(1) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND THERE LIVED AN ARCHITECT. The structure replacing Ray Bradbury’s torn-down home is nearly finished. LA Observed interviewed architect Thom Mayne and his wife about the design in “What would Ray think? Thom and Blythe Mayne’s house in Cheviot Hills is almost ready to call home “. Despite the title, it didn’t seem to me the question was really addressed.
Prominent LA architect Thom Mayne razed the longtime Cheviot Hills home and work space of Ray Bradbury to build his own home. Mayne promised the neighborhood and fans a “very, very modest” house that would honor Bradbury in its design. Now that the teardown-and-replace is nearly complete, KCRW’s Frances Anderton, host of Design & Architecture, gets a tour and assesses if the promise was met.
However, the promised fence with Bradbury quotes is there, although you really can’t make them out in this photo from LA Observed.
A metal screen, fabricated by Tom Farage, contains quotes from Ray Bradbury’s writings. The moving gate will eventually have a hedge that moves with it (photo: Frances Anderton.)
(2) THAT TIME GRUMPY AND DOC WENT TO THE MOVIES. Atlas Obscura unearthed “The Movie Date That Solidified J.R.R. Tolkien’s Dislike of Walt Disney”.
…According to an account in the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Tolkien didn’t go see Snow White until some time after its 1938 U.K. release, when he attended the animated film with [C.S.] Lewis. Lewis had previously seen the film with his brother, and definitely had some opinions. In a 1939 letter to his friend A.K. Hamilton, Lewis wrote of Snow White (and Disney himself):
Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated–or even brought up in a decent society?
… Tolkien didn’t like the goofball dwarfs either. The Tolkien Companion notes that he found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross simplification of a concept they held as precious….
(3) DEMENTOR INVENTOR. Zata Rana, in an article on Quartz, “How JK Rowling Overcame Depression and Went On To Sell Over 400 Million Books”, reminds us that Rowling began to write Harry Potter novels after being diagnosed with clinical depression in the 1990s and her struggles to overcome her depression provides inspiring lessons for us all.
…During this period, her depression took a dark turn, and she considered herself a failure. She had fallen and felt stuck. She even contemplated suicide. Luckily, she found it in her to seek help, and writing became an outlet. The idea for the Harry Potter series had come to her years before on a train ride from Manchester to London. She had worked on a few chapters in Portugal, but she only really found her momentum back in the UK.
Rowling finished the first two books while still on welfare benefits. The dementors introduced in the third book were inspired by her mental illness….
(4) STINKS IN SPACE. The popular video game took a wrong turn when it left the Earth: “Activision admits taking ‘Call of Duty’ to space was a bad idea”.
Right from the very start it was clear that Activision’s Call of Duty franchise had taken a bit of a wrong turn with Infinite Warfare. The initial trailer for the game was absolutely slaughtered on YouTube, and early sales indicated that the game just wasn’t striking a chord with some of its target audience. Now, Activision is admitting what we all knew: Infinite Warfare was a misstep.
In a recent earnings call with investors, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and COO Thomas Tippl revealed that the company wasn’t particularly pleased with how the game sold, or its overall reception….
(5) CAN’T PULL OVER TO THE ROADSIDE. And you know what else is going to stink in space? Blue Origin — “Hold on tight and hold it: Jeff Bezos says no potty breaks on Blue Origin space trips”. Here are a couple quotes from a Bezos Q&A session.
What if I get queasy? Getting sick to your stomach can be a problem on zero-G airplane flights like NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” but motion sickness typically doesn’t come up until you’ve gone through several rounds of zero-G. Blue Origin’s suborbital space ride lasts only 11 minutes, with a single four-minute dose of weightlessness. “You’re going to be fine,” Bezos said.
What if I have to use the bathroom in flight? Go before you go. “Listen, if you have to pee in 11 minutes, you got problems,” Bezos said. You may have to hold it for more than 11 minutes, though, since passengers will board the spaceship a half-hour before launch.
(6) TODAY’S TRIVIA. “What, Me Worry?” Alfred E. Neuman made his debut as Mad Magazine’s mascot by appearing on the cover of The Mad Reader, a reprint paperback published in November 1954. He appeared for the first time on the magazine’s cover in issue #21 (March 1955).
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 26, 1956 — The Creature Walks Among Us was released.
