(1) FARGO/HUGO. On Fargo, the Hugo Award-look-alike turned out to be a “Golden Planet” won by Thaddeus Mobley. Observer’s episode roundup covers it at the end:
But Gloria is on to…something, definitely, something strange. At least as strange as the title Space Elephants Never Forget, one of many cheap pulp-fiction paperbacks written by a Thaddeus Mobley that Gloria found in a safe inside her murdered father-in-law’s house. Or were Thaddeus Mobley and Ennis Stussy one and the same? It appears so, just another way specters from the past–be it a former life as a famed sci-fi writer, or a murderous Cossack with the name Yuri Gulka–continue to materialize in, of all places, Minnesota. But I guess that makes Gloria Burgle uniquely qualified to take this case on; if you’re fighting the past, you may as well employ someone who is stuck there.
Mobley’s books were shown:
- The Planet Wyh
- The Dungeon Lurk
- Space Elephants Never Forget
- Toronto Cain Psychic Ranger
- Organ Fish of Kleus-9
- The Plague Monkeys
- A Quantum Vark
(2) I WONDER. Syfy asks “Where is the Wonder Woman movie advertising?” — and starts me wondering is the movie is being “John Carter-ed”?
Wonder Woman finally gets her own movie and the movie marketing machines for DC and Warner Bros. haven’t seemed to have chugged to life.
We’re less than six weeks out. There’s been more advertising for Justice League than the movie that’s supposed to kick off the whole JLU film arc. On Warner Bros.’ YouTube Channel, Wonder Woman has only three trailers to Justice League‘s six. Where are the TV commercials and product tie-ins (yes, I know about Dr. Pepper, other ones please)? Batman and Supes both had their own breakfast cereal, so where’s my Wonder Woman cereal, General Mills? I’ve seen toys but no toy commercials.
It’s been pretty quiet out there, regardless of the fact that people have reacted positively to the little advertising that’s been released. The few trailers Wonder Woman has have garnered close to 60 million views. Imagine what would happen if the trailer were embedded on major entertainment sites and there were stories out there about the film?
(3) DOC OF THE BAY. Cat Rambo doubles back to cover a book in the series she missed — “Reading Doc Savage: Land of Always-Night”:
The man menacing poor Beery, who Beery calls Ool, is odd in many ways, including being skeleton thin and having enormous, pale eyes. He wants something back, something Beery has stolen to take to Doc Savage and is currently carrying on a money belt around his waist
Beery is standing in front of a candy store; when the inevitable happens, he reels back and smashes into the plate glass. After a struggle, he dies, “becoming as inert as the chocolate creams crushed beneath him.”
Ool takes his possession back from Beery, which turns out to be a peculiar pair of goggles with black glass lenses. He tastes one of the scattered chocolates, smacks his lips, and gathers as many chocolates as he can into his hat. As he departs, he eats the candy “avidly, as if it were some exquisite delicacy with which he had just become acquainted.”
(4) THE CULTURE ON RADIO. Available for the next 28 days: a BBC audio adaptation of Iain Banks’s story “State of the Art”, adapted by Paul Cornell.
The Culture ship Arbitrary arrives on Earth in 1977 and finds a planet obsessed with alien concepts like ‘property’ and ‘money’ and on the edge of self-destruction. When Agent Dervley Linter, decides to go native can Diziet Sma change his mind?
(5) GUARDIANS REVIEW. BBC reviewer Caryn James says too many explosions in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2. BEWARE SPOILERS.
…The film’s spindly plot is just an excuse, a peg on which to hang action scenes. When the team is hired to retrieve some valuable battery-sized energy sources, Rocket slips a few in his pocket. Soon the Guardians are being pursued all over the cartoonish universe.
Many antics ensue, but like so many other space movies this is essentially a father-son story. As the last film ended, Peter learned he was only half-human, on his mother’s side. The sequel adds a vivid new character, Peter’s long-lost father. He is played by Kurt Russell with a twinkle in his eye and a swagger that reveals where his son got that roguish attitude.
(6) SILVER CHAIR. ScienceFiction.com has a progress report on the next C.S. Lewis movie adaptation – “Joe Johnston To Helm ‘Chronicles Of Narnia: The Silver Chair’”.
