(1) CON REPORT. Outer Places went to Steve Wozniak’s comic con — “The SVCC Tech Showcase Was Filled With Robots and Supercars”.
Second only to the Woz himself, the night’s biggest show-stealer was SoftBank Robotics‘ Pepper the Robot. The machine is designed to be able to accurately perceive emotions, and is currently being marketed as a personal assistant in Japan. Tonight, Pepper mostly just rolled up to people and requested they take a selfie with them – that may sound like a waste of Pepper’s talents, but any robot who can perceive emotions would eventually realize that humans enjoy doing really silly things. So before the robots take over, we’ll take selfies with them.
(2) CAPTAIN KIRK. Of course, that may be underestimating William Shatner who was at SVCC yesterday, too — “William Shatner delights fans at Silicon Valley Comic Con” . Watch the KGO news video at the link.
From “Star Wars” to “Star Trek” and everything in between, the second annual Silicon Valley Comic Con did not disappoint on its opening night. In addition to costumes and cosplay fans were treated to an evening with Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner.
(3) SOMEBODY’S WRONG ON THE INTERNET! The Fargo/Hugo Award identification continues to outrun the correction – as per usual in social media. But I’m impressed how many people know what a Hugo is. By comparison, it’ll be a cold day in Fargo Hell before the masses think they recognize a Dragon Award being used as a murder weapon on TV – take that, Puppies!
https://twitter.com/DreadSinister/status/855570948996481024
That Hugo award in the Fargo premiere, ah jeez! #Fargo
— Kevin Lever (@kevinlever) April 22, 2017
https://twitter.com/dutchindian/status/855638309791518720
Series of tweets here:
https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/855665862786686976
(4) SCIENCE’S SIBLING RIVALRY. Star Trek, Arrival, linguistics, and “soft” science versus “hard” science: “Uhura Was a Comms Officer: Why Linguistics Matter”.
In Arrival, Louise Banks melds xenolinguistics, language documentation and underlying pattern recognition—even within the film, however, her specialty is derided as “not real” science by her male (theoretical physicist) counterpart Ian Donnelly. After quoting from a book on linguistics Banks wrote, Ian says flatly that she’s wrong:
“Well, the cornerstone of civilization isn’t language. It’s science.”
This is a succinct rendition of how language study tends to be viewed by those outside of it: that the scientific study of language isn’t science. This also, of course, ties into other things (such as sexism and whatnot, plus trying to use dialogue as characterization in media) but detailing such factors is beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say, Arrival tries to detail the work of documenting and recognizing patterns of a completely unfamiliar system.
(5) WELCOME TO MARS, NOW DROP DEAD. Daily Mail, which enjoys such a reputation around here, warns “Visitors to Mars Will Die in Under 68 Days”..
…One of the most important conclusions of the research is that neither crops nor oxygen generated for the inhabitants will be sufficient to support life for long. A fatal fire is also a major risk.
The Daily Mail summarized the very long MIT paper:
Mars One is an ambitious plan by a Dutch entrepreneur to send people to Mars next decade and start building a colony there. The proposal has received fierce criticism for its lack of realistic goals, and now one study has dealt the team a crushing blow – by saying the colonists will begin dying in 68 days. Low air pressure, habitats at risk of explosion and a lack of spare parts are among the potentially fatal dangers that apparently await anyone who makes the inaugural trip.
(6) LEND A RESEARCHER A HAND. Zack Weinberg asks for your help. I ran this past a friend whose computer and network knowledge I respect and he agreed it looked bona fide – but as always, exercise your own wisdom about participating. This demo is part of a research study conducted by Zachary Weinberg, Nicolas Christin, and Vyas Sekar of Carnegie Mellon University. And as he says at the end, “’I particularly want Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America.”