(8) THEY STOPPED FOR LUNCH. And didn’t clean up after. Better hope your litter doesn’t last this long. “Neanderthals in California? Maybe so, provocative study says”
A startling new report asserts that the first known Americans arrived much, much earlier than scientists thought — more than 100,000 years ago __ and maybe they were Neanderthals.
If true, the finding would far surpass the widely accepted date of about 15,000 years ago.
Researchers say a site in Southern California shows evidence of humanlike behavior from about 130,000 years ago, when bones and teeth of an elephantlike mastodon were evidently smashed with rocks.
The earlier date means the bone-smashers were not necessarily members of our own species, Homo sapiens. The researchers speculate that these early Californians could have instead been species known only from fossils in Europe, Africa and Asia: Neanderthals, a little-known group called Denisovans, or another human forerunner named Homo erectus.
This reminds me of my visit 40 years ago to the Calico Early Man Site where Louis (but not Mary) Leakey thought they had found evidence of equally ancient toolmaking. According to Mary, their disagreement over this contributed to their split.
(9) QUESTIONS BIGGER THAN THE EXPANSE. The Space Review ponders the utopian and quasi-religious aspects of space advocacy in “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids”.
A few years ago historian Roger Launius wrote “Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion” in the journal Astropolitics. He noted the similarities between human spaceflight enthusiasts and what we understand as traditional religion. For much of the history of the space age the comparisons have often been blatant, with spaceflight leaders such as Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, as well as numerous political leaders such as Ronald Reagan, talking about spaceflight in quasi, or even literally religious terms. Launius observed that human spaceflight, like religion, has its immortality myths, its revered leaders and condemned villains, its sacred texts, and its rituals, rules, and shared experiences. According to Launius, “The belief system has its saints, martyrs, and demons; sacred spaces of pilgrimage and reverence; theology and creed; worship and rituals; sacred texts; and a message of salvation for humanity, as it ensures its future through expansion of civilization to other celestial bodies.”
These religious aspects can be found throughout the writings of spaceflight advocates, the self-styled missionaries of the spaceflight religion. One of the most common arguments for space settlement is to achieve immortality for humankind by moving a portion of humanity to Mars in event of catastrophe. The Space Review regularly publishes these kinds of appeals to transcendence. The advocates argue that humankind could be wiped out by natural disaster—typically a meteor strike—and settling the Moon and Mars would help avoid the species being wiped out (see “Settling space is the only sustainable reason for humans to be in space”, The Space Review, February 1, 2016). Other commonly-cited threats include man-made ones like war and environmental destruction—as if space settlers would not also face the same things in a far more fragile biosphere. The Expanse has highlighted this vulnerability and interdependence with a subplot about food production on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede collapsing because the ecosystem lacks the robustness of Earth’s complex environment.
(10) CHU ON WRITING. In an interview at Outer Places, “Author John Chu Talks Cybernetics, Short Fiction, and Sci-Fi”.
OP: Are there themes or elements you find yourself returning to again and again in your work?
Chu: At a LonCon 3 panel, I joked that all the parents in my stories make unreasonable expectations of their children. That may be truer than I’d like. Certainly, I like to explore the notion of family in its many forms, i.e., family does not have to mean blood relation. The most interesting characters in my stories are likely either navigating relationships with their blood relatives, searching for their family, or both.
(11) PLUS ATWOOD’S CAMEO. An NPR reviewer finds “Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Is Compelling — And Chilling”.
One searing scene features Offred’s memory of Aunt Lydia, the abusive headmistress who trains new Handmaids, quoting scripture and shocking the women with cattle prods. Eventually, she explains their duties as breeders. “You girls will serve the leaders of the faithful and their barren wives,” says Aunt Lydia, who cites Tinder as one source of the moral turpitude that has caused God to create the infertility crisis. “You will bear children for them. Oh! You are so lucky!”
(Atwood, who also served as a consulting producer on Hulu’s series, pops up in one scene from the first episode, where she slaps Offred for being slow to respond during an indoctrination session.)
This is a world of 1984-style paranoia and doublespeak. On the surface, it’s a placid, polite community that just happens to have black-clad guards with machine guns on every corner. But beneath that veneer is a world of grim desperation, fear and oppression. Women are stripped of husbands, children, jobs, their own money and control over their sexuality.
(12) MARVELS AND MARTYRS. Carmen Maria Machado reviews The Book of Joan for NPR.