Director Joe Johnston (‘Jurassic Park III’,’The Wolfman’) sure likes shields! Having worked with ‘Captain America: The First Avenger,’ he now has a more fantasy based movie to helm where characters will wield shields in in ‘Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair.’ Disney and Fox were only able to bring three of the novels to the big screen previously, and now we’re getting a fresh look into the iconic C.S. Lewis classics through Sony. Apparently, the studio wants to make sure someone with blockbuster experience to bring this film to life.
While Johnston hasn’t been too busy since working with Steve Rogers, the type of work he’s done in films ranging from this to ‘Jumanji’ to ‘The Rocketeer’ seem perfect for the action-adventure portion of this epic fantasy.
As ‘The Silver Chair’ doesn’t follow the original Pevensie children but their cousin Eustace Scrubb it is the perfect way for them to reboot the universe and not have to really dwell on the first movies and move forward at the same time.
(7) THE FEDERALIST POOPERS. Bill Nye was a big hit at the March for Science. Not surprisingly, The Federalist came out with a dissenting view of Nye a few days later — “Bill Nye’s View Of Humanity Is Repulsive”.
Although many thousands of incredibly smart and talented people engage in real scientific inquiry and discovery, “science” is often used as a cudgel to browbeat people into accepting progressive policies. Just look at the coverage of the March for Science last week. The biggest clue that it was nothing more than another political event is that Nye was a keynote speaker.
“We are marching today to remind people everywhere, our lawmakers especially,” he told the crowd, “of the significance of science for our health and prosperity.” Fortunately, our health and prosperity has blossomed, despite the work of Nye and his ideological ancestors
(8) ACTRESS PRAISED. A Yahoo! Movies critic recognizes “Alexis Bledel As Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale Is the Role She Was Born to Play”.
In the Handmaid’s pilot, Bledel’s character, Ofglen, makes a 180 in the eyes of Elisabeth Moss’s Offred. The two characters, who shop together but are the de facto property of two different men, suspect each other of being enthusiastic participants in Gilead’s totalitarian state. “I sincerely believe that Ofglen is a pious little shit with a broomstick up her ass,” Offred says in voice-over as she approaches her companion with a smile. “She’s my spy and I’m hers.” With Bledel as Ofglen, you instinctively believe Offred’s assessment. Hasn’t she always seemed too perfect? Too brittle? Too willing to be a snitch? (Or was that Rory Gilmore?)
(9) MORE OF OFFRED’S VOICE. Refinery interviews Elizabeth Moss about Handmaid’s Tale, feminism, and the Trump election — “Elisabeth Moss Talks The Handmaid’s Tale — & How It’s Definitely A Feminist Show”.
“I welcome any time feminism enters a conversation. I would firstly say, obviously, it is a feminist work. This is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve been filming it for six months, I’ve been involved with it for a year, I’ve read the book nine million times. It is a feminist show, it is a feminist book, and as a card-carrying feminist, I am proud of that. [Regarding the controversy at the TriBeca Film Festival panel], I think there is a very important word, which is ‘also.’ I think that it is a feminist work, and it is also a humanist work, which is what I believe Margaret says as well, so I’ll defer to the author of the book on that one. Women’s rights are human rights, hence how it becomes a humanist work.”
(10) THE FUTURE IN A BAG. The Verge reports: “An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next”. There are lots of “don’t celebrate yet” caveats, but many fans say it sounds like an important first step towards the “uterine replicators” in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series.
Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop — much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus — but right now, it has only been tested on sheep.
It’s appealing to imagine a world where artificial wombs grow babies, eliminating the health risk of pregnancy. But it’s important not to get ahead of the data, says Alan Flake, fetal surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and lead author of today’s study. “It’s complete science fiction to think that you can take an embryo and get it through the early developmental process and put it on our machine without the mother being the critical element there,” he says.
(11) STAR POWER. An interview with the Astronomer Royal tests his ability to envision the limits of the universe: “Astronomer Royal Martin Rees on aliens, parallel universes and the biggest threats to mankind”.
Q: How big is the universe … and is it the only one?
Our cosmic horizons have grown enormously over the last century, but there is a definite limit to the size of the observable universe. It contains all the things from which light has been able to reach us since the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago. But the new realisation is that the observable universe may not be all of reality. There may be more beyond the horizon, just as there’s more beyond the horizon when you’re observing the ocean from a boat.
