s ballots which otherwise would have averaged just three nominees. Something like that would break the model entirely, boosting the organic vote for highly-recommended works by enough to beats the slate votes.
Summary: Expect a total sweep by the slate. If any of their nominees don’t make the final ballot, they have failed, and we all have something to celebrate.
Sad news…. He was also one of the good things about Star Maidens, of course. (And if you were to list all the good things about Star Maidens… well, it wouldn’t be a long list, that’s for sure.)
I really don’t think the five percent rule will come into play, because the RP voters are surely more than five per cent, so will fill up any spaces where legitimate nominees don’t get enough votes to qualify. (Slates have, in general, a similar effect to the five percent rule; they mean that a legit nominee needs at least five per cent to be considered.)
We don’t know, of course, how many categories all the nominators will nominate in. I can imagine a lot of votes in Best Novel and Dramatic Presentations, and then a massive falling off. Or there may be some categories where a lot of people vote for just one thing – e.g. Penric’s Demon.
So what do we think? Better or worse than last year? How many No Awards we got?
@Kyra
Brandon and I make a few different assumptions (e.g. I ignore the Sad Puppies entirely). He uses all sort of info for novels (e.g. Goodreads ratings) that’s not generally available for short stories. He’s trying to predict the actual nominees, while I’m only trying to predict whether any of them will be organic. And he limits himself to high-school math (for the sake of his audience).
This lets him predict that a couple of novels (Uprooted and Ancillary Mercy) will beat the curve. He may well be right. The number of much-talked-about novels is pretty small and they may break the curve by enough to make it onto the final list.