One of the pleasures of The Book of Joan is its take-no-prisoners disregard for genre boundaries. Its searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy make it a kind of sister text to Jeff VanderMeer’s ineffable Southern Reach trilogy. Yuknavitch is a bold and ecstatic writer, wallowing in sex and filth and decay and violence and nature and love with equal relish. Fans of her previous novel, The Small Backs of Children, will recognize these themes and their treatment.
(13) HELL’S JINGLING BELLS. And the BBC tells us why Milton should be more widely read.
…Ricks notes that Paradise Lost is “a fierce argument about God’s justice” and that Milton’s God has been deemed inflexible and cruel. By contrast, Satan has a dark charisma (“he pleased the ear”) and a revolutionary demand for self-determination. His speech is peppered with the language of democratic governance (“free choice”, “full consent”, “the popular vote”) – and he famously declares, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”. Satan rejects God’s “splendid vassalage”, seeking to live:
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile Pomp.
(14) SOME LIKE THE LIGHTNING — SOME DON’T. Two perspectives on Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning.
TRIGGER WARNINGS for discussion of ciscentricity, allocentricity, intersexis, and gender essentialism, and for quoted anti-trans and anti-intersex slurs apply to the following essay, as well as SPOILER WARNINGS.
Too Like the Lightning has been feted and critically acclaimed, and now nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I read it back when it first came out, after hearing about how well it supposedly handled queerness, and especially gender in the context of queerness, from a number of people whose opinions on the topic I usually respect; I did not agree with these assessments. I’ve been asked a number of times to discuss more fully my issues with the presentation of gender in the novel, so, with the Hugo Awards now open for voting, it seems like this might be the moment, to let voters see what this particular genderqueer person thought of the presentation of gender in the book. For context, I’m a bisexual nonbinary person and my pronoun is they….
- Yoon Ha Lee: “The problem with problematic”
Hi! I’m trans. I’m queer. I would like to talk about trans characters who end up dead in the course of story, or queer characters who are not the heroes of the story, and why that is frequently completely all right with me; and why the frequent labeling of works as “problematic” for not portraying trans (etc.) characters as paragons of virtue is itself a problem….
Now, I can completely sympathize with someone, especially a trans or nonbinary someone, noping out of Palmer’s novel due to the use of pronouns. I am personally of the opinion that you can refuse to leisure-read a book for any reason you damn well please, and I can see why that would hit a sore spot. (To reiterate: we’re talking about leisure reading here, things you read of your own will.) But I do not agree that Palmer’s worldbuilding here was problematic, and I do not think she should have been discouraged from writing this future….
“But is it hurtful?” you ask.
I feel this is the wrong question.
Individuals are hurt by whatever hurts them. And that’s not always something an author can predict–given the number of individuals in this world that’s a losing proposition, to try to write a work that never hurts anyone. I was not hurt by Palmer’s exploration of gender and society and use of pronouns, but again, trans people are not a monolith; and I want to be clear that people who noped out of the novel because of the pronouns (or any other reason) are entirely within their rights. I do think she was doing something interesting and definitely science fictional and that that’s fine, and that she should not have been prevented from writing with this device.
(15) CLASSIC WHO. Michael O’Donnell contributes an “it’s always new to someone on the internet” news item, a Doctor Who documentary, 30 Years In The Tardis posted on Vimeo by the director Kevin Davies around a year ago. It was originally broadcast by the BBC in 1993 to celebrate the Doctor’s 30th anniversary and never repeated (although it was included with one of the Doctor Who box sets).
Part 1:
Part 2:
(16) WELCOME TO KARLOFFORNIA. And A.V. Club remembers when “Thriller turned classic pulp stories into terrifying television”. (A post from 2014.)
… “As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a Thriller!” was the catchphrase associated with Thriller, the horror anthology hosted by the craggy, silver-haired Englishman who in 1960 was still the world’s most emblematic scary-movie star. Rod Serling’s nervous energy animated The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock’s laconic drawl set the tone for his eponymous suspense series. Karloff was a natural choice to join their ranks: He let viewers know what they were in for just by saying his name….
Here is the prosaic chain of events by which Thriller came to meet Weird Tales: Frye’s associate producer, Doug Benton, asked writer Charles Beaumont (The Twilight Zone) for his ideas on material to adapt for Thriller. Beaumont suggested the pulp magazine and steered Benton to superfan Forrest J. Ackerman, who owned a complete set. Ackerman wouldn’t part with his trunk of back issues but agreed to loan them to Benton, a few at a time. Benton set out to track down authors and rights, and so Thriller began to offer relatively authentic screen versions of many key Weird Tales authors: August Derleth, Harold Lawlor, Margaret St. Clair, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, and Robert Bloch. Only Lovecraft was missing.