What’s more, the galaxies are likely to go on and on beyond this horizon, but more interestingly, there is a possibility that our Big Bang was not the only one. There may have been others, spawning other universes, disconnected from ours and therefore not observable, and possibly even governed by different physical laws. Physical reality on this vast scale could therefore be much more varied and interesting than what we can observe.
(12) BAXENDALE OBIT. Passing of a famed comic-strip maker: “Leo Baxendale: Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx comic legend dies”
He was regarded by aficionados as one of Britain’s greatest and most influential cartoonists.
His creations also included The Three Bears, Little Plum and the comic Wham!.
Baxendale’s son Martin, also a cartoonist, said his father died at the age of 86 after a long fight with cancer.
(13) SUSAN WOOD REMEMBERED. Carleton University is still awarding the Susan Joan Wood Memorial Scholarship.
Awarded annually on the recommendation of the Department of English Language and Literature. Preference will be given to a student proceeding from the Third to Fourth year of an Honours program in English with an emphasis on Canadian literature. Donor: Friends and colleagues of Susan Joan Wood. Endowed 1982.
Andrew Porter recalls, “It was folded into Carleton’s general scholarship funds, after an initial funding period during which I and many other individuals and conventions provided funds.”
(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
- April 28, 1930 — Best known as Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones is born in Texas.
(15) STREAKING ACROSS THE STORIED SKY: Webwatcher Jason of Featured Futures reports on the brightest lights seen this month with the “Summation of Online Fiction: April 2017”:
I thought ralan.com might have been hasty in declaring Terraform dead but I’m calling it, too. Leaving aside comic strips, after four stories in January, there’ve only been two in each of February and March and none in April. The remaining dozen prozines brought us forty-two stories of 199K words.
In one of Dozois’ Annuals (I forget which) he says something about the industry going in streaks with some years producing no anthologies about wombats and others producing ten of them. The same is true of webzines on a monthly basis. As March was Horror and Tor/Nightmare Month, so April was Fantasy, BCS/Lightspeed, and Novella Month….
(16) LONG HIDDEN CONTRIBUTOR’S FIRST NOVEL. Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey was a 2016 release from Thomas Dunne.
In her extraordinary debut, Spells of Blood and Kin, Claire Humphrey deftly weaves her paranormal world with vivid emotional depth and gritty violence. Bringing together themes of death, addiction, and grief, Claire takes readers on a human journey that goes beyond fantasy.
When her beloved grandmother dies suddenly, 22-year-old Lissa Nevsky is left with no choice but to take over her grandmother’s magical position in their small folk community. That includes honoring a debt owed to the dangerous stranger who appears at Lissa’s door.
Maksim Volkov needs magic to keep his brutal nature leashed, but he’s already lost control once: his blood-borne lust for violence infects Nick Kaisaris, a charming slacker out celebrating the end of finals. Now Nick is somewhere else in Toronto, going slowly mad, and Maksim must find him before he hurts more people.
Lissa must uncover forbidden secrets and mend family rifts in order to prevent Maksim from hurting more people, including himself. If she fails, Maksim will have no choice but to destroy both himself and Nick.
- Bio: Claire Humphrey’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Crossed Genres, Fantasy Magazine, and Podcastle. Her short story ”Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot” appeared in the Lambda Award-nominated collection Beyond Binary, and her short story “The Witch Of Tarup” was published in the critically acclaimed anthology Long Hidden. Spells of Blood and Kin is her first novel.
(17) DON’T BLAME DIVERSITY. Martin Wisse responds pungently to the question: “Is diversity killing Marvel sales?”
Short answer: no. Long answer:
Good gods do I hate most of what Marvel has been doing in the 21st century, from the debased widescreen storytelling to the shitting on everything its characters stand for, but what it has done right is providing space for more diverse superhero comics, both character and creator-wise. I stopped being a regular comics buyer, let alone a superhero floppies buyer since, well, the start of this century and getting a view of what the industry is like a decade and a half later I’m glad I did. Everything this dude listed as being more of a problem than Marvel pushing diversity is shit I’ve already seen in the nineties, then secondhand in the naughties, just more chaotically and more intensive. Pushing more titles, an obsession with events, an overwhelmingly short term focus at the cost of a long term vision: we’ve seen that all before. It’s just the speed that’s different….
