(1) YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA GET. I appreciate the irony in the first line of Germain Lussier’s io9 post “The New Dune Movie Is Being Written By the Man Who Wrote Forrest Gump”:
But we don’t think that should worry you.
According to Lussier, Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for Forrest Gump, has been hired to adapt the Frank Herbert novel Dune for director Denis Villeneuve.
(2) NEW AFRICAN SF AWARD. Since the Hugo announcement date was only known a few days ahead of time, the African Speculative Future Society may not have known that April 4 was a less-than-optimum date to announce the inaugural 2017 Nommos shortlist.
The categories are:
The Ilube Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African – 1000 USD prize,
The Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novella by an African – 500 USD
The Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Short Story by an African – 500 USD
The Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Graphic Novel by Africans – 1000 USD to be shared.
The award website says —
We have welcoming and inclusive definition of who is an African that includes children of an African parent. Read more about eligibility here.
The award has been funded for four years, by Mr Tom Ilube.
“Science fiction is important because it looks ahead to African futures. Fantasy and fiction based on traditional tales are important because they link us back to our forebears. Both are important for African development. I wanted to make sure that the explosion of African science fiction gets the recognition it deserves.” Mr Tom Ilube.
The first award ceremony will be held at Aké Festival in Nigeria, November 2017. After that they hope to alternate the location of the awards ceremony between West and East Africa.
Here are links to the Short List and the rest of the nominees in all 4 categories:
- Novel Short List and Long List
- Novella Short List and Long List
- Short Story Short List and Long List
- Graphic Novel Short List and details
(3) OLD OPERA HAS NEW ACTS. Cora Buhlert couldn’t find what she liked 20 years ago, but there’s enough good stuff now for her to be writing about “The Space Opera Resurgence”.
I didn’t like any of those books. But I was an SF fan and a space opera fan and this was all the space opera there was, with very few exceptions (mostly published by Baen Books, which are notoriously difficult to find in Europe). So I kept trying the highly regarded New Space Opera of the early 2000s, until I found myself standing in the local Thalia store, the latest offering of New British Space Opera subgenre in hand (it was this one – I remember the cover very clearly), when I suddenly dropped the book to the floor and exclaimed, “Why do I keep buying this shit? I don’t even like these books.” So I turned my back on New British Space Opera and on science fiction altogether (I did put the book back on the shelf first) and read other genres for a few years, until I came back in a roundabout way via urban fantasy and science fiction romance and found a whole universe of SFF books that weren’t on the radar of the official genre critics at all.
Now, some ten to fifteen years later, there is a lot more space opera on the shelves than back in the early 2000s. It’s also a lot more diverse the than just pale Banks clones. Nor is it just written by white, overwhelmingly British dudes – indeed, some of the best space opera of today is written by women and writers of colour. And even some of those authors whose novels almost put me off science fiction altogether some ten years ago are writing much more enjoyable works these days. …
(4) MAIL CALL. It’s not easy to get letters from the year 1962 unless you’re The Traveler. Galactic Journey today unveiled – “[April 5, 1962] Pen Pals (Letter Column #1)”. The first missive comes from University of Arizona student Vicki Lucas….
Of course, to pay the tuition and room & board, I also take in ironing, do tutoring, deliver newspapers, etc., and they helped me get a student loan. It’s been a real eye-opener to go to school here. Now I know what “scholarship” means. At the University of Arizona, from which I transferred last year, I did have some great learning experiences, but nothing as rich as this.
Not that I didn’t have some great experiences at UA, meeting an English Professor who is an avante-garde composer (Barney Childs), and since I worked in the Fine Arts College I went to most concerts & saw the harpsichord played for the first time (double keyboard!) & heard Barney’s music played. (I admit, I have a crush on him — see the enclosed photo.) And then I’ve been to San Francisco & seen jazz trumpeter Miles Davis & a lot of other stuff….
(5) CAMESTROS FELAPTON EXPLAINS IT ALL TO YOU. Thank goodness somebody can. In “Hugo 2017: How to vote for best series” he looks at 8 different approaches to dealing with the vastness of the Hugo nominated series. Sure, 8 is also a lot — just be grateful he didn’t try to match the number of ways Cyrano described his nose.
