Pixel Scroll 4/20/16 Through the Scrolling-Glass

(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 —

(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

(12) TODAY’S OTHER HISTORY LESSON. Hmm. Good point.

(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.

bb8 auction

(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.]

206 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/20/16 Through the Scrolling-Glass

  1. @ Cat Eldridge

    But…but…I’ve already read The Fall of the Kings, and I haven’t read Porcelain Dove. So not a good substitute! I have no doubts I can find a second hand copy– the difficulty has been remembering to look for it (and remembering what it was I wanted to look for) when the opportunity arises.

  2. Oh, wow, I remember Dreamsnake. I remember the bit about reproductive control as well, at least in part because it included a fact about male anatomy and temperature control that I had recently learned from other sources, tied up with a rather off-colour joke.

    I think the first book of hers that I read was Superluminal (which I wouldn’t find out until later was an expansion of the short story “Aztecs”, but which also included a few scenes that spread across into Victoria, where I lived) and I still have a copy of The Entropy Effect around here somewhere.

  3. @Dann:

    From my perspective, “lady” isn’t an unwholesome word. I fully appreciate that there are many historical examples where that word (or the lack thereof) has been used/not used with less than complimentary intent. Some people may not give that word the pass that it gets on this end of the wire. I’m OK with that, too.

    From my perspective, it starts getting problematic when women are described as “lady [blank]s” (full disclosure, I am primarily thinking of the SFWA Bulletin description of “lady editors”, though “lady engineers” follows close behind). There is often what feels to me like a dismissive tone, like the li’l lady getting a dismissive head pat (or, let’s be frank, ass pat) for doing a man’s job.

    Wow, I sure love parenthetical statements, don’t I? Welcome to the jumble inside my head ;P

  4. One of my college roommates went to high school with Madonna, although he didn’t know her that well. But one of his pals, not a close friend of mine, is married to Madonna’s sister. So at least I’ve got a “Two degrees of separation” thing going.

    With men writing female protagonists: Last year I was working on a story with two female protags, one a teenager, one about 30, and friends asked me how I did that. (I’m a straight white guy, by the way.) I started from the concept that women and men of any age have the same motivations: We want to survive. We need things like money. We need friends, even though sometimes we don’t realize it. As a writer, it shouldn’t be that hard to get into the mind of a character who’s not exactly like you, regardless of sex. The question to Weir seems kind of odd to me, particularly when you think of how many Agatha Christie novels were written in the male first person (Hastings).

    (The novel languishes because I hit problems with the plot, and I’ve never actually published anything. So my opinion may be moot. Still, come on. There shouldn’t be anything radical about men writing about women, or vice versa.)

  5. At the time God Stalk was published, was it unusual sbe gur srznyr cebgntbavfg’f ybir vagrerfg gb qvr gentvpnyyl naq fur tb ba gb znal zber obbxf?

  6. McIntyre published two further novelettes in the Snake sequence, “The Serpent’s Death” and “The Broken Dome”, both of which appeared in Analog early in 1978. I don’t know if there was any additional material in the novel version – ISFDB describes Dreamsnake as a fix-up of the three novelettes, which suggests that there was little or no new content. I wonder if any controversy was due to the novel reaching a wider public than the core magazine-reading SF audience?

  7. Mike Glyer: Whatever was added to “Of Mist, Grass, and Sand” to make it Dreamsnake I obviously missed, only having read the novelette. The novelette was published in Analog (and won the Hugo) five years before the novel (which also won the Hugo). I wonder if any of the supposedly controversial bits were in the Analog story? The review you link to seems to say some things might have been presented in more allusory ways, rather than actually absent from the novelette.

    I only read the novel in the last year or two. Apart from the female protagonist, the other “controversial” elements I mention [female protagonist had sex, was able to control her reproductive system psychologically, rescued a girl from being sexually abused by a man, and ultimately saved herself rather than needing to be saved by a man] were not in the first chapter (which is the entirety of “Of Mist, Grass, and Sand”), they appear as the story progresses. And they’re all pretty openly and directly described; I wouldn’t call any of them “allusory”.