I’m doing a research project related to online censorship, which you can help with, by visiting https://research.owlfolio.org/active-geo/ in any reasonably recent version of Firefox, Chrome, or IE. (You must have JavaScript enabled. It doesn’t work in Safari, which unfortunately means you cannot use an iDevice.) Press the Start button on the map, wait for it to finish, and then click the “Tell me more” button (which appears when it’s done) and read the text and follow the instructions. It is especially helpful if you do this on a computer physically located somewhere other than Europe and North America.
The experiment is testing “active geolocation”, which is when you try to figure out where a computer physically is by measuring how long it takes a packet of information to go round-trip between one computer and other computers in known locations. This has been studied carefully within Europe and the continental USA, but much less so elsewhere.
This is relevant to Internet censorship because, in order to measure Internet censorship, you need access to a computer within the sub-network run by a censorious country or organization. Commercial VPN services are one way to do this. Unfortunately, the countries that are most aggressive about censoring the Internet are also countries where it is difficult and expensive to host servers. I suspect that several commercial VPN providers’ claims of widespread server hosting are false: they are placing servers in countries where it is easy to do business, and then adding false entries to commonly-used geolocation databases. If whatsmyip and the like tell their users that the VPN server is in the right country, that’s good enough to make a sale…
I have run these measurements myself on many VPN servers, but I don’t know how accurate they are, and the accuracy varies depending on the true location. By visiting this page, running all the way through a measurement, and then telling me honestly where your computer really is, you provide me with data that I can use to calibrate the VPN measurements. Again, data from places other than Europe and North America is especially helpful: I particularly want Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America.
(7) CHARLES VESS. Coming this fall, an art book by the master — “Charles Vess Has An Original Art Edition of The Book of Ballads”.
From Neil Gaiman’s retelling of “The False Knight on the Road”, to Jeff Smith’s “The Galtee Farmer”, and Jane Yolen’s “King Henry” – Charles Vess’ The Book of Ballads brought new visions of the classic folktales from the brightest New York Times bestsellers, award winners, and masters of science fiction and fantasy together with stunning art from Charles Vess. With this new The Boo of Ballads Art Edition, get ready to experience the stories anew!
Hits comic stores September 13, 2017 and bookstores on November 10, 2017.
(8) SQUEE DOWN UNDER Ryan K. Lindsay is an excited Aurealis Award winner.
https://twitter.com/ryanklindsay/status/855421140403015680
(9) TODAY’S DAYS
Two choices for April 22 —
EARTH DAY
The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, activated 20 million Americans from all walks of life and is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The passage of the landmark Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and many other groundbreaking environmental laws soon followed. Twenty years later, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage.
MARCH FOR SCIENCE
The March for Science is the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies, and governments.
(10) MARCHER FOR SCIENCE. Given what a lot of you think about the Daily Mail, why wouldn’t most their coverage of the March for Science in London revolve around Doctor Who’s Peter Capaldi? Except that you think it’s a good thing, don’t you. Fess up!
Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi joined physicists, astronomers and biologists at the March for Science as protesters paraded past London’s most celebrated research institutions.
Leading figures used the occasion to warn Britain’s impending divorce from the continent could compromise their work by stifling collaboration with overseas colleagues.
Organisers claimed 12,000 people joined the London event, as hundreds of similar protests took place around the globe, from Australia to the US.
Somebody needs to say it: What’s Doctor Who but a show that glorifies fake science and boasts a stunning lack of internal consistency? Yes, I love it, too, but let’s not get confused about what happens every episode….
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 22, 1953 – Sci-fi horror movie Invaders From Mars was released on this date.
- April 22, 1978 — The Blues Brothers make their world premiere on Saturday Night Live.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- April 22, 1894: Legendary film heavy Rondo Hatton is born in Hagerstown, MD. (Which makes me wonder, did he ever meet Harry Warner, Jr.?)
(13) SEE THE AUTHORS. Here are Ellen Datlow’s photos from the April 19’s Fantastic Readings at KGB with Laura Anne Gilman and Seth Dickinson.
(14) HEAR THE AUTHORS. At the next Fantastic Fiction at KGB on May 17, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present E.C. Myers and Sam J. Miller.
