(1) FARSCAPE ON BIG SCREEN. ComicBookMovie.com reports “Rockne O’Bannon Officially Confirms FASRSCAPE Movie”.
After years of rumours, Rockne O’Bannon has finally confirmed that a Farscape movie is actually happening. The show was cancelled back in 2003 and a mini-series titled Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars was aired in 2004 to provide closure to the fans but it appears we shall be getting more Farscape in the near future. Confirmation comes from TV.com’s Ed Shrinker who had a friend that attended the Showrunners panel at Wondercon which O’Bannon was a part of.
(2) BEAGLE COMING TO BALTICON. Peter S. Beagle will be a Special Guest of Honor at Balticon 50, taking place over Memorial Day weekend in Baltimore, MD.
“It’s Peter’s birthday, but the fans are getting the gift,” says Beagle’s attorney, Kathleen Hunt.
(3) AXANAR IS DOCKED. In “’Star Trek: Axanar’ Fan Film Docked After Copyright Suit from CBS/Paramount”, Elizabeth Howell gives Space.com readers a status report on the lawsuit.
… According to Peters, Winston & Strawn subsequently filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. CBS and Paramount responded, he said, by amending portions of the complaint. The new complaint alleges that copyrights were violated in matters such as the pointy ears and “distinctive eyebrows” of Vulcan, the gold-shirt uniforms of Federation officers, and the Klingon language, according to documents posted by The Hollywood Reporter on March 13.
New motion to dismiss
In the meantime, the production of “Axanar” is on hold pending the result of the lawsuit. If the lawsuit is resolved in the film’s favor, Peters said, production will still be delayed, as it would take a couple of months to organize everything, including coordinating the actors’ schedules and resuming work on elements such as the costumes.
Winston & Strawn filed a new motion to dismiss on March 28. CBS and Paramount have yet to file a response in court.
“The motion provides examples as to how CBS and Paramount overreach in what they claim are elements protected under copyright, and fail to be specific as to exactly which copyrights have been infringed upon; and, in the case of the potential feature film Axanar, claims of alleged copyright infringement cannot be made against a film that doesn’t yet exist,” read part of an Axanar statement on the motion to dismiss.
(4) A THOUSAND WORDS IS WORTH A PICTURE OF A CAT. At Camestros Felapton’s blog, Timothy the Talking Cat has his claws out: “Ctrl-Alt-Delete – A Reviewing”.
[Timothy] No sarcasm. Don’t forget, this time I control the narrative. I can make you say anything. Say “I’m a poo-poo head”
[Camestros] I’m a poo-poo head.
[Timothy] OK say I’m a fish’s butt.
[Camestros] You are a fish’s butt.
[Timothy] Oops – forgot the speech marks. So back to the book – naturally you hated it?
[Camestros] You know I actually enjoyed quite a bit of it.
Despite what you might assume from this exchange, they spend most of their time reviewing books. But as today’s Top Level Poster I can quote whatever part I like.
(5) ICE FIVE. Theory: Game of Thrones is science fiction, not fantasy: “This Is the Most Insane and Compelling Theory for How the Wall in Game of Thrones Stands”. Esquire’s John Maher delves into the ideas advanced by vlogger Preston Jacobs.
Let’s go back to the Wall, a prime example in the case of Game of Thrones. Maybe there is some sort of magic keeping it up. “Or maybe,” Jacobs suggests, “there’s some sort of refrigeration unit.”
It seems farfetched, until you start digging deeper—and Jacobs, an auditor for the U.S. State Department by day, is an expert at doing just that. After re-reading the series a couple of years ago, he jumped right into reading the vast majority of Martin’s extant works, including every story that’s taken place in the author’s most frequently visited setting, a shared universe called the Thousand Worlds….
The Long Night itself seems to hint at the explanation for how this world—as Jacobs and other theorists do, let’s call it Planetos—became the way it was. A winter that lasts for a generation seems pretty hard to believe, even in a world with seasons as crazy as those on Planetos. In the first season of Game of Thrones, Tyrion discusses with Maester Aemon and Lord Commander Mormont the longest winter he’d ever lived through, and mentions it lasted three years. But as Jacobs points out, there is such a thing as a generation-long winter in the real world: a nuclear winter.
In the Thousand Worlds universe, humanity is at perpetual war with multiple hive-minded species—a form of life that pops up in A Song of Ice and Fire as well, and which Jacobs explores in detail in one of his theories. During this endless war, the hive-minded races typically destroy human worlds using nuclear weapons, wait a hundred years for the dust to settle, and then invade and enslave the survivors. And in the interim, something familiar happens, as it does on High Kavalaan, a planet in Martin’s first novel, Dying of the Light.