    Whether they are part of the other pieces published in Analog, I don’t know.

  8. I am running down the list of books I gave 5-star reviews to to see which ones I don’t recall having any love element for the leading woman. Actually just one: Fudoki, by Kij Johnson. But if I count women who are one of several protagonists, there are many more with no sex or love in their story.

  9. Celebrity classmates: I was two years ahead of Alanis Morrissette and once played against her in a talent show (we both lost to the student council president’s Dixieland jazz band.)

  10. What Hamilton has available is an original Broadway cast recording. Not a soundtrack. A soundtrack goes with a movie. A stage musical gets a cast recording.

  11. Dreamsnake was and remains one of my favorite books, which is probably why I’ve worn several copies to tatters. I’m pretty sure I read it shortly after it came out and don’t remember an particular controversy, but maybe that was just in Berkeley.

    Prince’s death is hitting harder than that of David Bowie. His work has had so much personal significance and I’m beyond sad I’ll never see him live again. I’m listening to Emancipation right now, because for some reason – the exuberance? – it’s the one I listen to most often.

    Lauowolf on April 21, 2016 at 10:38 am said:

    Best guitar solo ever.

    Thanks for that. I think it’s my favorite guitar solo too, even if my favorite Prince moment is probably his Grammy performance with Beyonce. It’s odd to see aged Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne alongside young Prince and young George Harrison (yeah, I do know who it really is).

    @dann665, I typed some stuff about “tone check,” but then I realized I just don’t have the energy to explore why being female doesn’t make it impossible to be sexist. Just…if I think something is sexist, I’m not going to do a sex or gender check.

  12. @Vasha

    I am running down the list of books I gave 5-star reviews to to see which ones I don’t recall having any love element for the leading woman. Actually just one: Fudoki, by Kij Johnson. But if I count women who are one of several protagonists, there are many more with no sex or love in their story.

    On the short-fiction front, I looked across all 36 stories I’ve given 5 stars to so far. Fifteen of them have no major human female character (that drops to 10 if we include non-human ones). Of the 21 that do, 12 have no love element. (I’m stretching a point to call it a love element if she had consensual sex at all.)

    I hope this is simply the average across the field, since I’m trying to focus purely on story quality in my ratings, but it does seem low.

  13. Well, I went to school with both Rowan Atkinson and Tony Blair, when we were all little kids.

    Around the time that Tony Blair became PM, one of the fish-wraps published part of a class photo showing the two of them sitting in the same group. My mother saw the picture, and recognized it as a copy of one we had with young Nigel sitting in it.

    I do remember young Atkinson, but not the other chap.

    In other pixels, did Karen Memery have a female lead but no love story?

  14. I went to elementary and high school with David Balsillie, Jim Balsillie’s older brother, who seems to have been written out of every biographical sketch I’ve seen of Jim. (Jim was a couple of years behind us but was in some of the same extracurricular groups.)

    I know the person who was Dean of Men at the college where Jim went to undergraduate university. Both of us agree that if we had had to choose somebody we knew for future wild success, it would not have been Balsillie.

  15. @Cheryl S: Just…if I think something is sexist, I’m not going to do a sex or gender check.

    And being a feminist doesn’t preclude one from saying sexist (or racist) things (or doing sexist or racist etc.) things.

    Speaking of which, let me once again thank the wonderful Filers who created and made available the Stylist List!

  16. Dreamsnake: I remember when it came out. I still have my PB copy. It cost 2.95.

    And Vonda became one of the “must buy immediately whatever she writes because she’s that good.” I was lucky enough to see her at a con in Seattle–she read from the then in progress Barbary. And her other work–ALL AMAZING and all in such different genres with such fantastic female protagonists.