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published four novels, and short stories in various magazines and anthologies, including Space & Time Magazine, Hidden Youth: Speculative Stories of Marginalized Children, and Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy. His first novel, Fair Coin, won the 2012 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult SF and Fantasy, and YALSA selected The Silence of Six as one of its “Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers” in 2016. His next book will be DoubleThink, a collection of stories related to The Silence of Six from and he continues to write for ReMade, a science fiction series from Serial Box Publishing.
And
Sam J. Miller’s short stories have appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, along with multiple “year’s best” anthologies. His debut novel The Art of Starving, forthcoming from HarperTeen, was called “Funny, haunting, beautiful, relentless and powerful… a classic in the making” by Book Riot. His second novel, The Breaks, will be published by Ecco Press in 2018. He graduated from the Clarion UCSD Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop in 2012. A finalist for multiple Nebula Awards along with the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards, he won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides.”
May 17th, 7 p.m. at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
(15) GO AROUND AGAIN. The … individual … pushing circular runways backs up his ideas: “Circular runways: Engineer defends his proposal”
Last month we published a video arguing the case for circular runways at airports, as part of a series called World Hacks. It took off and went viral.
The video has had more than 36 million views on Facebook and generated heated debate on social media – including within the aviation community. Many people are sceptical about the concept.
So we decided to hand-pick some of the top concerns and put them straight to the man proposing the idea: Dutch engineer Henk Hesselink.
This is what he had to say….
Chip Hitchcock remarks, “I like how he casually dismisses increased landing speeds (ignoring their effects on tires) and doesn’t even discuss how difficult it would be to build several miles of surface with a uniform concavity or to refit several thousand airplanes with an autopilot sophisticated enough to handle such a landing — or how much harder aborting safely would be if the autopilot failed.”
(16) GET YOUR TISSUES READY. Nerdist has photos — “Little Jyn Erso Cosplayer Delivers Death Star Plans to Leia at STAR WARS Celebration”.
Harley and her dad made the data cards as a fun activity for the convention. Harley loves interacting with other people, and they thought this was a fitting tribute to their love of Star Wars and Fisher. As Harley ran into Leia cosplayers of all variety of ensemble, she handed over the Death Star plans. I don’t know how many Leia cosplayers were moved to tears by this act, but I’d wager it wasn’t a small number.
(17) KAMIKASSINI. Cassini sets up for final plunge: “Cassini probe heads towards Saturn ‘grand finale'”.
In the years that it has been studying the Saturnian system, the probe has flown by the haze-shrouded world on 126 occasions – each time getting a kick that bends it towards a new region of interest.
And on Saturday, Cassini pulled on the gravitational “elastic band” one last time, to shift from an orbit that grazes the outer edge of Saturn’s main ring system to a flight path that skims the inner edge and puts it less than 3,000km above the planet’s cloud tops.
The probe will make the first of these gap runs next Wednesday, repeating the dive every six and a half days through to its death plunge, scheduled to occur at about 10:45 GMT on 15 September.
The probe is scheduled for deliberate destruction to avoid any risk of it hitting and contaminating a Saturnian moon.
(18) APOLLO 13. Now there’s a documentary about “The unsung heroes who prevented the Apollo 13 disaster”.
Two days into what should have been a mission to the Moon, disaster struck Apollo 13. A new film explores the drama – and astronaut Jim Lovell recounts the incredible efforts to bring the crew back….
These tanks, in the spacecraft service module, were Liebergot’s responsibility. They held oxygen and hydrogen, which was converted to electricity and water in three fuel cells – powering the capsule and providing the astronauts with drinking water. The routine instruction to turn on stirring fans was to make sure the liquid in the fuel vessels was properly mixed, to ensure the gauges gave accurate readings.
Swigert flicks the switches for the fans. Two minutes later, there is a bang and the master alarm sounds.