(17) PASSING GO. Atlas Obscura goes inside the history and geography of the iconic game: “Touring the Abandoned Atlantic City Sites That Inspired the Monopoly Board”.
One of the last traces of old Atlantic City is the Claridge Hotel. Found on the corner of the two most expensive properties on the Monopoly board—Park Place and Boardwalk—the Claridge was known in its heyday as the “skyscraper by the sea.” Opened in 1930, it had an Art Deco opulence that wouldn’t be out of place in midtown Manhattan.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael D’Donnell, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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I can easily believe that.
Thanks for picking my title.
Also, box checked…
Re: (11) – From the reviews it sounds like Hulu’s made an excellent and faithful adaptation of Handmaid. That almost certainly means I won’t be watching it, as I found it one of the most harrowing books I ever read.
Re: Handmaid’s Tale.
I always thought Suzette Haden Elgin did feminist dystopia better in Native Tongue. I am muttering in my tea over this article about how the cast of the current adaptation and (once) Atwood also claimed it was not a feminist novel
I’m teaching a dystopian lit course next term (a themed course called “Shaping the Future”) and while I thought about THT since it was so much in the news these days with the adaptation, I finally decided not to go with it (for several reasons).
These are the ones we’ll be reading (I am also now reminded I am late getting book orders in, ACK).
Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
Unwind by Neal Shusterman
The Running Man by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
Fifth?
Scroll like no one is filing you.
@1: I must have missed the memo in which a marquee the size of a studio apartment was considered “modest”. I don’t see any way that plants can cover up that middle finger extended at the neighborhood.
@17: I knew Atlantic City had seen a number of failures but didn’t realized it was quite that grim. I wonder whether the Clinton campaign could have made more of “the world’s greatest job creator” having to close one of his ego projects at a time when the overall economy was improving.
@robinareid: the sequels to Native Tongue are IIRC moderately discrete — but I’m a bit surprised you’re doing Sower without Talents. Can you comment?
@ Robinreid. Parable of the sower is the only one of those I have read. It was really frightening for me because it was the most realistic dystopia I’ve read – realistic in the sense that I can easily see society going from now to there. Doesn’t require any major event or evil people, things just gradually get worse.
@14–I knew I’d be irritated by the first one just because of their need to post a trigger-warning. And I was right. I came away from that with the impression that whoever wrote it was looking for something to complain about.
“Indeed, Mycroft states that the singular they is the product a “prudish” era, and a “neutered”7 (in this case, meaning unsexual, desexualised) pronoun. Another character states that “sex is in everything… If you don’t believe that, you need to get laid”8; thus we see binarism and allocentricity as apparently common beliefs.
When did allocentrism (whatever the hell that is and I did Google it) become a thing?
I agree with the second person–don’t like it, don’t read it. And certainly don’t presume to tell the writer that the whole thing is wrong just because you didn’t like the world they created.
I really liked Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, as well as some of the other books she’s written. I read her blog for a while and she struck me as the nicest person. Sadly, she’s dead. I cannot read Handmaid’s Tale. I don’t need that kind of depressing crap with the politics we have now.
Almost done with City of Stairs and IMO it should have won the Hugo whichever year it was published in. Fantastic world-building, intriguing characters you really care about, and a twisty plot. Highly recommended.
Finished Dark Matter by Blake Crouch a couple of days ago and liked it. Interesting plot and I liked the way it ended.
tick!
… but pixels are a file’s best friend.
(and it occurs to me that there’s a tiny bit of contrast from that to this:)
(11) I also came across this article the other day and found it an interesting take on The Handmaid’s Tale: (really more about the story as such than the Hulu adaptation) https://newrepublic.com/article/141674/handmaids-tale-hulu-warning-conservative-women
And I agree with bookworm1398 re Parable of the Sower – the way dystopia is described as happening via gradual decline feels both very realistic and extra scary.
(14) SOME LIKE THE LIGHTNING — SOME DON’T
I thought both essays were very good, touching on different facets of the book, and different ways people cope with the representation and exploration of gender issues.