“I think the book that really made me think Westeros could be post-apocalyptic was Dying of the Light,” says Jacobs. “When he started writing about nuking people, with everybody hiding in mines and founding their own houses and holdfasts, it just occurred to me that the Long Night could be a nuclear winter.”
(6) HEINLEIN ON THE LINE. At the MidAmericCon II site, Toastmaster Pat Cadigan has blogged her fannish origin story.
Forty years ago, in the spring of 1976 in Lawrence, Kansas, the phone rang in the late afternoon, about an hour and a half before I had to go and teach a belly-dance class. When I picked up, a deep, warm-as-a-woolly-blanket man’s voice said, ‘Hello, Mrs. Cadigan. This is Robert Heinlein.’
And I freakin’ died.
Seriously; I died. This is my afterlife. Isn’t it great?
Okay, let me back up a little….
(7) HUGO TIME. It’s no coincidence that Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty and staff are doing a lot of work just about now:
First, on behalf of the Hugo administration staff and all the rest of the folks making preparations to run MidAmeriCon II, I want to thank all of the people who participated in our Hugo and Retro Hugo nomination processes. There were over 4,000 of you and that is a new record participation by quite a large margin.
There’s a large number of tasks we have to do to administer the Hugos. Identifying eligible nominators and voters, setting up servers and web pages to handle secure nominations and voting, answering hundreds of questions about the process for the members, making sure everyone’s nominations are counted appropriately even if they don’t use the same name for something they loved that all the other folks who loved it used or nominated it in the wrong category accidently, locating and contacting the potential finalists to get their acceptance and inform them of how the process works and what to expect, coordinating with convention events staff to run the awards ceremonies and pre-receptions, and numerous other tasks. The previous run on sentence would be staggeringly large if we tried to give a full accounting of everything the awards administration entails. It can be fun, it can be exhausting, and it can even sometimes be frustrating. When we do a good job, though, it’s very rewarding.
(8) HUGO LOVE FROM WORDPRESS. Kevin Standlee’s The Hugo Awards website came in for recognition today —
Featured @Jetpack site — the site of @TheHugoAwards, sci-fi's most prestigious award: https://t.co/t37s12jSWf pic.twitter.com/Pm89fNIe2E
— WordPress Discover (@WPDiscover) April 20, 2016
(9) NEIL GAIMAN. Gaiman on mourning Pratchett — “Good Omens, Cheap Seats, and the Memorial”.
I haven’t blogged for a long time, but right now I’m on a train, and it feels like a good time to catch up. This morning I was interviewed by Charlie Russell for his documentary on Terry Pratchett. (Charlie made the previous BBC Terry Pratchett documentaries, Living With Alzheimer’s, Choosing to Die, and Facing Extinction.) We did it in a Chinese restaurant in Gerrard Street, because Terry and I had first met in a Chinese restaurant, in February 1985. It was easy and pleasant, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I was talking about the last time I’d seen Terry, and what we said, and I found myself crying uncontrollably, unable to talk. And then I pulled it together, and we carried on….
The memorial the other night was beautiful. I wore my mourning frock coat that Kambriel made for me, and I went out that afternoon and bought a white shirt and a black tie. (Actually, I bought four shirts, which, given how often I wear white shirts, should take me easily to the end of my lifetime.)
I read the introduction to A Slip of the Keyboard, which I’d written for Terry while he was alive. I got sad at the end but that was fine. And I held it together just fine when Rob, Terry’s amazing right-hand man, presented me with a big black author’s hat Terry had left me. I couldn’t put it on, though. I wasn’t ready for that. (I tried it on later, in the dressing room. I looked, to my mind, like a rabbinical cowboy assassin. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)…
(10) MORE LIKE INDIE FOR SMART PEOPLE. Sarah A. Hoyt, in “Going Indie For Dummies: You Lays Down Your Money” at Mad Genius Club, begins her survey of professional services available to indie authors with a warning –
I cannot emphasize enough that you should at all costs avoid paying money up front to have any of the necessary stuff done to your book. Particularly if your indie ebook is a short story or a novella, it’s QUITE possible you’ll never see that money again….
Then she follows with a lot of practical experience. (And no, I am not picking this quote as a setup for predictable comments about Baen copyediting, but because writers in general suffer through this.)
b) Copy editing: even houses confuse this with “editing” and I’ll get a list of typos or repeated words from editors who are supposed to be doing high-grade structural. It’s what most people think of as “editing.”
PLEASE make sure you get a copy editor who actually knows what he/she is doing. Again it is too easy for a copy editor to screw with a book by making the wrong choices, and/or not getting what you’re trying to say. (I recently had a copy edit that suggested changing “calloused hands” to “callous hands” — yes, her hands are cold and unfeeling. What the actual F?) so several steps:
1- look for a copy-editor with references and call/email those references where the copy-editor can’t hear/read and ask for the real skinny and how hard they are to work with.