The issue is that Best Series is not unlike Best Editor Long Form – the normal way of voting in the Hugo Awards doesn’t work (read the relevant stuff and vote). However, unlike Best Editor Long, best series at least has accessible information and works. The problem is that it is way too much volume of stuff to evaluate if you haven’t already been following the series in question. So here are some approaches to choose from.
(6) CHOP CHOP. Shouldn’t Wolverine co-creator Len Wein be getting a cut of this?
A medical clinic in the Philippines is using an unusual mascot to advertise its circumcision service: claw-bearing X-Men super hero Wolverine.
The advertisement for Dionisio M. Cornel Memorial Medical Center in Antipolo features an image of Hugh Jackman as the adamantium-clawed character he played in the X-Men and Wolverine films next to text promoting the clinic’s circumcision service.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSRvd73lmN4/
(7) RED ALERT. At Nerd & Tie Trae Dorn wants to know “What the Heck is Even Happening With AnachroCon Right Now?”
The Atlanta, GA based convention AnachroCon might be more aptly named “AnarchoCon” these days. Earlier this week the convention’s Chair and legal counsel Sarah Avraham stepped down in what sounds like an extremely complicated situation.
In a public Facebook post Avraham detailed the reasons for her departure, and while you should really read that post in its entirety, I’ll do my best to summarize it. It starts when Avraham was approached by William and Cindy MacLeod in the spring of 2016 to take over the event in an attempt to rehabilitate the convention’s image and get it back on track financially.
Because man, this con needed help….
(8) ON HOLD. Nerd & Tie is also reporting that “One Month After Cancellation, Multiple Parties Still Waiting For Refunds From Lebanon MEGA Con:.
This last weekend would have been the second annual Lebanon MEGA Con, if the Missouri based convention hadn’t announced its cancellation just one month before. While organizer Will Peden did say that everyone owed money would be paid, some parties are waiting for those promises to be fulfilled.
(9) TODAY IN FUTURE HISTORY
- April 5, 2063 — The day the Vulcans landed. According to Memory-Alpha:
First Contact Day was a holiday celebrated to honor both the warp 1 flight of the Phoenix and first open contact between Humans and Vulcans on April 5, 2063 in Bozeman, Montana
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch
[Apr. 5, 1962] Happy 45th birthday, sf author and creator of Psycho, Robert Bloch! https://t.co/GjfLbO3JGd pic.twitter.com/J4BtA3rLIU
— Galactic Journey News (@journeygalactic) April 5, 2017
I recognize Bob Tucker on the left. Who is the woman on the right? The photo is from a 1959 party in Chicago.
(11) DELIBERATIONS CONTINUE. The Shadow Clarke Jury carries on a discussion of the books they’d like to see considered for the Clarke award.
It does not seem surprising that reading Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K, in which an estranged son accompanies his tycoon father to the threshold of his journey into eternity, brought those memories of Cold Lazarus especially rushing back. Straddling the millennium, both [Dennis] Potter’s final teleplays and DeLillo’s sixteenth novel have a leached-out, end-times quality that puts human mortality centre stage and refuses to look away. That Potter’s scripts – almost a quarter-century old now and written while SF was still very much a pariah literature – leap naked into the science fictional abyss, while DeLillo’s novel appears to negate, to brush aside the very notion of science fiction altogether, seems just one further irony.
Imagine a table laden with all the food you can think of; things you like and things you don’t like; cuisines from all around the world; the fresh and the fast; three thousand calorie freak-shakes next to organic kale salads; dessert piled on top of nachos sitting on a bed of pears. The table is groaning, under the physical and the metaphorical weight of the feast. It’s wonderful and disconcerting and a bit horrifying and deliciously tempting at the same time. This is the gastronomic equivalent of Cathrynne M. Valente’s Radiance, a virtuoso outpouring of language, style, trope and intertext fit to overwhelm any appetite. It took close to a week for me to sit down and start this review after I finished the book; I needed that long to digest it. If you like your novels spare or clean this one probably isn’t for you.