    Should do some re-reading.

  17. Just looked through the home library and there is a definite lack of sole protagonist female characters without a romance element of some sort (though in many it’s a not a major theme or plot element. I’m coming up with maybe two standalone books and two trilogies (one being Ancillary and very debatably making an assumption Breq is biologically female). I could add a few more if we count multi viewpoint stories with a female protagonist among several other protagonists.

    Then again is it a fair question (other than personal reading interest of the original poster)? Looking them over, a vast majority of the books with solo male protagonists also have romantic elements in major or minor ways too. It would be a longer list but not by a lot.

  18. @Laura:

    (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.

    Indeed— here is a good collection of the many times he’s stated that. I don’t think the Esquire writer did any homework for this piece at all beyond writing down whatever Jacobs said.

  19. @Dawn

    From my perspective, it starts getting problematic when women are described as “lady [blank]s” (full disclosure, I am primarily thinking of the SFWA Bulletin description of “lady editors”, though “lady engineers” follows close behind). There is often what feels to me like a dismissive tone, like the li’l lady getting a dismissive head pat (or, let’s be frank, ass pat) for doing a man’s job.

    I agree with your examples as being good negative examples of my suggestion that there are less than positive uses (or non-uses) of the term “lady”. BTW, I work in the engineering field and am well aware of the issue of sexism in that field.

    @Liz

    I thought the discussion has been about the hamfisted wording of an interview question. Obviously I missed some posts.

    Well I wouldn’t use the term “ham-fisted”, but I figured that was kind of obvious at this point. At the very least, I wouldn’t assume malintent on the interviewer’s part without prior history of similar behavior.

    The way you phrase this suggests quite strongly that you’ve got your own agenda here, about which you’re not being entirely straightforward. In the interests of honesty, here’s my agenda: I think it was a stupid, sexist question, and I’m not willing to read much into Weir’s answer to a stupid, sexist question.

    I appreciate your honesty. I’ll offer you the same in return.

    You have presumed a great many things about my motivations and the presence of some sort of agenda. Those presumptions are based entirely on issues that exist on your end of the wire.

    I recognize that the well of forbearance has been more than just a little poisoned over the last few years by others. It seems to me that the only way to clean the well is to clean the well. Some day I may finish/publish my TL;DR manifesto on my interest in SFF and the recent events.

    In the meantime, I respectfully suggest that while you may well disagree with my motivations, I don’t believe that you will find them as unsavory as some of the other motivations that exist in the world. I’m OK with disagreeing with folks. If there are two people in uniform agreement on every issue, then one of them is redundant.


    Regards,
    Dann

  20. @robinareid – And being a feminist doesn’t preclude one from saying sexist (or racist) things (or doing sexist or racist etc.) things.

    It would be amazing if it did, like an integrated personality palette. If feminist then not sexist or racist.

    @The other Nigel – In other pixels, did Karen Memery have a female lead but no love story?

    There were several love stories, if you mean the book by Elizabeth Bear, including one that was the spur for some of the action. And I’d say more but I’m too lazy to rot-13.

  21. @Stoic Cynic:

    Looking them over, a vast majority of the books with solo male protagonists also have romantic elements in major or minor ways too. It would be a longer list but not by a lot.

    You’re right. That’s why I added: …actually, I guess it’s the notion that a person isn’t truly happy without romantic/erotic love that bugs me, by which I meant men and women, straight and gay. There’s that idea of being “completed” by a romantic partner which just makes me feel a little icky, y’know?

    I really appreciate everyone’s suggestions! I cannot guarantee that I will read any of them anytime soon, however.

    Bouncing back to women in STEM for a moment, I just read a piece in Wired by the daughter of Alex St. John, who wrote an article reeking with privilege about game developers and “crunch time” last week.

    She discusses many of the reasons why women don’t enter or stay in the tech field, including the attitudes of some white men like her dad.