2- ask them what manual of style they use. If you get back “manual?” or “I just use sensible grammar” and this is a paid copy-editor it’s time to bail, ladies, gentlemen and fuzzy toys. There are many ways of doing things including punctuation (unlike what your grammar teacher told you.) I favor, for my own checking, Strunk and White which has a slightly British flavor. Most publishing houses use Chicago Manual of Style. Baen uses Words to Print (I think that’s the title.) You want to make sure your books are consistent, so make sure your copyeditor uses a style you can live with.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 20, 1841 — Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appears in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. The tale is generally considered to be the first detective story.
(12) TODAY’S OTHER HISTORY LESSON. Hmm. Good point.
I always thought it was ironic Andrew Jackson was on a bank note, considering his opinion of the national bank.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 20, 2016
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born April 20, 1937 — George Takei, age 79 today.
- Born April 20, 1964 – Andy Serkis
(14) IN BOOKS TO COME. “Andy Weir, Author of The Martian, Shares Details About His Next Novel” at The Smithsonian. Here’s a guy nobody will ever accuse of having SJW tendencies.
Your next book will have a woman as the central character. Given that “gender wars” in science fields is still a contentious topic, why did you decide to go with a lady lead? What kinds of challenges does your protagonist face, and does her gender play any role in those challenges?
I don’t take part in any political debates. So I’m certainly not trying to make a point by having a female lead. She’s just a character I came up with that I thought was cool, so she’s the lead.
The book is another scientifically accurate story. The main character is a low-level criminal in a city on the moon. Her challenges are a mix of technical/scientific problems, as well as juggling personal interactions—staying a step ahead of the local police, working with shady and dangerous people to do illegal things.
She doesn’t encounter any distinctly “female” challenges. There’s no love plot. And the story takes place in a future society where there is practically no sexism.
(15) NOT JUST TANG. The BBC discusses “Four ways NASA is teaching us how to live more sustainably”.
2. Clean water
In space, water is in short supply, so Nasa has developed an innovative way to filter waste water on the ISS using chemical and distillation processes. This lets it turn liquid from the air, sweat and even urine into drinkable H2O.
In fact, since 2008, more than 22,500 pounds of water have been recycled from urine alone on the ISS – something that would have cost more than $225m (£160m) to launch and deliver to the station from Earth.
“Most people are horrified when they see what we drink!” says Ms Coleman. “But the filtered water up there just tastes beautiful, it really is delicious.”
Nasa has since licensed the technology to companies on Earth, which have created portable filters for use in places where fresh drinking water is scarce.
Filters produced by US firm Water Security Corporation, for example, have been installed in villages across Mexico and Iraq, allowing residents to purify water from contaminated sources.
(16) RILEY INTERVIEWED. David Dubrow conducted an “Interview With David A Riley” after the author dropped off a Horror Writers of America award jury last week amidst controversy.
Why did you withdraw from the jury of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Anthology?
Because, as I saw it, that was the best thing to do for the good of the HWA. There is nothing prestigious or glamorous about being a juror. It does involve a lot of unpaid, unseen, arduous work reading an enormous number of books by authors or publishers or, in the case of anthologies, editors, keen to have their books included amongst the finalists for the Stoker awards. Of course the juries cannot add more than a few books, but it does mean reading all those submitted, good, bad or indifferent. I know from when I was a juror for First Novels this can be a hell of a chore. Standing down, therefore, was easy – it saved me a lot of hard work, some of it far from enjoyable. I only put my name forward because the HWA sent out a last minute email appealing for volunteers from active members for this position. I thought I was helping the HWA by stepping forward, never realising the reaction stirred up by certain individuals, some of whom already had a personal grudge against the HWA and are not even members….
Are you still part of the UK National Front?
I resigned in 1983 and have not been involved since.
A lot of people have characterized you as a fascist. Would you say that’s a fair description of your politics?
No. It’s an easy label to flash around, usually by those who are fascists themselves, particularly from the left. Fascists don’t believe in free speech and try to suppress it for their opponents. I have never in my life tried to do that. They are also prepared to use physical violence against their political opponents. I was never involved in anything like that. I would add that during the time I was involved in the party any member who associated with a neo-nazi group, either in Britain or overseas, faced expulsion. This, I can confirm, was enforced.
(17) EISNER AWARD MANGA. Brigid Alverson reviews six works in her post “This Year’s Eisner-Nominated Manga Shows What the Medium Can Do” at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog.