His claim directly addresses the central conceit of the novel that the networks and routes by which African-American slaves escaped to the free states and the North exists as an actual underground railroad with stations and steam locomotives on rails. However, his mistake lies in imagining that the workings of the railroad can be reduced to information as legible as a map and a timetable. Earlier in the novel, when Cora visits this particular ‘ghost tunnel’ for the first time with the railroad operative, Royal, she reflects that the necessary secret of the railroad is not a bad type of secret but rather an intimate part of the self that is central to personal identity: ‘It would die in the sharing.’ The enigma of the railroad, as Royal observes, is that ‘it goes everywhere, to places we know and those we don’t’. The challenge it presents is not to classify it as a system of knowledge but to figure out both how it connects the different selves who use it and where it might lead to.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish is easily the least traditionally science fictional of my shortlist selections: not only does it feature no rockets, but it’s set firmly in the past (and is more about pasts than futures) and it includes talking snakes and something very much like a dragon. In the sense that science fiction is defined by the presence or absence of received ideas and familiar imagery—that is, using the least science fictional definition of science fiction—it would not be considered science fiction.
(12) A LITTLE SMACK. Fusion says justice has been served – “Black Panther and Ms. Marvel Nominated for Hugo Awards Days After Marvel VP Blamed Them for Sales Slump”.
On Tuesday morning, the finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards (the Oscars of sci-fi and fantasy writing) were announced by the World Science Fiction. Unsurprisingly, collected volumes of Marvel’s critically acclaimed Black Panther and Ms. Marvel series were both nominated for Best Graphic Story.
These nominations come just days after Marvel’s Vice President of Sales, David Gabriel, went out of his way to blame Marvel’s lagging sales on comics—like Black Panther and Ms. Marvel—starring people of color and women. Suffice it to say that the optics of this whole thing don’t reflect well on the publisher, but the Hugo nominations send a telling message to Marvel about just how the public actually feels about its “diverse books.”
(13) REACTION POST. Abigail Nussbaum catalogs all the emotions she’s feeling after seeing the 2017 Hugo shortlist, beginning with happiness about her Best Fan Writer nomination, and continuing down the spectrum til she reaches —
Frustration, because the puppies’ ongoing presence on the ballot, even under extremely reduced circumstances, means that it continues to be impossible to talk about the nominees as their own thing, rather than a reaction to an attempted fascist takeover. There’s a lot to praise about this year’s ballot, including the continued shift towards a more diverse slate of nominees, but in the short fiction categories in particular, the Hugo has once again thrown up a fairly middle-of-the-road selection. Most of these stories aren’t bad, but quite a few of them are meh, and it would be nice to once again be able to have a proper discussion of that. Instead, we’re all still in bunker mode, still cheering the fact that publishable fiction was nominated for the genre’s most prestigious award, which increasingly seems like a low bar to clear.
(14) PUPPY ANTENNAE ACTIVATED. Cora Buhlert sets things in context and delivers a thorough set of first impressions about the Hugo ballot.
The best novel category looks excellent. We have the sequels to two previous Hugo winners in the category, Death’s End by Liu Cixin and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin respectively. We have the long awaited and critically acclaimed debut novels by two accomplished short fiction writers, All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders and Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee respectively. We have a highly acclaimed debut novel with a very unique voice, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, as well as the sort of sequel to 2014’s highly acclaimed debut novel with a unique voice, A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. A Closed and Common Orbit, Too Like the Lightning and Ninefox Gambit were also on my ballot, and I’m looking forward to reading the remaining three. And those who worry that science fiction is about to die out and be swamped by fantasy, which will inevitably lead to the collapse of the West or something, will be pleased that four of the six nominees in this category are unabashedly science fiction. The Obelisk Gate is an edge case, while the only clear fantasy novel is All the Birds in the Sky and even that one has a mad scientist character. Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 3 writers of colour, at least 3 LGBT writers, 1 international writer in translation, 0 puppies.
(15) TUESDAY’S HUGO NEWS. H.P. at Every Day Should Be Tuesday features a picture of a dog in his more Puppy-sympathetic coverage of the 2017 Hugo Awards finalists.
… I am very gratified to see Cixin Liu back where he belongs Death’s End a finalist for Best Novel. I loved it, as you can probably tell by my overenthusiastic review. I thought The Dark Forest was robbed, and I voted for The Three-Body Problem as the Best Novel two years ago. I would have loved to have seen the entire series go up for an award, but oh well. It perhaps says something about the incestual nature of the Hugo voting that the two books in the series edited by the popular Ken Liu were finalists, and the one that wasn’t didn’t even finish in the top 15 nominations….