On the ground, Liebergot is beginning the last hour of his eight-hour shift and is the first to see something has gone wrong. “The data went crazy, there was a lot of commotion in the room,” he says. “We didn’t know what we were seeing.”
That eight-hour shift would eventually end three days later.
“Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” Lovell tells mission control. “It looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something. We are venting something out into space.”
Chip Hitchcock opines, “To go with a documentary about the rescue, which I can see starting another round of does-this-qualify-for-the-DP-Hugo — provided it gets enough attention. (Released 5 weeks ago, but I don’t recall it showing in Boston at all; did anyone else see it before it went to Amazon video?)
(19) BACK IN THE STEM. “Why Russia is so good at encouraging women into tech” — Chip Hitchcock introduces this with a lemony comment: “Makes an interesting contrast to the recent proposal to decriminalize wifebeating; I wonder whether their rightward political shift will affect this.”
According to Unesco, 29% of people in scientific research worldwide are women, compared with 41% in Russia. In the UK, about 4% of inventors are women, whereas the figure is 15% in Russia.
Russian girls view Stem far more positively, with their interest starting earlier and lasting longer, says Julian Lambertin, managing director at KRC Research, the firm that oversaw the Microsoft interviews.
(20) PUB SIGN. Catching up on the news from 2011 — “Sizewell: Unique pub sign scoops top award” in the East Anglian Daily Times.
His unique creation features three variations on the vulcan theme – the Roman god, the delta-winged jet aircraft and the TV character Mr Spock.
Mr Fisk, who has been at the pub since 1997, decided to create a new sign after the old one was hit by a lorry around 18 months ago.
(21) HOLD EVERYTHING. In “Love in Public” on Vimeo, Noah Malone explains what happens to relationships when talking club sandwiches give gratuitous advice.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Zack Weinberg, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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@Cassy B: It’s not new but I thank you for pointing me toward that post, because the Twitter thread it linked to seemed to indicate that Beagle is well enough to be writing and talking to his friends; I’d been pretty worried about him after he was unable to finish a reading here and cancelled the one after that. I’m sure this is all hideously stressful and I hope the slowly grinding gears of justice produce some benefit to him soon (though I’m afraid the result might be more like “Cochran loses, but mishandled the money so badly that there’s none left to pay Beagle anyway”).
Question for Tolkien scholars: decades ago (before 1990, I think; certainly before 2000) I read a scholarly work (article in collection? book?) arguing that LOTR has four heroes: Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf. Does this ring a bell? What am I remembering?
Doctor Science: Looks like “Vids in Space” requires a password. Does that mean a paywall, just registering for the site, or….?
I know the legalities are complicated, but having a publishers blog as a Fanzine, just sounds like an oxymoron.
Even uf they are huge fans of their own work, as Castelia clearly is.
Mike:
The password is listed right above the Vimeo embed. PW-protected so the vid can’t be found by googling, I believe (or possibly for copyright reasons, I don’t know).
Doctor Science: Thank you!
Have any of the people saying the WSFS should boot the Castalia blog from the Hugo noms contacted WSFS to challenge its inclusion?
I don’t know the procedures here, but perhaps drawing it to their attention is the first step?
And yes, I’m sure there are people there who read File 770, but they’re busy and they’re not necessarily the people in charge of that bit.
@Mark
They sent us an e-mail telling us we’d reached the shortlist. Then they quoted the definition for fanzine and asked us to notify them if either a) we didn’t qualify or b) we didn’t want the award. If we did want to accept, we were told to confirm that “Rocket Stack Rank, edited by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong” was how we wanted to be listed.
It’s possible that for works that seemed not to be qualified, they would have framed it differently. E.g. “Your story appears to us to be too long for Best Novella. Can you confirm the word count?” But I’m just guessing.
@rcade
Indeed. It’s just that based on all that’s been said in the past two years, I think they’re very unlikely to disqualify someone who fights it. Maybe that’s for the best, assuming 3SV gets passed. Not having to fight people makes the job a lot easier for the volunteers, I’m sure.