Nominees for the Eisner Awards, the top honors in the comics industry, were announced on April 19. This year’s nomnees in the manga category (technically, “Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia”) offer a range of different types of manga, from genre comedy to poignant literary works. As a former Eisner judge myself, I know how hard the choices are, and this year’s slate is exceptionally good. All these series are accessible to non-manga readers as well as longtime fans. Let’s dive in and take a look!
Assassination Classroom, by Yusei Matsui This was the surprise nominee, because it’s not exactly a highbrow series, though it is wickedly funny. The setup is totally over the top: a class of misfit high school students are assigned the job of killing their teacher, Koro-sensei, an octopus-shaped alien who has announced he will destroy the earth at the end of the school year. Armed with weapons that are harmless to humans but deadly to their teacher, they study his weaknesses and plot new attacks, and new assassins join the class as the series goes on. What makes it so fun (and so weird) is that Koro-sensei is actually a really good teacher, and he uses his superpowers to help his students as much as to evade their attacks. He’s quirky, overly fond of gossip, a bit self-indulgent, and he often finishes a face-off with an opponent by doing something silly like giving them a manicure. This is a series that shonen fans will particularly enjoy, as there are a lot of inside jokes about the conventions of the genre, but it’s also a fun action comedy for anyone willing to go all in on suspension of disbelief. There is a darker side to Koro-sensei, and occasionally he lets the jovial mask slip, adding a bit of edge. The judges nominated volumes 2-7 of this series for the award.
(18) STEM INTO STEAM. Wil Wheaton has posted “My speech to the 2016 USA Science and Engineering Festival”.
Which brings me to funding.
You’re never too young for science – getting children interested in the world around them, and asking them to try and figure out how things work is a fundamentally good idea. Curious children will naturally gravitate towards STEAM subjects. Let’s encourage that and make sure that a child who wants to explore that particular part of our world has everything she needs to get there, and keep learning about and making awesome things when she leaves. This is and will continue to be a challenge. Despite the clear and undeniable benefits of a comprehensive education, including science education, not only to individuals but to our entire society, we have allowed the funding of our schools to become part of the culture wars. This is as disgraceful as it is predictable. When so many of our poorly-named “leaders” deny scientific consensus on everything from climate change to vaccines, a scientifically literate and well-informed populace can be tremendously inconvenient to them and theiir corporate owners. Well … good. Let’s be inconvenient to them. Let’s educate and empower a generation who will be real leaders, and carry our nation into the future.
We all know that it’s possible to fund STEAM education. The money is there, it’s just being spent on other things. Making enough noise and applying enough sustained pressure to change this will not be easy. It will actually be quite hard. But when has America ever shied away from doing things that are hard? Everything worth doing is hard, and President Kennedy said as much when he challenged our nation to go to the moon. Right now, decades later, every single one of us has benefitted in some way from that commitment. Right now, a generation of future scientists can look to MARS and beyond, because nearly fifty years ago, we did whatever it took to go to the moon.
Why aren’t we doing that today? Because it’s hard?
(19) 2016 SPECULATIVE FICTION EDITORS. The Book Smugglers are already “Announcing the Editors of Speculative Fiction 2016 & Call for Submissions”.
In which we announce the editors for the 2016 edition of the award-winning collection Speculative Fiction
As you probably know by now, we are the new publishers of the ongoing editions of Speculative Fiction: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary – a collection that celebrates the best in online Science Fiction and Fantasy nonfiction. We are currently hard at work on the publication of SpecFic ’15 – edited by Foz Meadows and Mark Oshiro – and we feel it is time to move on to the next very important step for next year: announcing the two new editors for 2016.
Since its inception in 2012, the Speculative Fiction collection has been envisioned as an annual publication, curated by a new pair of editors each year. Each incumbent pair is also given the weighty task of selecting the next year’s editors.
Today, we are extremely proud to finally announce the editors of Speculative Fiction 2016: Liz Bourke and Mahvesh Murad!
Apparently items for the 2015 collection needed to be submitted to the editors? Well, I didn’t send in anything from File 770, so that’s that.
(20) CELEBRITY VERSIONS OF BB-8 AUCTIONED. Til April 24 you can bid on a variety of BB-8 droids that have been kitted up by celebrities. 100%* of the proceeds from this auction will be donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, on behalf of Force For Change.
The Londonist ran an article and a gallery of photos.
We enjoyed the recent Star Wars film. But, like many, we couldn’t help thinking that BB-8 would look far more fetching dressed up as the globus cruciger from the Crown Jewels, or else painted in the colours of the Union Flag, tarted up like a teapot, or made to look like one of the Beatles.