The Rageaholic was a finalist last year, but I only saw my first few videos within the last month or so. And for the most part, I have no interest in watching his videos on video games or movies or politics. If only for the main reason I don’t watch many YouTube videos or listen to many podcasts. I ain’t got time for that stuff. But Razorfist has an encyclopedic knowledge of comics and Elric of Melnibone. And he’s got a great shtick. Usually in black-and-white, decked out in mirrored sunglasses and a leather jacket, long hair, wall covered in posters behind him. Complete with some metal thrown-in to start and finish things off, and a rapid-fire, eloquent, profane delivery.
H.P. also identifies himself as a contributor to the Castalia House blog.
(16) HUGO BY OSMOSIS. The nominations have inspired J.D. Brink’s latest theory.
And John Picacio has been nominated for best professional artist. I’m pretty darn sure (though not 100%, mind you) that he and I shared a day at Dragon’s Liar comics in San Antonio signing stuff on Free Comic Book Day a few years ago. We sat right next to each other.
So by sheer proximity, I should be getting a Hugo award, if not this year, than next year
(17) IF I WERE A RICH MAN. Who knew I wouldn’t have to wait til I made a million dollars before seeing my name in Forbes? They published the Hugo nominees.
(18) MOST IMPORTANT CATEGORY. Jude Terror’s account of the nominations for Bleeding Cool is intentionally myopic: “Marvel And Image Split Hugo Awards Comics Category, Shut Out Other Publishers”.
Worldcon has released the finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards, the science fiction and fantasy awards named after Amazing Stories founder Hugo Gernsback. We’re pretty sure that’s the book Spider-Man first appeared in. In true snooty comics website fashion, we’ll only talk about the things that relate to comic books and ignore everything else.
First, in the most important category, Best Graphic Story (that’s fancy-speak for comics), nominees included Marvel’s Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, and The Vision, two of the most successful and acclaimed books the likes of which Marvel “has heard” people don’t want anymore, and one written by a guy who “rode off into the sunset.” Monstress, Paper Girls, and Saga from Image took the other three slots, shutting out all other publishers. Shockingly, no prominent editors from the superhero comics community earned nominations in any of the editorial categories, though Sana Takeda, a familiar name to comics readers, did move the needle with a spot on Best Professional Artist list.
Dan Slott failed to secure a nomination in Best Fan Writer despite writing some of the most acclaimed Doctor Who fan fiction around in Silver Surfer, though Doctor Who’s Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, was nominated under the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category, which is a fancy way of saying “TV show.” Yes, we know we’re breaking out “only talk about comics” rule, but what could be more “comics website” than that?! Sir Robert Liefeld’s greatest creation, Deadpool, earned a nomination in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category, which is a fancy way of saying “movie.”
(19) VIRTUAL VISON. “Astronomers just turned on a planet-size telescope to take a picture of a black hole” – Vox has the story. (No, not that Vox.)
Every image you’ve seen of a black hole is an illustration. A giant “virtual” telescope may change that….
We’ve never seen a direct image of a black hole. But if an audacious experiment called the Event Horizon Telescope is successful, we’ll see one for the first time.
Why we’ve never seen an image of a black hole
The biggest problem with trying to detect a black hole is that even the supermassive ones in the center of galaxies are relatively tiny.
“The largest one in the sky [is] the black hole in the center of the Milky Way,” Dimitrios Psaltis, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, said in 2015. “And taking a picture of it would be equivalent to taking a picture of a DVD on the surface of the moon
(20) THAT REVOLUTIONARY NEW IDEA FOR SELLING BOOKS. The Verge has another Amazon bookstore on its radar screen – it will be the third in New York.
Amazon has confirmed plans to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore across from the Empire State Building, bringing its total number of announced but as-of-yet unopened stores in New York City up to three.