  22. Prince was an icon (and for a while, his name was literally an icon…). I fondly remember doing line dances in college to “1999.” And who can forget this hit:

    I’m not a pixel
    I’m not a scroll
    I am something that you’ll never understand

    (Apologies to Prince for riffing on “I would die 4 u.”)

  23. ETA too late because I should have used Amilia St. John’s name instead of simply “the daughter of Alex St. John”. Way to reduce someone to their relationship to a man, Dawn.

  24. @Dawn Incognito

    As much as anything I was just struck by how many books had romantic elements once I started looking for them. Just looking at a small section of P’s near me right now and out of fiction: 12 – have love interest or relationship sub plots, 2 – I’m not sure of, and 1 -absolutely does not. By chance this is including stuff by H Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, Stephen Pressfield, etc that are fairly action adventure oriented. It’s almost like romantic elements are salt to most book recipes.

  25. Dann665

    I find it strange that you consider it ironic that some people are thinking that an interviewer asked a sexist question and lo and behold the interviewer turns out to be female.

    People absorb sexist attitudes from the society they grow up in. It’s not like there is some sexism club in which men bring boys in, check for a Y chromosome and then indoctrinate the boys in the secret sexist handshake and read to them from the manual of sexist jokes and have merit badges in sexism or something–and the girls are kept on the outside (or maybe hatch from eggs?) and thus never learn how to sexism.

    Society tells boys and girls alike that girls and women are less important than boys and men. Not in an open, straightforward way (usually. Anymore) but in a thousand subtle ways. Men’s issues are just issues, women’s issues are specifically women’s issues–and women are “special interests” despite women being more than half the adult population. The newspaper includes news for men in the body of the paper and sets news for women in a special ghetto. Men run for president and the news articles discuss trade and foreign policy; women run for president and the articles discuss clothing, hairstyles, and parenting.

    Girls as well as boys see all these things and accept them into their picture of “how the world works.” Girls have slightly more stake in realizing something is wrong–though sexism hurts boys and men also, so the stake is only slightly higher. But that doesn’t mean girls all do realize that, and even when they do it doesn’t mean they always recognize their own sexist attitudes.

    I believed for years I was a staunch feminist, while also demanding to take shop because I thought home ec was silly and frivolous–girl’s stuff. I bought into all the BS my society fed me about how traditionally feminine pursuits were inferior to traditionally masculine ones–and I thought the reason I was equal to a man was that I also disdained feminine interests, not like those other girls. I got over that, eventually, but it took women calling other women out for sexist attitudes to make me re-think my assumptions.

    So heck yes women can be sexist. Heck yes, even women who are trying hard to see through society’s BS about the relative worths of women and men and even those who succeed in some ways, can still be sexist in others.

    It’s frustrating. It’s saddening. But ironic? No, not really.

  26. @Cheryl S: It would be amazing if it did, like an integrated personality palette. If feminist then not sexist or racist.

    Yes, and if we could just flip parts off permanently instead of struggling with engrained/embedded issues for years.

  27. @Cat: believed for years I was a staunch feminist, while also demanding to take shop because I thought home ec was silly and frivolous–girl’s stuff. I bought into all the BS my society fed me about how traditionally feminine pursuits were inferior to traditionally masculine ones–and I thought the reason I was equal to a man was that I also disdained feminine interests, not like those other girls. I got over that, eventually, but it took women calling other women out for sexist attitudes to make me re-think my assumptions.

    Yes, yes, yes! Been there, done that. I call it the “honorary guy” thing: if you can convince yourself and men (or even in younger years, boys) in your social/professional circles that you’re not like those other women, well, then, you have a slightly higher status (of course it takes only a small slip to cast you into the outer hells of girl cooties, heh, revealing just how precarious, fake, and not worth it the effort is).