I had some thoughts of my own to add, primarily about what Palmer is trying to achieve with her treatment of gender. I personally found it provocative and eye-opening, but by the same token, I can certainly understand why the book can be a punch in the gut — particularly to those who don’t really need any eye-opening on the topic… So, I’ve written my thoughts up as “Too Like The Lightning” Punches Everyone In The Face.
At some point this Hugo season, I hope I’ll get around to similar conversation on other, non-gender aspects of TLTL I find noteworthy, too — but, yeah, internet discussion tends to get moving 😛
(BTW, Mike, this is officially my favorite of your item-titles ever :P)
I finally started listening to Welcome to Night Vale. It’s so good.
@Oneiros : Oh! Enjoy! SO MUCH FUN, and a bright ray of light and happiness. In a creepy kind of way 🙂
Barbara Hambly’ Sun Wolf and Starhawk Series: The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar, and The Dark Hand of Magic is 2.99$ instead of 15 on Apple,Amazon,Kobo and Google (and maybe at other places).
But for me, it’s not working 🙁 (when I’m logged on my amazon.com account, I get the regular price, maybe because I’m located in France right now)
I loved these three books. A bit dark sometimes (but not Games of Thrones-dark, more like Guy Gavriel Kay Dark : choices have consequences, war is not fun, magic is not easy)
My favourite Hambly book may still be Dog Wizard ( the first I read from her I believe, and also, it was just like an Ars Magica RPG settings)
BookBub says the Hambly deal has expired.
@Standback
How spoilery for SS is your piece?
@Mark: Basically not at all. I go into substantially less detail than the original essay.
TBH, I’m still digesting Seven Surrenders. It’s a very different beast from TLTL (which is surprising, given TLTL’s abrupt ending! But no, the division actually makes good sense, in retrospect). It has a couple of elements that really give me pause (and might force me to revise some thoughts about TLTL, but I’m not there yet).
So basically all I touch on 7S is to say “yeah, some of these things get worse in 7S,” and I don’t even go into what or how.
(10) CHU ON WRITING
Coincidentally, I just read Chu’s How to Piss Off a Failed Super Soldier in the Book Smugglers packet compilation, and it was very good, as was the whole packet.
(14) SOME LIKE THE LIGHTNING — SOME DON’T
Franklin links to this piece by Cheryl Morgan as well, which I found really interesting:
I think it remains to be seen whether the messages the book is currently giving are the messages the full series will give, or whether they are messages Palmer wishes to endorse rather than merely represent – given how deliberately opaque the book is I doubt it’s possible to tell at this point.
(15) CLASSIC WHO.
I might be the person this is new to then – if I saw it on transmission then I’ve forgotten.
(14) This might be a good time to mention that Crooked Timber have just run an online seminar on Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders with contributions by Jo Walton and Max Gladstone, among others, and some responses by Ada Palmer. I’ve only skimmed the material as I haven’t actually read the books, but it looks like there’s a lot of good stuff in there.
(14) @Mark:
So, I don’t think at all that Palmer is portraying gender-neutrality as “political correctness gone mad.” I think it’s kind of the other way around — that the goal of achieving a gender-neutral society is one that’s very easy to empathize with, that seems like a good solution to our problems. I think the goal of muting the influence of gender is taken, by the book, to be laudable and self-evident. The people who do use gender as a method of influence are portrayed as warping society; while Mycroft laments the impossibility of overcoming gender issues, he describes it as a social change society hasn’t managed to build up yet, not as something best avoided.
It’s the means to that end that don’t really pan out. Trying to eliminate the problem of gender by concealing it sounds good, but isn’t sustainable. This is a lot of what I wrote about in my comments, so I won’t repeat it here 🙂 I will agree, though, that if anything gives me pause, it’s the possibility that Palmer is touting an essentialist gender binary. I don’t think she is, and even if she is, it’s a very different binary than the common one, decoupled entirely from biological gender — but even so, it would feel simplistic and false.
(I will add one other small observation:
Terra Ignota overcomes sexism by concealing gender; religious conflict by concealing religion. What’s missing from this list? Racism — Terra Ignota’s globalized society seems to have overcome racism entirely; the cast of characters is from a diverse set of ethnicities; nobody makes any issue of it at all. I find this interesting — particularly because racism is the social ill most disrupted by Terra Ignota’s elimination of geographical distance, by the bash’ system, by the Hives replacing race and nation as personal identifiers…
I think there might be something here about racism being solved by a series of social changes that undermined the foundations of racism, vs. gender and religion, which were swept under the rug.)