Publisher’s Weekly reports that a sign reading “Amazon Books Coming Soon” has gone up in the 34th Street storefront, adding that an Amazon rep said the store will open this summer. The store has also been added to the Amazon Books website. This would presumably make it Amazon’s second store in New York. A location in Columbus Circle’s Time Warner Center (just off of Central Park) was announced in January, with the intent to open this spring.
Another, in Hudson Yards, the still-under-construction $20 billion shopping and luxury residential complex on Manhattan’s far west side, was widely reported last summer — with plans to launch alongside the rest of the development’s new stores in 2018 or 2019.
(21) CUTTING EDGE. Here’s the King Arthur: Legend of the Sword final trailer. The film will be out May 12.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, and Mark-kitteh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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In a tweet John Scalzi was wondering what the point of the cabal was if they couldn’t deliver the promised Hugo nomination and/or a spot on the New York Times bestsellers list.
Robert Whitaker Sirignano, I have tried the civet coffee. My rommate’s boss travels to Asia on business regularly and someone gave him a pound of the beans as a gift. He doesn’t drink coffee so he gave it to us!!! Man, that was the best coffee that I have ever had, and we have two separate family members who roast their own beans. We drink a lot of excellent coffee. If I ever won the lottery, I would buy more of those coffee beans.
Cat Eldridge, I thought the Dune miniseries were pretty good. Didn’t care much for some of the actors, though.
Each trailer makes me less interested in the King Arthur movie.
Well, unless Camestros is Chuck Tingle…
(1) I’m reassured by this. I think that Forrest Gump is one of those exceedingly rare pairings where the film was dramatically better than the book upon which it was based. The book lacked any of the charm of the film, and the charm is what made it worth watching.
With that said, however, the two were radically different from one another, which would normally be cause for concern – but we’ve seen radically different takes on Dune. At least two of them, now (Lynch’s and the Sci-Fi miniseries). And neither was necessarily bad. They were just nothing like the book in a number of ways.
(3) How to vote for best series. I feel like I’m in a minority. I’ve read three of the series on the list completely, and have read at least three books in each of the other series. I also really don’t like Naomi Novik’s writing style.
(12) Marvel vs Diversity: I read somewhere that Marvel bases its sales on single issues in comic book shops. They ignore trades (both graphic novels and compilations) for their calculations. Since most comic shops are owned/operated/dominated by white males, it’s not surprising that the white male demographic buys more single issues in comic shops. I’d love to be able to cite my source on this, but I honestly don’t remember who/where I read it.
(13) Frustration at puppies on the ballot? Eh. They are SF readers and fans, even if our tastes don’t overlap much. I’m perfectly okay with puppies putting things on the ballot. What annoys me is when they waste their time, energy, and money putting bad things on the ballot to troll. Of course, this year they only wasted a bit of time. I have to wonder how many of them are going to spend the cash to be able to vote.
Worth mentioning: Remember The Aeronaut’s Windlass from last year? Beale posted his Reading List from 2016, and only gave it two stars. I expect his slate would have been more effective at producing winners if, you know, he nominated things that even he thought were worth reading.
(18) Bleeding Cool tries so hard to be edgy/cool. And usually they end up looking stupid for folks that aren’t in their target demo. And frequently for those who are in their target demo.
(21) I’m the only person I know who is looking forward to this film. Guy Ritchie has consistently created fun movies. Not necessarily good, mind you, but fun. I’ve greatly enjoyed all of his films that I have seen. Even with the fast cuts and whatnot, there is a surprising amount of subtlety in his work. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a favorite of mine and every time I watch it, I see something else to love in the direction and editing.
We could be pixels… just for one scroll.
Rev. Bob – nice!
Re: Marvel and diversity – this great article from CBR shows that not even the sales figures back up that narrative. Here’s their conclusion:
@Bartimaeus …so what I can glean from this is that the A-list – the same characters that feature in the movies – are the books that are falling off in sales.
Hmmmm. are the comic book movies killing the comic books?
THAT would be very interesting and would strongly suggest that all science fiction should be printed in pictograms from now on…
@ Karl-Johan Noren
I see a lot of this on an anecdotal basis. My books get marketed as romance because my publisher see romance readers as their primary market and that’s what they know how to sell. So I hear a lot of “I can tell your work isn’t my sort of thing because I don’t like romance” or “I had to get strong-armed into reading it because I don’t read romance” or “we aren’t going to carry these because we don’t sell romance”. (Maybe I should start keeping a file of what romance reviewers say about them as rebuttal, because serious romance readers are uniform in agreeing that I don’t write romance.) But the point is, there mere appearance that a book is romance will turn off people who might otherwise enjoy it.