(18) DIAGNOSIS MARVEL. ComicsBeat has a few ideas to add: “Tilting at Windmills #259: What the hell is wrong with Marvel Comics anyway?!?!”
The harder you make it to collect “Marvel comics”, the fewer people will do so. And that audience fracturing has finally come home to roost.
One personal stat that I always try to get across is that at my main store, most mainstream superhero style books, because of mismanagement of the brands by the publishers, have dropped down to “preorders plus 1-2 rack copies”. Generally speaking, this yields sell-ins that are sub-20 copies for most titles, and a truly depressing number of books are sub-5.
Sell-through is, thus, what matters for retailers as a class, and it is virtually impossible to sell comics profitably if your initial orders are so low. Even a book like “Amazing Spider-Man”, we now are down to a bare eleven preorders, and we’re selling just three or four more additional rack copies of current issues. There’s no room to “go long” here – I really only have a two copy tolerance for unsold goods before what should be a flagship book of the line becomes an issue-by-issue break-even proposition, at best. It’s just math.
(19) MORE RESOURCES. Here are some of the news reports that set the Marvel discussion in motion.
- NPR: VP of Sales Sparks Controversy — “Beyond The Pale (Male): Marvel, Diversity And A Changing Comics Readership”
- ICv2 interview: “MARVEL’S DAVID GABRIEL ON THE 2016 MARKET SHIFT”
“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity.”
- John Jackson Miller of Comic Chron looks at the big picture circulation stats.
“I don’t see much evidence of a sales slump at all,” Millers says. “In fact, the comics industry has seen its best stretch it’s seen in many decades over these last five years — we’ve seen five consecutive years of growth in the comics shop market.”
(20) DOWN FOR THE COUNT. Drunk gets into fight with a Knightscope robot on the copany’s premises: “Silicon Valley security robot attacked by drunk man – police”.
One local man told ABC News it was not a fair fight.
“I think this is a pretty pathetic incident because it shows how spineless the drunk guys in Silicon Valley really are because they attack a victim who doesn’t even have any arms.”
(21) ONLINE INTERNATIONAL. Around the world, lots of connectivity used for play: “Unlocking the potential of technology”. A captioned photo gallery at the link.
[Thanks to rcade, Cat Rambo, amk, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Bruce D. Arthurs, Hampus Eckerman, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Clack and Bonnie McDaniel, and alternate universe contributing editor Kip. W because he actually said it a month earlier.]
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[this box is ticked]
(10) I read about this at Science News the other day. Their story gets into some of the difficulties in setting up one of these.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/faux-womb-keeps-preemie-lambs-alive?tgt=nr
@7 – Nye has loathsome Eugenics views. Nye preaching about global warming when owning three homes is pathetic. No 770 excerpts about specific criticisms by the Federalist author. But follow the link and read for yourself.
Re: Wonder Woman advertising. It’s been announced that Danica Patrick will drive a car with a Wonder Woman paint job in two May NASCAR races.
Fifth!
Ticky Cad
airboy has teal, metallic, and orange scented eugenics views.
It’s just make something up week, right?
@Camestros Felapton – Go back and read the article and read Nye’s views.
Unless you think snuffing out people or forcibly controlling women not to have children is ok. Then you would agree with Nye and the Chinese Communists.
But if it keeps you in your happy place, then don’t read the article and don’t learn about Nye’s views on Eugenics.
I know, I don’t know what teal smells like either. Yet here we are.
airboy: Unless you think… forcibly controlling women not to have children is ok.
It’s interesting that this is not okay, but that forcibly controlling women to have children is okay.
@airboy: I call bullshit on the eugenics.
I put Bill Nye Eugenics into Google and read the front page links from Fox, National Review, Town Hall, and the New York Post. All but the NYPost have very selective quotes that could quite easily be the opposite of what you are saying and no links to check against. By the third page, we’re down to Natural News.
The NYPost actually did link this 1:15 long YouTube video in which you can see for yourself whether Nye is agreeing with the guy he asks the question of or if he is pushing him to stop equivocating. And the guy backs down from policy initiatives to encourage fewer births in the developed world to changing cultural norms.
https://youtu.be/eHmtn6gAioQ
I think technology (to allow people to control their procreation), feminism (to give women the final say on whether they get pregnant or not), and democratic socialism or social democracy (to give every person a reasonable belief that they don’t need to have a dozen children to see one survive) will control population growth just fine.