8) Heck, evidence of anything pre-Clovis in the Americas for the longest time has been controversial. Neanderthals in the Americas would really upset a lot of apple carts.
14) TLTL is definitely one of the most debated Hugo award finalist books in recent times. My review from August 2016 seems quaint and quiet in comparison–my major beef with it was the incomplete story problem.
And you’ve seen Cam’s post collecting reviews on it, yes?
And – from that seminar – here’s a passage from one of Ada Palmer’s responses that explains what she thought she was doing with her treatment of gender, among other things:
“Is this a utopia or a dystopia?” is a question many, many people have asked about these books… Discovering that you have one set of feelings about this question, and a close friend has very different ones, is chilling, and informative, and is one of the kinds of discourse I hoped to stimulate when writing these books. And other issues in the book (gender, family units, ethnic identity, ethics & forgiveness) were also engineered to cause similar splits between readers for whom this world, and book experience, feel utopian, dystopian, or something in between.
It’s a valid approach, but it seems a bit smug-liberal to me – trying to “provoke debate” as an abstract exercise without acknowledging that the lives and happiness of actual people might be at stake in the debate. But I’d have to read the books to have a properly informed opinion, of course.
Palmer: Discovering that you have one set of feelings about this question, and a close friend has very different ones, is chilling, and informative, and is one of the kinds of discourse I hoped to stimulate when writing these books.
Ghostbird: It’s a valid approach, but it seems a bit smug-liberal to me – trying to “provoke debate” as an abstract exercise without acknowledging that the lives and happiness of actual people might be at stake in the debate.
Actually, that sounds like a post-publication retcon to me (oh, yeah, this was totally the effect I was going for!).
@JJ Actually, that sounds like a post-publication retcon to me
I’m inclined to take her at her word – there’s a lot of context missing from the heavily-edited quote I posted.
Started my Hugo reading last night with The Tomato Thief.
That Wombat certainly has a fine turn of phrase.
Speaking of Super Soldiers, I’m sure I’m not the only person who found the culmination of the recent story arc in Questionable Content immensely moving. I had occasion to discuss this with someone yesterday. The conversation began like this:
“Do you read many web comics?”
“A few”
“What about Questionable Content?”
“Oh, my parents like that.”
That put me back on my heels. I thought Olds Like Me who read it were the exception.
(I was also moved by Band Vs. Band recently, but I know everyone who reads it was thrilled, so why bother asking?)
@John: I may not be Old Like You but I’m definitely Old by many reckonings; I’ve been reading QC for years (among an assortment of way-younger-than-I soapish strips). Doesn’t hurt that it’s set in an area I remember well.
@John A Arkansawyer “What about Questionable Content?” “Oh, my parents like that.”
I enjoy reading Questionable Content but I think that’s fair. It seems more likely to appeal to the nostalgia of Gen X than the anxieties of Millennials. (To the extent that generations are an actual thing, anyway.) Probably true of Oglaf too, in a different way.
Non-webcomic reading: I just finished “Every Heart a Doorway”, which I found… slight? Nothing actually wrong, but it spends so much time explaining the setup that there’s no room left for any of the millions of interesting things you could do with it. And (avoiding spoilers) it’s got the most oblivious set of amateur detectives I’ve seen in ages.
So now I’m re-reading “Lavondyss”, which I love for the mass of powerful moments and haunting images linked in ways that make more intuitive than conscious sense and always forget the bits in between that you have to slog though to get to them.
And, prompted by @Guillaume, I’ve just downloaded “Bride of the Rat God” (my own favourite Hambly novel) onto my phone so I’ve got something less demanding to fall back on.
@ Ghostbird
Another fan of Robert Holdstock here. Lavondyss packs such a mental wallop. However, I haven’t managed to complete my collection. Have you read the Merlin Codex series yet?
That’s one hell of a trigger warning.
The post goes on to accuse Ada Palmer’s book of “punching me in the face repeatedly.”
Where’s the warning for people troubled by the idea that reading something you find personally offensive is like being a victim of physical violence?
11. Yes, yes, we know. But it’s NOT science fiction.
@rcade: Well, you know. Part internet hyperbole. Part… I personally feel like TLTL made a point of aggressively misgendering everything in sight; to me, that’s really unusual and fascinating, but to somebody who’s already very sensitive to that, it can pretty much overwhelm anything else. At extremes, it’s like trying to read a book with a blaring police siren hooked up to it — it’s constant, and practically impossible to notice anything else.