Thanks for the kind words. Given the competition, I’m seeing the Castalia House Blog as a guarantee that RSR won’t end up last in the final vote. 🙂 But I don’t disagree overall.
For those interested, an eARC is now available for P. C. Hodgell’s latest Kencyrath book:
http://www.baen.com/the-gates-of-tagmeth-earc.html
Since it is an eARC, the author warns that if you get this version, you should expect typos.
(I’m so excited!)
@Kurt Busiek
I sent them a link to your comment and asked. We’ll see what they say.
Every cloud, you know….
rcade:
The way §3.1.13 of the WSFS constitution is worded, the main question seems to be who counts as “contributors or staff”, and whether Beale (or anyone else who gets paid by Castalia House) is involved enough to fall into that group.
I had the same doubt as you last year and tried looking a little into it, and I couldn’t find any evidence of Beale being a contributor. My understanding is that the Castalia House Blog is run 100% by Jeffro and a couple of other writers, none of whom get paid, and that the publisher Castalia House does nothing beyond providing web hosting. If that is indeed the case I think it’s fair to accept the blog as a fanzine.
On the other hand: I agree that the blog should be disqualified from Best Fanzine if either Beale or anyone else employed by Castalia House contributes occasional articles, or if Jeffro and/or the other frequent writers get paid for their writing. If you know of articles on the CH blog written by Beale and published in 2016, I suggest you send links to the Hugo Admins.
Just to be clear about the current rule, paying for material — which Tor.com does — disqualifies something as a fanzine, not being the hype-machine for a professional publisher.
Not that it would be a bad thing to regain the amateur focus of the category, but experience shows that in fanpolitical terms that’s a far more radical change than it might at first appear.
Mike: That is not clear to me. Paying for material means it stops being a fanzine and becomes a semiprozine, if it fulfils other conditions for fannishness. But being published by an entity which provides more than 25%…. makes it a professional publication, and therefore neither a fanzine nor a semiprozine.
Edit: This also applies to Johan’s point. The detailed bits of 3.1.13 aren’t what matter; the first line of the section says ‘non-professional’, and that’s what’s at issue here.
(4) SCIENCE’S SIBLING RIVALRY.
Interesting story. I loved the linguistics element in Arrival. Somehow never thought that much about SG1 before, but remember that exchange in ST because I just watched it a few months ago. Now I’m thinking it may be time for an SG-1 re-watch, one of my all-time favorite SF shows, and I don’t care who thinks that makes me a fool!
(16) GET YOUR TISSUES READY.
What a great picture and sweet story!
(21) HOLD EVERYTHING.
Weird and gross and I liked it.
@Arifel “rediscovered Temeraire though I skipped a lot of the fighty bits”
I just finished the first book, and loved it all the way through to the fighty bits, which were fine and all, but not nearly as interesting as the rest of it (to me). I suspect I’d have had the opposite feeling if I’d read the book when I was a teenager (approximately 15 years before the first book was published).
@JJ
Damn you, JJ! (book purchased)
@Kyra – Yes! I’ve only finished To Ride a Rathorn, and that was in December, but I’m excited to continue on, once I’ve finished my Hugo reading (I’ve also been missing Discworld). Looks like there’s plenty of time to finish the next three and move on to the fourth before next year’s nominations.
:tickety-boxity:
Since my comment didn’t make an argument one way or the other, it seems an odd choice to link to over the ones actually making a case, but I suppose we will.
As you say, the rule for a professional publication reads —
And you’re arguing facts not in evidence. It’s not enough for Castilia House to own the blog. Castalia House has to be providing a quarter of Vox Day’s income.
I’m sure we’d all be surprised if Tor.com* wasn’t providing a lot more than one-quarter of Tom Doherty’s income — and since it’s part of Macmillan I don’t know whether he is in the staff or owner category, but either way it ought to hold true for him.