Those are two and a half things rightists hate (they’re ambivalent about technology) because they allow people to control their lives, including their reproduction.
So it’s not surprising to see rightist propagandists spread this particular lie. (If it were true, they’d give a full account.) I encourage you find the source and see for yourself. Given how tendentiously the first three made their case, and how even the brief excerpt the NYPost shows enough to cut its legs out from under it, you may want to rethink.
I did and I carefully counted the instances they gave of Nye’s views on eugenics.
Here they are:
And that’s the lot of them. Out of the zero views of Nye’s on eugenics in either article (the one in the scroll and the one it links to) none of the 0 cases were ‘loathsome’
Just ticky, because I deleted two responses here to airboy that just made me angry to proofread. Likely because I read that opinion piece in the NY Times today by the new climate change denier columnist, and I really am not in the mood regarding the topic.
@airboy: If you follow the link from The Federalist to NPR, you’ll see that Bill Nye isn’t even in it. And if you follow the link about this quote from Ruth Bader Ginsberg,
you will go to another Federalist article with that same quote, which links to the actual New York Times interview, where the full context is clear and it is apparent that they have twisted her words into something she did not say. In fact, it’s pretty much its opposite. Here are the relevant paragraphs for your possible edification:
The non-italics in the final paragraph are what The Federalist left out, and the bold is what shows they twisted her words.
The dishonesty is stunning and obvious. Do you really want to stand behind that?
Well unless you think putting toast in your ear is foolish then your views on eugenics are purple orientated! Oh, it is still non-sequitur week yeah? No
You know the word ‘eugenics’ means something right? Ironically, the Federalist article gets the distinction but just throws it in there as a kind of vague association. If you had bothered to read the article you’d have spotted that. At best (!?) the article is trying to smear Nye by claiming that if lived in the past he’d have supported eugenics – which is a stupid claim but I guess the writer is at leats vaguely embarrassed by the idea of an out right lie and/or scared of libel laws.
Read it. The read it again. Then read it another time. Then searched them both for the word ‘eugenics’ and counted that for no good reason. Then drank some more coffee. Then wondered if you get that you are saying something really nasty about somebody that is false or whether you don’t understand that is what you are doing or whether you just don’t know what the word ‘eugenics’ means and think it means just anything to do with population control. Then wondered about how deep-seated eugenics ideas are within the US right and whether that also helps underlie their attitudes to welfare and health care and then drank some more coffee.
Then I thought about what teal smells like again. I think fish. Not a nasty fishy smell but like fish and chips.
Dang. I meant to embed that video the NYPost linked, but I didn’t notice it was the shortened URL which does not link. But I can fix that:
I guess the answer to my question is eugenics is DEEP deep-seated in modern US rightwing thinking. It permeates it so deeply that somebody can even manage the double think of decrying eugenics and supporting eugenic policies.
Take the shocking infant mortality rate in the US, or the multiple ways conservative policy seeks to punish and deprive children of poor families. Think about the policies being followed that will mean people in poor communities will more likely have polluted water or air.
It is, in short, an ingrained view that the great and the good are somehow that way because of breeding. It’s why the GOP don’t bat an eyelid at nepotism from those they approve of and don’t care if poor people die early, or don’t even survive child birth.
I dislike Vox’s views but at least he is upfront about the poisonous ideology he is advocating. He is clear that he thinks IQ is everything and poor people having babies somehow is creating ‘dysgenic’ shifts. Others are less open about their loathsome views.
They’re Pixel and the Brain, They’re Pixel and the Brain;
One is a scroller, the other’s insane.
While I agree with everything else Camestros Felapton says, teal only smells like fish and chips when it’s been sitting out too long. When it’s fresh, it smells like warm ocean breezes and salt spray. When it starts to smell fishy, you’re supposed to toss it out and make a new batch.
But other than that, he’s on the money.
The answer to the conundrum about Nye and eugenics is simple: airboy is a liar.
We are heading into controversial territory now 😉
@Aaron: He’s repeating a lie. Let’s see if he repudiates it once shown the evidence. It’s clear that article is a falsehood.
I was feeling slightly sorry for him earlier today, when several people missed the point of James David Nicoll’s “20 Core Novels” lists and were treated gently and he got roundly dumped on for making the same mistake, which was a little rude of people, so I guess this gets him even with some of you and back down where I had him in my mind.