I’m a great fan of TLTL. I absolutely don’t think it’s for everybody, though. I admit, I am dismayed by a few people saying nobody should read it — but on the other hand, I’m certainly not going to say nobody can object to it, either 😛
Really dumb question here. I just bought the Peter S Beagle Unicorn Humble Bundle. I’ve never done Humble Bundle before.
How do I download my books?
I got a receipt; the receipt had a link, I clicked the link, and it brought me to a different Humble Bundle for software. I don’t see another likely link in the email. There’s a 12 digit number (in the form #xxxx-xxxx-xxxx) and a 13 digit alphanumeric hash included in the email, but I don’t know which one to plug in, or where to plug them in….
Help?
(EDIT) Never mind; there’s a separate email in my spam folder. And I now have 15 unicorn books in my download folder. Sorry to bug people; nothing to see here; move along….)
@Rob Thornton
I’m not really a Holdstock completist – I liked Mythago Wood, loved Lavondyss, and vaguely remember The Hollowing and Gate of Ivory. (Oh, and The Ragthorn has stuck with me, even though I don’t think I’ve re-read it since it first appeared in Interzone.)
I did start Celtika at one point and thought it looked promising but once I put it down I found it hard to come back to. Some combination of a very dense difficult book, a protagonist I didn’t really like, and a mild personal bias against Arthurian stuff. (I’m not sure what the opposite of “resonates” is, but that’s what Arthurian myth does for me.) It did get under my skin, though, in the way Holdstock’s best writing can do – I may yet go back and give it another try.
A fifth amongst the Vile may be quite continental…
Have we done Milton yet? Yes, I recall doing Jerusalem. Anyway,
Better to Scroll in Hell than to be a Pixel?
@Cassy B: Try creating an account (if you haven’t already). and logging in. That should give you access to “Library” and “Purchases” pages; it might be there.
@rcade
Violent imagery is something that can bother people and should probably be used carefully – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tagged in some communities – but it sounds like you’re more annoyed that you don’t understand all the terms in the trigger warning? (I’ve never come across allocentricity before – time to do some reading, evidently.)
@Standback: Thank you for that article. I felt very much the same way as you towards the book but your article did a good job of helping me understand how others would have felt quite differently.
@Ghostbird and @Rob Thornton, another big Holdstock fan here. The Mythago books are among the few that have taken up permanent residence in my imagination.
I still have my SFBC editions of Mythago Wood and Lavondyss on the shelf here — I really should revisit them one of these years, especially because I suspect there was a whole lot going on in the story that kind of went whizzing past me when I first read them.
Felt like the setting would have easily sustained a long slice-of-life novel, rather than going to the murder mystery so early.
Still interested in what angles the sequels will pick up, though. The first one is a prequel set in Jack and Jill’s world — which, despite its strong element of pastiche, did stand out as the most unusual fit with portal fantasy.
Standback, it turns out that the actual download link went to my spam filter. All is now well. But thanks; good to know for the future, just in case.
Come and scroll it as ye go
On the Seven Seven Oh.
@steve davidson: If so, why is “If This Goes On…” SF?
@whoever: My thanks to the person who noted a few Scrolls back that Brother’s Ruin is only a third of a story; I’ve removed it to Tsundoku Coventry, where I keep incomplete works until the full story is published.
Re: QC
I used to read it back before it got all trendy. 🙂
Okay, actually I started reading around number 1600, 2830 felt like the perfect ending and since then I’ve been bad about keeping up… Uh I mean that it’s um too hip and popular and now I’m reading some comic you’ve probably never heard of.
QC, xkcd and Skin Horse are my regular webcomic reads.
EDIT: I also catch up on Gunnerkrigg Court less often than I should, it’s a bit frustrating in installments.
Definitions time
Allo(sexual): a person who is sexually attracted to other people, opposite of
Asexual: a person who is not sexually attracted to any gender
Allocentric: a narrative or society that prioritises sex and sexual attraction, often to the point of excluding or erasing anyone that doesn’t comply with it. A common form is insisting that sexual attraction is universal, and therefore using it as a universal selling factor in advertising.
@Ky
Thanks for the definition. That’s what I took from context in the article, but it’s good to have confirmation.