What is the situation with Castalia House and Vox Day?
*ETA: Change that so it relates Doherty to TOR, which is promoted through Tor.com, but it’s the publishing enterprise that would be Doherty’s source of income.
Unless he’s not the only staff, which I don’t think he is.
Then the question becomes whether “staff” refers to staff of the publication or of the entity.
@Kurt Busiek
The Hugo folks got back to me. (Fast!) They said they’re already aware of everything on this thread, and that they’d need something new in order to reconsider this issue. They said some of the later comments outlined the issues pretty well. (Without saying which ones, but my money is on Johan and Mike.)
Andrew M:
Hmm, you’re right, we should read “non-professional” as “not professional according to §3.2.11”. And then the connection to the publishing house becomes problematic regardless of how much Beale (or other employees) are involved in the blog.
But hey, if Beale makes a statement to the Hugo admins saying that Castalia doesn’t make money, I’m willing to believe him.
MIke: I’m only saying what the argument is, not whether it’s right. (My ‘it’ is indefinite.) As you say, whether it’s right turns on facts we don’t know.
Kurt Busiek on April 23, 2017 at 11:34 am said:
This seems to imply that there is some entity called WSFS that can override the current Worldcon committee and their Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee’s decision. This is not true.
1. WSFS consists of the members of the current World Science Fiction Convention. It has no Board of Directors or other executive authority.
2. In general, Worldcon committees are sovereign except where otherwise provided. (WSFS Constitution section 1.6)
3. The Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee of the current Worldcon has irrevocable domain over the 2017 Hugo Awards (WSFS Constitution section 3.13).
There is nobody that can override the decisions of the 2017 Hugo Award Administrators. Greg Hullender did the right thing by contacting the current Hugo Award Administrators. Their decision is what applies.
No, in this case it means I’m speaking casually, not legalistically. I might have as easily said “the Hugos,” but didn’t because I figured someone would tell me that awards statues don’t make choices.
I’m pretty sure people knew what I meant. Greg certainly did, since he said he sent my comment to “them” and that them was the Hugo Committee, apparently.
@Kurt Busiek
It’s the same “them” that told me RSR was a finalist, so I have great confidence it was the right one. 🙂
@JJ:
Book purchased. TBR continues to grow.
General Hugo reading
Series thoughts
The Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone – have enjoyed the ones I’ve read – haven’t read the latest
The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey – haven’t read any yet need to get to this
The October Daye Books, by Seanan McGuire – have kept up with series and enjoyed but it’s not in my top 10 for UF series
The Peter Grant / Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch – haven’t read any of these – the reviews haven’t led me to believe it will be my thing
The Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik – I enjoyed the early books in this series but stopped reading for some reason – I have the last 3 to read – I’m feeling skittish as the last book I read by her (not Temeraire) had attempted rape treated too casually for my tastes as well as the relationship between the female protagonist and her mentor included too much emotional abuse for my tastes
The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold – this is my number 1 pick as I reread these books for comfort reading and to remind myself it’s possible to write strong women and disabled people & strong doesn’t have to mean kickass.
(5) [Daily Mail article on Mars One study]
It’s difficult to unwind this. The Scroll item refers to the Daily Mail, but it links to a Yahoo article that (supposedly) quotes the DM, without linking directly to the article.
I can’t find any DM article that seems to fit what is described, after diligent searches, but I did find what appears to be the Science Direct article (published in the journal Acta Astronautica) mentioned by Yahoo: link. The summary says that the authors determined that colonists will start dying after 68 days, but the actual article doesn’t say that.
The source article is a revision of a paper that had been given at the 65th International Astronautical Congress. The initial paper did make the 68 days claim, but that section was dropped from the one supposedly summarized by the Daily Mail and subsequently Yahoo.
Greg – I figured. You weren’t fooled by casual reference to the WSFS into thinking I was making some organizational distinction, but rather pointing in the general direction of the appropriate authorities without troubling to figure out the precise name.