  28. re: Honorary guy – For the better part of my growing-up years, I was so self-congratulatory about how most of my friends were boys, because I, unlike all those other girls, wasn’t silly, wasn’t obsessed with celebrities and crushes and clothes, wasn’t gossipy, wasn’t girly. Besides, girls are mean and catty. Girls just aren’t friend material. Boys, on the other hand…

    No one ever told me “girls are mean and will stab you in the back and are obsessed with cosmetics and are silly. Boys are interesting and friendly.” But those cultural assumptions were all around me, and I internalized them, and they shaped my brain and personality for the better part of my childhood.

    Now, even without internalized sexism, I probably would have been friends with more of the boys than the girls just because I wasn’t interested in the things most of the girls seemed to be all about. But it’s societal sexism that taught me to sneer about it and congratulate myself on having elevated myself to the superior position of “one of the guys”.

  29. For SFF devoid of romance, I think (though my memory is a bit blurry) that most of the works of Isaac Asimov would qualify.

    Way Station by Clifford Simak, which I recently re-read, almost qualifies, except that there is a relationship between the protagonist and a very alien alien which sort of vaguely resembles romance, depending on how you squint.

    But yeah, I’m struggling to come up with examples written by guys or girls.

    But I can certainly think of plenty of works by women where romance is no more than a minor element. A lot of Cherryh’s stuff, for example.

  30. @JJ: I was shocked to find out that, when it was published, Dreamsnake was apparently considered controversial. The reviewer chooses to call the work “controversial”, but doesn’t provide documentation. I think he’s exaggerating; with no Internet to speak of back then there could have been flames I didn’t see, but I don’t remember any general fuss. (The big noise at the awards was when Superman beat local favorite The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which suffered from having little (no?) availability in the US; note that this was later allowed for in the Hugo rules.) I’m not surprised there was some noise, as McIntyre mentions in the interview linked to that column.
    OTOH, I’ll also note when I arrived in the UK a week before the awards, the first essay that I read (a column in the back of a listings magazine) started out ~”The trouble with these Libbers is they want all the rights and none of the responsibilities!” — and I got hit with a few other examples at-con suggesting that however insufficiently advanced feminism was in the US, it was even further behind in the UK. So there were probably people grumbling about it locally that I didn’t hear; OTOH, note that Worldcons outside North America have tended to give Hugos to the less-traditional novels. (OTOOH, even that year’s nominations included another unusual work: Harpist in the WInd.)
    And as for nobody finding the plot controversial now: imagine a Puppy reading it….

    wrt a subsequent comment: per the interview, the book isn’t a fixup; she extracted some pieces for Analog to publish because they couldn’t serialize the whole thing after publishing the part the novel grew out of. Bova probably got letters about them, but from his talks at Boskone I got the impression he expected a certain number of ignorable letters about each issue even though he wasn’t deliberately trying to irritate people.

  31. One thing I would mention just in passing–I have the impression some folks believe Puppies hate all SFF with women or minority protagonists and I’m pretty sure that is mistaken. While (AFAICT) they don’t like people deliberately seeking out fiction with women or minority protagonists or by women and minority writers, it’s okay if a story they otherwise find good just happens to have protagonists or authors who are women or minorities.

    I think they’re mistaken enough already; we don’t have to misrepresent their position to make them more so.

  32. One excellent book with a female protagonist and no romance is Remnant Population. by Elizabeth Moon. This book also has the benefit of one complete story and not needing to read a lot more books to finish. It concerns a woman who purposely stays behind when their colony is evacuated. I don’t recall a romance in Moon’s Vatta’s War series (beginning with Trading in Danger) but I can’t promise this as I haven’t read the series in years. Moon’s two sprawling fantasy series have many things going on but romance is not a major element in either.

    I think the protagonist in A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman may have a boyfriend by the end of the book but it isn’t the point. I really love this book. It’s an urban fantasy that explores what happens when a good person is suddenly gifted with a dark power. It goes nowhere that I expected it too. This is one of the books in my comfort read pile.

    That’s off the top of my head.