Our wishes are fulfilled at a new exhibition and charity fundraiser. The cutesy droid has enjoyed a makeover from dozens of artists and celebrities, with the best efforts on show at White Rainbow Gallery (47 Mortimer Street) until 21 April.
Contributing celebrities include Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Warwick Davis, Simon Pegg (responsible for the Beatles droid, above), Paddy McGuinnes, Jonathan Ross, Nicola Adams and the band Years and Years. Each has daubed the droid with a design celebrating an element of British culture, from Robin Hood to the Sex Pistols.
(21) LOOK UP IN THE SKY. Alastair Reynolds is in awe by the end of a session of starwatching (“Pattern Recognition”) —
The light I caught had travelled 25,000 years to reach my telescope. If there’s ever a day when that sort of thing doesn’t send a shiver down my spine, please feel free to shoot me.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Will R., Steven H Silver, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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John A Arkansawyer: Love your blog.
The Puppet Masters was way better after it was cut than before. It’s one of the half-dozen or so of Heinlein’s books I think will have long legs, in part because it’s a historical artifact from that period of history. It was also a better anti-Communist allegory when it was less explicit, and not just in terms of sex and violence.
It’s also a really wonderful novel. I just reached back and touched the old hardback which is my current reading copy. It’s there because I was in that book just last week. I was looking for a particular passage; I ended up reading most of it again. I see its flaws and I just don’t care about them; its virtues outweigh them massively.
People trying to be the new Heinlein waste their time. He was sui generis, a phenomenon not to be repeated. The sort of tripe that Hoyt preaches in her non-fiction political writings? Heinlein sold me on it, for decades, and there are parts of it which are probably wrong which I still believe; she can’t. She doesn’t have the chops.
(I’m trying to make time to try her fiction, just as I did with Larry Corriera, who isn’t bad though nothing special. Informed people with good taste tell me the books are good. I’m kind of hoping they’re wrong and I’m kind of hoping they’re right and I’m planning to judge for myself. Someday.)
@Mike Glyer: Okay, fine. I’ll update it this week. Happy now? (I am–thanks!)
Mike, per their guidelines, anyone could have submitted something from here:
That said, I didn’t submit anything at all for 2015.
(14) Having read The Martian, I both want to avoid and am morbidly curious about this.
(20) Saving that gallery for after my long run of meetings today is over.
2) Neat. The Last Unicorn is one of my sister’s favorite movies. Maybe I’ll pick up a copy and have him sign it.
4) Honestly, I read Soda Pop Warrior because the cover was awesome, it was at the library, and I needed something to read. I enjoyed it, though the beginning was a little slow. I also enjoyed CAD, though there were some parts I thought that the author’s politics showed through, including some stuff I thought was sorta transphobic. I got a review of it up. Interestingly enough, the Author and I are still on good enough terms that I’ll be getting his new ARC when it’s ready. So that’s pretty neat.
10) I can’t be the only one who believes that not paying for copy-editing isn’t going to get you very far…
14) Practically no sexism, eh? That’s… a statement that he’ll probably regret.
The story sounds interesting though. I’d read that.
@James Moar, that joke’s got some history…
@Snowcrash, the entire first song performance by the cast should be kicking around somewhere as it was broadcast during the Grammies
Eisner manga:
Assassination Classroom: It is one of those things that is a clever idea, but suffers from having to pound out chapter after chapter on demand, and therefore moves at a glacial pace and is very repetitive in plot. Arguably would be much better if it had been designed to be just a volume or two with a story arc from the beginning. I’ve really bogged down still inside of (IIRC) the second volume, and may never bother going back to finish it.
A Silent Voice: I mini-reviewed that in a Scroll on March 27th (as a subsection of a multi-subject comment.) Here’s a repost of the relative section:
I wasn’t familiar with 3 of the other 6 reviews, but I’ve wanted to get my hands on Shigeru Mizuki Showa for a while now. (Though I’d personally think the award could go to someone who can still appreciate it.)
Today’s read — The Porcelain Dove, by Delia Sherman
Fantasy novel about a maid in 18th century France. I kind of wish this had just been a historical novel about a maid in 18th century France. That part of the book, which to be fair is the bulk of it, was pretty interesting. The fantasy aspects of it, done in the manner of French fairy tales, often seemed odd and tacked-on, and sometimes made the main character seem like a peripheral element of her own story. The main character was also frequently not very likeable, but the story acknowledged this and there were consequences for it within the narrative. The fairly blasé attitude some of the characters hold towards rape and racial prejudice can be disturbing, but was likely intentionally so in order to create a picture of the period. An understated love story will probably land this book on my “good lesbian romance SFF” list in the “minor romantic elements” category, but not with a terribly high rating.