My apologies to anyone who was led astray and thought I was asking if Worldcon members had been roused to overrule the Hugo Committee.
I have finished reading Deaths End.
It is an odd book.
I feel it may not be showing itself to its best advantage because it presents itself as a novel. The whole series, I think, is a future history, a bit like Heinlein’s. It might have worked better if actually written as a set of short stories and short novels, like Heinlein’s, rather than as a trilogy of massive volumes. This last volume, especially, has a sense of ‘This happened. And then this happened. And then this happened’ rather than of being a connected narrative.
I was also rather annoyed by what happened to the second book, which was much more of a connected narrative, and seemed to be moving towards a definite solution to the problem, even if a rather gloomy one. The third volume tells us, rather quickly, that this solution didn’t work, and moves on.
New acquisitions:
* The first two books of a series, The Girls From Alcyone – book one was free, and book two’s marked down from $3 to $1 for another couple of days.
* Six Wakes, mentioned elsewhere. A murder mystery with clones in space, for $3? Sold.
* Daily deal from Open Road: $2 for The Big Front Yard, a collection of short fiction by Clifford Simak.
* The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, currently $1 – basically, “Mythos” plus “anthology” plus “Bentley Little and Seanan McGuire” made it a must-have for me at that price.
Johan P says But hey, if Beale makes a statement to the Hugo admins saying that Castalia doesn’t make money, I’m willing to believe him.
H’h? I thought Beale has been insisting that his books outsell Scalzi’s by a long shot? You mean he’s lying about this? Damn, another person to trust .
When people refer to ‘them’, I assume it refers to giant ants. Just so you know.
Giant ants run the Hugos.
I mean, why wouldn’t they?
I, for one, welcome our new insect Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee.
Re: status of Peter S. Beagle
Beagle is active enough that he’s scheduled for programming at BayCon next month. (Including a panel that yours truly is moderating.)
@Heather Rose Jones: That’s great! Except it also makes me sad, because I recently decided I can’t make it to Baycon! 🙁
Worker ants skitter about collecting nominations and bring them back as tributes to the nest.
Yup, me too – both the buying them cheap a while back and the vulture bit.
And now they are a series for Hugo purposes, so I can promote them up Mount Tsundoku.
(* ticks box *)
(* remembers to reply to ticky-box-confirmation email for once *)
4) And when he said that, my immediate response was, “Wrong. Because you have to have language first before you can have science at all.” It was a stupid line, and one that no scientist of my acquaintance would ever have said.
@ Doctor Science: Re the Vorkosigan vid, OMG YES!! That’s an amazing piece of editing.
I have a comment in moderation linking the nine posts on the Castalia House blog written by Beale in 2016. The first one is this:
The New Sheriff in Town
rcade: I see your point, however, I’d just as soon not host those links. I may link there if I need to report a news item, and commenters may, too, but I don’t want to give them THAT much bandwidth.
Why is that the focus when the semiprozine definition disqualifies a fanzine and only takes $1 of compensation to a contributor to meet?
If you paid me $1 to write a blog post here, File 770 would become a semiprozine. It wouldn’t matter whether that was 25% of my income.
OK. If anyone wants the links, my username on this comment links to my blog and there’s a contact page on it. I’m also on Twitter as @rcade.
Heather Rose Jones comments Beagle is active enough that he’s scheduled for programming at BayCon next month. (Including a panel that yours truly is moderating.)
He’s actually both feeling much better and doing more writing than he has in well over a decade.
Here’s the deal. If you want to support him by purchasing books by him, only the last two as released by Tachyon Books which would be Summerlong and In Calabria as his former agent who may well be spawn of a Hell demon claims he owns the rights to, well, everything else which has made for an interesting time by his lawyer.
Under new circumstances should you purchase anything published by Conlan Press which that particular Hell spawn is the principal of. Indeed chances are that he’ll take your money and never bother to send you anything as he’s done this for well over a decade now.