  33. I was shocked to find out that, when it was published, Dreamsnake was apparently considered controversial.

    Unless my decades-old memory is betraying me, doesn’t Dreamsnake have a lesbian couple as prominent secondary characters? (As I recall, gurl ner vzcyvpvgyl chavfurq sbe orvat yrfovnaf ol bar bs gur cnve qlvat bs enqvngvba fvpxarff.) That alone would have been enough for it to be considered “controversial” in the ’70s.

  34. also demanding to take shop because I thought home ec was silly and frivolous–girl’s stuff.

    I will long be grateful for the fact that, in my middle school (grades 6-8) over thirty years ago, the school had already decided that every student would take wood shop, metal shop, cooking, sewing, and typing; boy or girl, no exceptions, no point in complaining. (Granted, I’d already done all of those at home except for metal shop. My father got into cross-stitching, and my mother uses the lathe to make picture frames. I will admit my experience might not be average.)

  35. @Heather Rose Jones – Unless my decades-old memory is betraying me…

    It is, a bit. Vg’f n gevnq bs gjb jbzra naq bar zna naq abg fb zhpu n chavfuzrag nf (rkcyvpvgyl jevggra ol ZpVagler nf) n pbzzragnel ba ubj Wrffr’f hcoevatvat shyy bs yvrf yrsg ure haoryvrivat bs gur qnatref bhgfvqr ure pvgl.

    I don’t recall romance in Tanya Huff’s Confederation novels. It’s not something that bothers me though, so long as it’s not tacked on and so inevitable the eyerolling sprains a muscle, so I’m probably just misremembering.

  36. @ Cheryl S.

    I am utterly unsurprised that my memory filtered out the guy. It was kind of a desperate situation for representation back then. Still, a reasonable basis for “controversy”. And I’m willing to argue that authorial intent is not the only game in town. Vs gur erfhyg vf gb ghea n dhrre gevnq gung vapyhqrf gjb jbzra vagb n z/s qlnq, gura ertneqyrff bs gur va-fgbel rkcynangvba, gur yrfovna ernqre gnxrf njnl gur zrffntr gung Jr Ner Abg Nyybjrq Unccl Raqvatf. Gung jnf pregnvayl gur zrffntr gung fghpx jvgu zr.

  37. As long as we’re naming romance-less books with important or main female characters (or are we also listing ones with male MCs?), am I forgetting something, or do these all not have romance in them? A Darker Shade of Magic, The Girl With Ghost Eyes (though, granted, she Very Much Misses her dead hubbie throughout, so maybe this one shouldn’t count), Planetfall (I guess one could say gur vagrenpgvbaf jvgu gur znva punenpgre naq ure rk-ybire could sorta qualify, but to me that was really just nabgure rknzcyr bs ubj zrffrq hc Era vf), Ancillary Mercy (I feel like I’m blanking on something here…I haven’t had my first cuppa tea yet, sorry). My memory bites, so maybe I’m off-base.

    Male main characters, I think of The Martian as not having romance; yeah, a couple of secondary characters get together, but the main character’s single throughout, no? 😉

  38. @Heather Rose Jones, point taken, and it’s a very good point. I’m pretty sure that was the year I first read The Well of Loneliness though, so anything not full of self loathing qualified as progress for me.

  39. so little tome. (Typo kept for amusement value!)

    Known somewhere else I frequent as a Tobago.

    TypO, But A Good One

  40. (Posted in wrong thread. Sorry. Post removed to correct Pixel Scroll)

    (Nothing to see here. Move along…)

  41. @Dawn Incognito:

    My god, what an utter moron! There is so much wrong in what he wrote in that article it even goes far beyond the multitude of prejudices he has on display.

    So what if he was one of the architects of DirectX? Speaking as someone with almost 15 years in the software industry, here’s the other major takeaway:

    He’s MANAGEMENT. Of course he thinks mandatory insane overtime is wonderful – he’s passing the buck on his own incompetence!