@10: IMO, the classic example of copy-editor screwup is the hardback of Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, in which brothers Jake and Josh Treves were merged into a single individual who someone is in the coastal west and the midwest simultaneously.
@James Moar: the bill for the keyboard would be on the way if it weren’t canceled by royalties for the best obscure joke I’ve seen this year.
@snowcrash: from what I see it’s similar to the appeal of 1776: making clear both the humanity and the brilliance of distant historical figures, without descending to the level of, say Parson Weems and his mythology. (He was responsible for the stories of the young George Washington, e.g. the cherry tree. My mother-the-US-history-teacher’s most vicious condemnation of anything I ever read was the historical fiction that she said sounded like the author had read nothing but Weems and believed all of it.) It’s a useful lesson: these people were not strange/remote/academic to themselves.
There might still be some movement! Tested did a couple of videos with the Henson company a few months back and they were deminstrating a hand-controlled rig to manipulate features on a CGI head. The head in the demo was Dominar Rygel himself.
Save for those of us who have been waiting for The Last Dangerous Visions, The Universal Pantograph, and The Finger Pointing Solward since 1973, 1970 and sometime in the 1950s, respectively.
also, ticky
(Having remembering a scene in The Porcelain Dove which I had momentarily put out of my mind, I will say outright that I found the attitude towards rape in the book disturbing, even if it was intended to accurately portray the period.)
Assassination Classroom, is that finished or is it planned to ever finish?
(5) Pretty sure GRRM has said that if the explanation for the irregular seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire is revealed, that it will be fantasy-based and not science fictional.
Looks like it has just very recently ended with chapter 180.
Amateurs. I’ve been waiting for the fourth part of “Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit ou Mémoires de M. de Meilcour” since 1738.
Yeesh, could we have SPOILER alerts for Hamilton, people?
It’s only been, like, 212 years…
Chris: Take it up with Lin-Manuel Miranda: what you’re calling a “spoiler” is revealed at the very beginning of the musical.
Gonna give Assassination Classroom a try anyhow…
(11) Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Coincidentally, I just skipped past that in my Poe omnibus collection. It started off with what sounded like a non-fiction piece discussing the comparative intellectual capacity of chess players versus practitioners of other games. I believe draughts (checkers) was mentioned frequently. 3000 pages later…./sarcasm…..I bailed in favor of an omnibus of Robert E. Howard “Conan” stories.
FWIW, I devoured Sebastien de Castelle’s “Saint’s Blood” over the weekend. Had to buy it from Amazon UK due to distribution games. It left me incapable of picking up a new book for a couple days. His series continues to be intriguing, emotionally charged and quite satisfying.
@Vicki
I may not have been 100% serious,
@Snowcrash, here’s an article I found touches on some of what I like about Hamilton.
Also, the Lyrics are brilliant. So is the music. After listening to Hamilton several times, I tried some other rap and hip hop. I still don’t like it very much, but for some reason I love Miranda’s version on this album. I wonder if I would like his other musical In The Heights? I haven’t listened to it yet.
But this pushes a lot of my buttons. History! Musical Theatre! Incredibly smart lyrics! Great stuff.
Here it is on spotify where I think you can listen for free. If not, the whole album is on YouTube. Here’s the order of the songs (warning, do not listen to the second half of Disk 2 while operating heavy machinery, or in public, or without a handkerchief).
Disc I
1. “Alexander Hamilton”
2. “Aaron Burr, Sir”
3. “My Shot”
4. “The Story Of Tonight”
5. “The Schuyler Sisters”
6. “Farmer Refuted”
7. “You’ll Be Back”
8. “Right Hand Man”
9. “A Winter’s Ball”
10. “Helpless”
11. “Satisfied”
12. “The Story of Tonight (Reprise)”
13. “Wait For It”
14. “Stay Alive”
15. “Ten Duel Commandments”
16. “Meet Me Inside”
17. “That Would Be Enough”
18. “Guns and Ships”
19. “History Has Its Eyes On You”
20. “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”
21. “What Comes Next”
22. “Dear Theodosia”
23. “Non-Stop”
Disc 2
1. “What’d I Miss”
2. “Cabinet Battle #1”
3. “Take A Break”
4. “Say No To This”
5. “The Room Where It Happens”
6. “Schuyler Defeated”
7. “Cabinet Battle #2”
8. “Washington On Your Side”
9. “One Last Time”
10. “I Know Him”
11. “The Adams Administration”
12. “We Know”
13. “Hurricane”
14. “The Reynolds Pamphlet”
15. “Burn”
16. “Blow Us All Away”
17. “Stay Alive (Reprise)”
18. “It’s Quiet Uptown”
19. “Election of 1800”
20. “Your Obedient Servant”
21. “Best of Wives and Best of Women”
22. “The World Was Wide Enough”
23. “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”
This is actually almost all of the musical. There’s only one small bit that wasn’t included on the album.