Some days it’s not worth not getting into bed early.
He’s repeating a lie.
This isn’t his first rodeo.
@Camestros: Teal is also a waterbird. So it smells kinda like duck?
Purple smells like artificial grape flavor. Artificial flavors/colors are so distinct and so unlike real ones that I have legit asked and answered “What flavor is it?” with purple, blue, and red. If you mix blue flavor and red flavor, you don’t get purple, though.
When Airboy is proven wrong, he just doesn’t acknowledge it.
His view of the world comes from believing what he’s told and then insisting on it, rather than thinking about it or examining any evidence.
I’ve noticed that Bill Nye is a weak point for even conservative types who otherwise make sense. Hopefully at some point the conservative war on science will end, and that will change, but it seems unlikely.
20) Typo alert – It’s probably not “copany.”
Teal is a waterbird and, whatever it smells like, it tastes like fish and mud.
@airboy, the problem with quoting questionable sources as support for one’s ideas is that the sources are bad. I don’t know how you get around the problem of finding credible sources for opinions that display a strong bias, but it probably won’t involve linking to the conservative version of the Daily Worker. (Also, I hope your wife is weathering things well.)
Two things:
That Federalist guy is clearly goring an ox. I could tell he was twisting Bill Nye’s actual stance. He also lost me when he tried to say with a straight face that folks that favor pro-choice are really eugenicists trying to cull the population of unfavorables.
@airboy — forcibly aborting babies like the Chinese did is wrong. So is forcing women to give birth when they don’t want to. Let’s see if we can make a statement that covers both situations: individuals should be the only ones making decisions about their reproductive choices. Not governments. Not other people with different religious views.
Which leads me to a thought I had about the nascent ‘uterine replicators’. In “Shards of Honor”, the Escos used the replicator technology to dump the children of rape back onto the Barryaran fathers.
My feeling is that once this technology is viable, the ‘forced birthers’ should set up womb farms and take over any fetus that a woman would otherwise abort. She signs over the cells and all parental rights, the righteous ones take responsibility for raising the child. Everyone is happy.
You guys don’t actually have synesthesia, do you? To me, teal is close to a C# minor, about two octaves above middle C. 🙂
As far as Bill Nye goes, even if I believed some of the wild accusations, I don’t think it would matter much. He’s an educator and TV presenter, not a scientist. (He does have an engineering background, but that’s hardly the same thing.) Basically, an entertainer. And, unless they’re so extremely crazy that I can’t possibly ignore it, I routinely ignore the political views of entertainers.
I’ve reviewed Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey.
I read the books in the Expanse series faster than I have been able to write reviews for them. My wife is reading them at an even faster clip than I did.
(2) I WONDER
Saw the latest Wonder Woman trailer at Guardians of the Galaxy. Looks much more interesting than “Batman v Superman”.
(5) GUARDIANS REVIEW.
No spoilers, but if you enjoyed the first, you’d likely enjoy this one. I did.
Quick Meredith Moment:
David Gemmell’s Legend (Drenai Sage #1) is on sale for $1.99 in the U.S.
There are no audiobooks of his in English (but a bunch in French), but I just looked and surprise! Legend is coming out in audio on June 22nd. Coincidence, or evil publisher plot? 😉
(5) GUARDIANS REVIEW & @Soon Lee: I won’t read the review, but thanks for confirming I’ll enjoy the second movie, Soon Lee. 🙂
(6) SILVER CHAIR. I enjoyed but wasn’t totally happy with the first three movies, so I’m curious to see how the next one will turn out, with this change.
(10) THE FUTURE IN A BAG. I read a little about this yesterdayish and I was intrigued and a little weirded out. Oh, and it made me think of James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter.
What??? No way does C# smell like fish and chips.
Good review – sums it up perfectly.
What Techgrrl1972 said.
airboy is an interesting commentator on areas of SF of which I know little. His regurgitation of rightwing talking points, to which he clings more tightly the more contrary evidence is presented, is extremely boring owing to its predictability.
(6) Silver Chair – though I dislike Lewis’ use of the powerful-woman-as-villain in the book, I reread it after I first saw Doctor Who in the 80s, after which I always imagined Tom Baker as Puddleglum. Any news about casting?