    Excessive overtime and completely missed deadlines are the fault of management. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I have no problem with incidental overtime, because I know and expect that the software industry is 40-hour weeks, more or less. Sometimes, things blow up. Sometimes, you miss a major dependency that trashes your carefully crafted plan. But excessive OT?

    It means you went into a project without adequately assessing the requirements, dependencies and potential unknowns involved. It means you didn’t figure out how many people you needed to do it right, how much time is reasonable and devise a sane, properly engineered roadmap to your end goal.

    It means you have no knowledge of good software engineering practices or management skills and would rather run your employees into the ground in a sweatshop while telling them they should be grateful for the privilege of being your personal code-slaves.

    But I’m sure he feels working 60-80 hour weeks on SALARY for less than the software industry at large is some kind of admirable thing.

    Ugh, I actually work in the game industry right now, at a major developer who used to have the worst reputation ever for this sort of thing(Still the largest, I believe, which should tell you exactly who) and even they realized this was a stupid thing years ago…

  42. Heather Rose Jones wrote: “Vs gur erfhyg vf gb ghea n dhrre gevnq gung vapyhqrf gjb jbzra vagb n z/s qlnq, gura ertneqyrff bs gur va-fgbel rkcynangvba, gur yrfovna ernqre gnxrf njnl gur zrffntr gung Jr Ner Abg Nyybjrq Unccl Raqvatf. Gung jnf pregnvayl gur zrffntr gung fghpx jvgu zr.”

    But it doesn’t. Bar bs gur gevnq jub qbrfa’g qvr vf znyr, ohg gur bgure’f frk vf arire fcrpvsvrq.

  43. @Cat

    One thing I would mention just in passing-I have the impression some folks believe Puppies hate all SFF with women or minority protagonists and I’m pretty sure that is mistaken. While (AFAICT) they don’t like people deliberately seeking out fiction with women or minority protagonists or by women and minority writers, it’s okay if a story they otherwise find good just happens to have protagonists or authors who are women or minorities.

    I can only speak for myself, but that is a close miss. I don’t know if I can avoid TL;DR territory in layout out my perspective.

    [Tries] Nope. Can’t. Deleted.

    Periodically, the implication…or perhaps the inference…in someone stating that they are deliberately seeking out non-SWM fiction is that works that are purposefully non-SWM are of higher quality because of non-SWM-ness.

    I think it depends on where one puts the emphasis. For some folks, it seems that a story cannot be “great” unless it does contain those diverse elements. For others, those diverse elements are nice if they are native to the story, but are not a requirement for a story to be “great”.

    I think they’re mistaken enough already; we don’t have to misrepresent their position to make them more so.

    Sage advice for everyone.

    @World Weary

    Thanks for the recommendations. The “to read” list just got a little longer….


    Regards,
    Dann

  44. @ Helen S

    Hmm, clearly I should re-visit the novel if only for the sake of accurate recollection. (I read it when it was newly published and haven’t revisited it since.) It wouldn’t be the first time when my memory played fast and loose between the book I read and the book I thought I read.

  45. “Periodically, the implication…or perhaps the inference…in someone stating that they are deliberately seeking out non-SWM fiction is that works that are purposefully non-SWM are of higher quality because of non-SWM-ness.”

    I actually have one rule when I buy games. It should not be about a brownhaired SWM who seeks revenge. It is astonishing how many games that are filtered out by that.

  46. dann665: Periodically, the implication…or perhaps the inference…in someone stating that they are deliberately seeking out non-SWM fiction is that works that are purposefully non-SWM are of higher quality because of non-SWM-ness.

    It’s never occurred to you that people deliberately seek out non-SWM fiction so they can read from a different perspective for a change? Seriously?

    That belief you have that they do it because “works that are purposefully non-SWM are of higher quality because of non-SWM-ness”? That’s a chip right there, sitting on your shoulder.

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