Re (4) not only did I find that review format pretty much unreadable but in 2016 how can you have something titled ‘ctrl-alt-delete’ and not have a loss.jpg edit.
@ Kyra
That’s the book of hers I keep meaning to track down and then can’t remember the title of when I’m in a bookstore.
@Jake
I don’t think that Timothy The Talking Cat is too concerned with readability, to be honest.
Perhaps we should send him an editor. I wonder what manual of style he prefers?
Heather Rose Jones on April 21, 2016 at 7:12 am said:
@ Kyra
Today’s read — The Porcelain Dove, by Delia Sherman
That’s the book of hers I keep meaning to track down and then can’t remember the title of when I’m in a bookstore.
A search of the ISFDB shows that the publisher of the current edition is Jill Grinberg Literary Management, isbn 978-0692331576. Oddly … it’s listed on Amazon but not BN.com. And a search of the isbn on addall.com returns only Amazon hits.
> “That’s the book of hers I keep meaning to track down and then can’t remember the title of when I’m in a bookstore.”
I think you might really like the rich detail of the historical setting. I certainly did. (Although I was, as I noted, less enthused by the fantasy story part of it.)
(5) ICE FIVE.
GRRM was asked about ASOIAF being part of the Thousand Worlds at the beginning of this year. His reply is here
Scrollscape: The Pixelkeeper Wars
21- Looking at Al’s pictures I am reminded that the one of the reasons I upgraded my camera early this year was to try and do some astrophotography. The new (Pentax) body includes a built in GPS with a specific function for using the camera’s anti-shake system to cancel out the effect of the Earth’s rotation by slewing the sensor. So you can take quite long exposures without star trails forming.
Of course for that to work I’ve got to get out of the central belt of Scotland and find some un-light polluted skies. At least that’s a reasonable driving distance in a country this size.
(19) 2016 SPECULATIVE FICTION EDITORS
Having commented on this up-thread, I want to post an apology for an implication I made there. Today’s morning task is to wade through the detritus in my e-mail in-box (which I use as a “follow up on this” function as well as everything else), and I have a reminder to myself dated last October regarding submissions for the 2015 volume. So, in fact, I was paying attention to announcements about it, and they did have a clear and obvious request for submissions, and my inability to keep up with life is entirely at fault.
Cheryl Morgan deserves the credit for the look and feel of The Hugo Awards website. I just maintain the site and write most of the content. Without Cheryl’s work, I’d be stuck.
(14) I didn’t read the whole interview, but I’ve got a couple of reactions to Weir’s response quoted here. Fundamentally, he was asked a stupid question, and responded as I would expect any writer to respond: this is the character I wrote, and she happens to be female. The rest I’m willing to put down to a sincere (if ham-fisted) attempt to address what he thought might be the interviewer’s concerns. (As for “practically no sexism” – well, we’re all rats in the maze on that one, and I wish him luck.)
I might be reacting this way because I really enjoyed both the book and the movie, and he’s got a nice success story going and I’m inclined to want to root for him. 🙂
My other reaction is that I must have missed all the interviews with my favorite female SFF writers where they were asked why they wrote male characters. Because it’s apparently this amazing thing to write someone of a different gender than yourself. Amazing. Notable. Something to be admired and worshipped. So I’m sure I’ll be stumbling on all these lost interviews any day now.
…Too much sarcasm?
Pingback: Timothy Under Attack by SJW Warrior Feminist Filers – Camestros Felapton
Liz: Not too much at all!
Re: The National Front: Valancourt Books recently reprinted a British novel from the 1960s, The Leader by Gillian Freeman, which details the rise of one of the Fascist organizations that eventually coalesced into the National Front. It’s not quite SF (though it is a kind of post-hoc alternate history), but certain elements should be familiar to anyone who’s dealt with Day/GamerGate/MRAs. My favorite part is when a Jewish girl joins the group, and the Leader is ecstatic because now they can say all the antisemitic garbage they want and then deny being antisemitic.
The first couple volumes are devoted to introducing the major players in the class. The first real plot arc begins at the end of volume two, and then the story shifts its focus to the real meat of the story — the school principal’s Social Darwinist theories (which are a satire of how the Japanese educational system works) and the mystery of where Koro Sensei came from.