@Cheryl S.: I have not personally researched this, but I’ve heard it often enough from sufficiently varied and typically reliable sources to believe it it be true: The Daily Worker had a great sports section for a long time. Which puts it one up over The Federalist any day of the week.
[ticked off]
Msb — don’t know if you’re aware, but Baker played Puddleglum in the 1990 TV version. He was by far the best thing about it.
@6: If they’re rebooting, maybe we can get The Horse and His Boy sometime? IMO it’s more filmable than The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but I suppose the producers needed to use the actors playing Lucy and Edmund before they outgrew their roles.
Speaking of outgrowing (successfully?) has anyone seen Daniel Redcliffe in any adult role? I missed Equus but am hoping to see the NT Live! re-airing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead when I have Thursdays free, even if I have to go a distance for it, as I like the play and wonder how he’ll do. (I saw the 20th-anniversary production; John Wood took over the Player King before filming the role, but the strangest thing was seeing Jon Rubinstein (who created the very naive Pippin 15 years before) as a very together Guildenstern.)
I generally enjoyed the Narnia movies, although there were definitely diminishing returns as the series went on; but Silver Chair could be very interesting if done well. Dawn Treader came out (and promptly sank without a trace) in 2010, so at this point I assume they’d just completely recast it.
I’ve seen Radcliffe in a couple of non-Harry Potter films: Woman in Black and Horns, both of which were quite good.
Msb — don’t know if you’re aware, but Baker played Puddleglum in the 1990 TV version. He was by far the best thing about it.
He’s basically the only part of it that I remember.
@techgrrl I am listening to Shards of Honor in audiobook now, first time in umpty-ump years that I read that particular Bujold…and I had forgotten a lot of things, it turns out. I’m at the point where the Escobarans have sent the Barrayarans the set of uterine replicators. I had completely forgotten this whole situation.
And the Betans treatment of Cordelia now comes off as much more creepy than it did the first time around
I saw a stage adaptation of Woman in Black that absolutely blew me away. Didn’t want to see the film version after that.
Grania Davis died yesterday, according to SF Site.
Bill Nye has a 1,600-square foot house in LA’s Studio City neighborhood. When some YouTubers paid him an unannounced visit a few years ago, his electric meter was going backwards. The house was producing more energy than it used.
Nye was in a competition with neighbor Ed Begley Jr. for years on whose house had a smaller carbon footprint.
He has a one-bedroom apartment in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood that’s well-situated for him to use the subway for TV appearances instead of TV networks sending him a car.
His last seven cars have been electric.
I can’t find a third residence. He has an office in Pasadena, California, where he works for the Planetary Society.
It’s sad that every time climate change comes up for discussion anywhere, it’s necessary to debunk a bunch of denialist-inspired bullshit.
The stage version of The Woman In Black is absolutely wonderful. The film is so different though that one doesn’t spoil the other — there’s only the kind of relation between the two that a quick three- or four-paragraph plot summary would provide (I’ve not read the book, so don’t know to what extent each is a faithful adaptation).
(7) THE FEDERALIST POOPERS
I thought the article from The Federalist fit perfectly here, because the perspective was so totally alien.
We recently had a court case where american fundamentalists sponsored a woman who was employed as a midwife. Her case was that she shouldn’t have to do the work she was employed to do (handing out contraceptions and assisting in abortions) because it was against her conscience. The court said she shouldn’t work at a place where that was part of the job description then and threw the case out.
Hopefully it cost the american religious fanatics a lot. Do stay away from us.
I see the Fargo Hugo Farrago has gone far.
@John A Arkansawyer – I have not personally researched this, but I’ve heard it often enough from sufficiently varied and typically reliable sources to believe it it be true: The Daily Worker had a great sports section for a long time. Which puts it one up over The Federalist any day of the week.
Are you sure you don’t mean the Daily Forward? It’s conceivable that the Daily Worker had a great sports section, but the only copies I’ve ever seen were heavy on the Stalinism track and at least in memory lacked anything worth reading. I think I would have enjoyed the box scores, if they were there.
Going through my mom’s things recently, I found a letter my grandfather typed to my uncle crowing over beating the “damned Communists” in his union’s election. He had participated in the San Francisco general strike, but by the early 50s had outgrown his socialist past and become a Democrat. He sometimes left the Daily Worker around, which I’m pretty sure he read only to confirm his conviction that Communists were (insert ableist insult here).