@HRJ:
I’ll confess to having hated entering the Romance section to find more books by an author I knew I liked. But then, I don’t exactly blend in with the other customers there… 😉
I have engaged in a bit of ribbing with one author, insisting that she wrote contemporary comic fantasy rather than paranormal romance. I was only half-serious at most, and she knew that, but it is true that the comedic setup is what got me hooked on the series. (IIRC, I encountered the first one in a Walmart, where it wasn’t shelved as Romance.)
@World Weary
just so you know:
“The traditional method of collecting feces from wild civets has given way to intensive farming methods in which civets in battery cage systems are force fed the cherries”
I THINK LEE HOFFMAN WITH BLOCH.
@Jack Lint: You’re forgetting some masterpieces!
Hell’s Pixels: The Strange and Terrible Scroll of the Outlaw Speeder Bike Gangs
The Banshee Scrolls for Pixello Meat
When The Scrolling Gets Weird, The Weird Start A Prozine
And who could ever forget this classic?
The Quidditch World Cup Is Decadent And Depraved
I remain frustrated at Puppies getting things on the ballot because they use the tactic of bloc voting to do it. It’s a sleazy thing to do even when they are 12% of the electorate and take up 12% of the nominating positions. I’d hate to see us decide this is acceptable behavior.
Frustration at puppies on the ballot? Eh. They are SF readers and fans, even if our tastes don’t overlap much.
Yes, I’m sure that the Pups are all big fans of Stix Hiscock. That’s why they voted his story onto the ballot.
Raise your hand if you are Jewish, funny, and breathing…not so fast, Don Rickles!
@Danny Sichel:
Cool, you saved me a rant about the commercialization of Kopi Luwak coffee. Instead of wild civets doing first-level quality control by eating ripe coffee cherries, the civets are just caged and force-fed the cherries. Now they’re essentially being used as a living processing method. It’s cruel and inhumane and kind of a scam.
(Quick note to any amateur home-roasters out there: the one step that vastly improved the quality of my coffee was to start sorting out defects. Pulling out the worst of the blighted, bug-eaten, or rotten beans before roasting has made a world of difference. That may sound obvious, but it took at least six months before it occurred to my bf and me. Turns out that bargain bag of Bali wasn’t such a bargain once the 40-50% of defects got sorted out. Also I’ve found stones a few times.)
Um, that’s kind of rant-length, isn’t it. Whoops.
@Danny Sichel “The traditional method of collecting feces from wild civets has given way to intensive farming methods in which civets in battery cage systems are force fed the cherries”
Because of course, dammit. We can’t have anything nice unless it originates in cruelty. *sigh*
Re: Marvel issues – I read an article on io9 about this, and the author posited the problem is too many crossovers and special editions. I can totally buy that. I remember back when Image was spitting out monthly “collector’s” editions of issue 1 of some new terrible comic that probably wouldn’t ever have an issue 2, back in the early 90s. I did manage to trade a bunch of those to round out my early Hellblazer collection, so it wasn’t a total loss, but man was that stupid – beanie babies for comics nerds.
We don’t object to any group of people voting stuff they like onto the ballot: but if they did that (voted stuff they like), they wouldn’t be Puppies. In the case of some past Puppy nominees, e.g Jim Butcher, one can easily imagine people voting for them because they liked them, even if that’s not what actually happened. In the present case, apart from the nominees who would have been there anyway, and perhaps Mieville, that’s not the case; they are all either shock-causing (Hiscock) or self-promotion (everything else).
(So what rcade said, in short.)
Who’s the “we” you think you’re speaking for. I object to it. I object to a group organizing to vote things onto the Hugo ballot.
Do you want the best quality Hugo Awards? Then vote for what you think deserves an award. Don’t let other people do your thinking for you.
I didn’t say ‘organising’. If a group of people agrees to vote for a particular thing, in order to gain an advantage, they are not voting for what they like.