If I remember my Andre Norton correctly, and I do, when they first dabbled in writing women they got serious pushback:
Interesting article via /. on EM thrusters and how the free lunch drive might actually work.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/
Re: Hamilton, there’s not much that can be done about a really negative reaction to the musical genres involved, but as a text, it benefits from a listen to the whole thing. It doesn’t especially dumb down the political maneuvering or the personal failings and tensions of the people involved, contains two fleshed out Greek tragedies, and it’s weaving an interesting meta-narrative about what it means to be American today, especially for immigrants and minorities, and also, oddly, about being an artist, or anyone with a calling that has odds and significance much bigger than they are. That takes a fair bit of time to come together, as a story. It’s a novel rather than an anthology of standalone shorts, so to speak, and the whole is a lot more than the sum of the parts.
I was (musically) lukewarm until about halfway through it, but when it clicks, it really clicks. It’s an impressive piece of work, and I dare say Kyra’s right about it being brilliant. And it’s fascinating watching how it’s changing people’s relationship with that piece of history and Hamilton in particular. The explicit tie into the immigrant experience, and the implicit tie into the minority experience, seems to be changing the sense of who has a claim on some very fundamental parts of the American identity and dream.
@Chip Hitchcock, no, I don’t think I’d say it has the appeal of 1776. I enjoyed 1776, but it’s far less ambitious than Hamilton, and, aside from both being musicals, I’m not sure they’re the same genre of thing. 1776 is light musical comedy, while Hamilton is quite a heavy drama. It’s like comparing Bonanza to There Will Be Blood… they may both be stories about fathers making their fortunes the American West with a certain conscious exploration of ethical issues and their relationship with their sons, but their appeal and significance is not the same.
14) Kind of a clumsy interview, but then again, I’m thinking that The Martian was basically an action-driven story, and something similarly written starring a woman could work as well.
Done properly, we might be seeing something in the line of Schmitz’ “The Demon Breed”; a little old fashioned, but still a good read.
@Vasha
The problem I’ve had with most of the Xuya stories has been that they’re unengaging–not that they’re sad or repetitious. I really loved In Blue Lilly’s Wake, but it’s the only one so far.
Nice piece on the progress in imprecisely reliable chips just below your linked article. Chips like that are probably the only chance of getting powerful, cheap(ish) artificial intelligence that doesn’t need it’s own dedicated nuclear power plant. (See linked article here.)
As for the EmDrive, I’m still highly skeptical
The Pixel Pointing Scrollward?
14) Weir interview
I may be completely wrong but I felt that Weir was confused with the inherent sexism in the question itself. I took his answer to mean that sexism is not part of the plot, not that the world he has built in his next book is 100% egalitarian. I was rather taken aback by this question in 2016. Has the interviewer not read anything published in this century?
Save for those of us who have been waiting for The Last Dangerous Visions, The Universal Pantograph, and The Finger Pointing Solward since 1973, 1970 and sometime in the 1950s, respectively.
Amateurs. I’ve been waiting for the fourth part of “Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit ou Mémoires de M. de Meilcour” since 1738.
I’m still waiting for Aristotle’s book on comedy… I hear it’s killer.
“I’m still waiting for Aristotle’s book on comedy… I hear it’s killer.”
Sillygisms: Aristotle Tells It Like It Is (Except When It’s Not): A Not-for-Rhetoricals Look at Why Funny Is Whatever I Say It Is, with a 14-Chapter Newly Dreamt-Up Appendix Citing Examples of Provably Analytical ‘Humor’ Performed in a Manner Befitting the Superior Man (Volume 1)
So we have Through the Scrolling-Glass…
How about Pixel’s Adventures in Filerland?
@Will R.: But does it have two chapter 5s?
@Liz Bonesteel
I guess I’m at a loss. Are we supposed to pay attention to the additional challenges faced by women due to our culture or not?
The article included a link to a very recent study about the perception of women in STEM fields. That article offered some very interesting observations about those perceptions and how they develop.
The question seems relevant to me given the current state of the world. At least, I wouldn’t describe it as “stupid”.
And I guess I’m at a loss for the general cultural objective. Do we want people to not care about gender in fiction or not? Regardless of a general preference that we not find anything unusual about a female leading character in a hard science fiction novel, the fact is that in 2016 on planet Earth, we still have some work to do. Asking about that choice reflects taht fact. His response appears to show that Mr. Weir’s thought process involves imagining a broad range of character types. His answer appeared to reflect the sort of attitude that I thought was supposed to be the general objective that we find a broad range of gender and racial character types to be unremarkable and representative of the world in which we live.
Sooo…..yes….too much sarcasm.
—
Regards,
Dann
I’m not sure there is a cultural objective. It is fine with escapist litterature in worlds that has left sexism behind. It is also fine with books with realism where sexism still is a thing. What is not fine is when people say we should ignore sexism because genders shouldn’t make any difference.
I’m fine with Weir imagining a more perfect world than the one we live in.