If all goes well, she with the aid of other folk, will claw back everything claimed by that Hell spawn.
@rcade
Just looking at the WorldCon75 Contact-Us page, I think the right place to send the info is [email protected]
Given that you’re passionate enough to have done all that work, it shouldn’t go to waste.
@Peer: I know the legalities are complicated, but having a publishers blog as a Fanzine, just sounds like an oxymoron. Shouldn’t that depend on the publisher? Obvious example: NESFA is a publisher (that pays royalties to authors, but nothing to any of the people who make the books happen), but also runs conventions and does other fannish things; if they were to do something of general interest in blog format (like Tor’s blog), would they be disqualified? I’ve seen a number of other small presses that I suspect are labors of love, but haven’t discussed economics with them.
In cleaning out a file drawer, my partner discovered a small stack of fannish-related papers. Most of them were obvious candidates for the recycling bin (ancient con flyers, etc.), but among the detritus were the following items that I thought might possibly interest someone here:
– Space-Time Continuum V3 #1, Jan/Feb 1994: This appears to be largely a listing of media-cons and related classified ads, but it’s got a very nice BatB illo on the cover. Newsprint, slightly yellowed with age.
– SubGenius Pamphlet #1: Printed on 2 center-stapled sheets of 11×17 glossy paper, this is apparently the Intro and FAQ for the Church of the SubGenius. Someone put a fair amount of effort into assembling this; it’s much nicer than your average church handout.
– Proper Boskonian #30, Summer 1993: “Proper Boskonian is the semi-annual (in theory) genzine of the New England Science Fiction Association.” Contains several articles including a Boskone 30 con report, 5 LOCs, and artwork.
– Weinstein & Glyer’s DISCOUNT Hoaxerama!: I’m not entirely sure what this is; perhaps Our Gracious Host can enlighten us. It has roughly the format of a fanzine.
If anyone is interested in any of these, comment below to claim it and send your postal mailing information to [email protected]. Sorry, offer open only to Filers in the USA, as we are asking neither remuneration nor postage — basically, we’re paying you to take this stuff off our hands, and postage outside of the US is prohibitively expensive.
I sent the links to the Hugo email address. I considered making a report the first time the subject came up weeks ago, but I was waiting to see whether any Hugo committee veterans popped up here to give their interpretation of the situation.
Weinstein & Glyer’s DISCOUNT Hoaxerama!
I would expect it to be closely related to the Hogu Awards.
It’s set up to fix what we/they were trying to fix at a given time. Originally, there was a prozine definition but when that Hugo category went away so did the definition. The semiprozine category was created to shift some zines out of the Best Fanzine category. Then around 2009 there was a plan to get rid of the semiprozine category that blew up in the proposers’ faces because by then semiprozines had proliferated and people WANTED to get into that category. Since the category was staying, it now became important to set a boundary between semipro and professional, to level THAT playing field.
The old professional definition was all about print run and couldn’t be revived in the internet age. So the new professional publication definition needed a different yardstick and you see the results.
Whereas the old print run definition could be checked by looking at the second class mail declarations that were required to be published annually by the USPS (therefore enforced by the government), the current definition requires information for which there is no external source. Administrators seem to have been operating on a basis of believing people when they say they’re not a professional publication, regardless of how doubtful that may appear.
But let me throw out another confusing thought. Many new businesses lose money at the outset. How would you show Castalia House is paying the owner enough to make it a professional entity?
I like that “roughly the format” phrase, as though it needs to be picked up with tongs, which is probably about right. 🙂
Back in our primes, Elst Weinstein and I looked around and saw people publishing collections by great fanwriters, like The Incompleat Burbee, and decided we should not take a chance on whether somebody would come along later to celebrate our worthy careers when we were perfectly capable of doing it ourselves immediately….. At that time our claim to fame was connected to APA-H (the apa for hoaxes) and the annual Hogu Award Ranquet at the Worldcon, and so most of the material in the collection has to do with one or the other.