I meant, we don’t object to conservatives, lovers of explosions, fans of Jim Butcher, etc. voting, just because they are that: what we object to is the tactic. Would anyone here disagree with that?
@Danny Sichel
@Dawn Incognito
I am very sorry to hear this about the civet coffee. I suppose it was inevitable. Humans always find the most efficient way to maximize profit. You have to have a certain level of guaranteed supply before other considerations even occur. One of my most hsted historical myths is this concept that there was once a group of humans who lived in harmony with nature. In the US, people like to believe it about the Native Americans. When you tell them about stampeding herds of buffaloes off cliffa, they don’t want to believe it. As if anyone would choose a hunting method that increases the likelihood of one of your party getting killed or, best case, coming back empty-handed and everyone goes hungry.
I’m afraid that humans rarely care about animals until caring about them has more benefits. Like people boycotting the market when they don’t.
@steve davidson
I think it’s more what kathodus said above – it’s the perpetual “events” and crossovers and constant renumbering of titles to #1s that probably caused the burnout, and not the movies. That’s what the CBR article says at the end, and it’s also the main complaint I’ve seen at the /r/comicbooks subreddit.
(I personally don’t follow modern superhero comics all that much – keeping up with regular SFF reading is enough thank you – but I do visit the subreddit once in a while to see the pretty pictures.)
@Soon Lee
Woo, title credit! That must be one of the faster suggestion to title credit turnarounds.
Fast, but not fastest.
Thank you 🙂 – personally, I’m not sure I’d have coped and looking at the line-up I’d have been bedridden with impostor syndrome for the rest of the year.
Well, unless Camestros is Chuck Tingle…
We are ALL Chuck Tingle!
Speaking of Chuck Tingle. He’s bought the stixhiscok domain
http://www.stixhiscock.com/
It has important advice:
“Like last year, the DEVILS were so excited about being DEVILS that they forgot to register important website names of their scoundrel ways. Now instead of learning about common devilman topics like having a lonesome way or crying about ethics in basement dwelling, this site can be used to PROVE LOVE by helping all with identification of a REVERSE TWIN!”
That website is a thing of beauty.
re: Marvel. I’m not a comic book reader (any more) however there was a lot of angst on tumblr about how Marvel was betraying the roots of the characters by making Captain America a member of Hydra (Nazi, IOW) and one of the other characters also. Since the original artists were Jewish and stridently opposed to anything Nazi, there was a lot of uproar in the fandom. Even the “it was only a dream” defense didn’t help assuage the outrage.
So Marvel has that to answer for.
Obviously reverse twins can be detected because they’re identical except for a goatee…but what if someone already has a goatee?
@Bill,
Two hours from suggestion to Title Credit is awesome. I’m happy mine went as fast as it did, while I could still remember having suggested it.
And to think that two years ago, I had never heard of Chuck Tingle.
Love is real!
Beware of Double Goatees!
Meredith Moment: Michael Angel’s CENTAUR OF THE CRIME (Book One of the “Fantasy & Forensics” series) is available for the Kindle FREE today.
Disclosure: I haven’t read the series yet myself, but both my wife and my son enthusiastically recommend the series.
@Andrew M
I think I follow you. Take the example of Dr. Who episodes dominating BDP(S) just because there were so many Dr. Who fans. (Never mind whether this ever really happened.) There you have a set of people who didn’t collude, but nevertheless dominated the ballot owing to a shared taste. I’ve heard this called an “unintentional slate.” One of the strengths of EPH is that it copes well with unintentional slates.
Anyway, I think you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with the Dr. Who fans, even though they’re biased, because their bias is towards the things they love. As long as they don’t collude on a specific slate, we’re all fine with them.
Is that what you’re trying to say?
This is not true.
There was a point that it was, when the sales of trades were lower and slower, but nowadays they take into account all publishing revenue streams, including trades and digital.
It’s true that Marvel sees a correlation between single-issue sales and trade sales, so that a book that sells poorly in single issues is regarded as likely also to sell poorly in trades, but it’s not ironclad and it doesn’t prevent them from adding all sales together.
@Soon
Even more shamefully, I might never have heard of Tingle save for…Theodore Beale.
“But it has long been said: oft evil will shall evil mar.”
The fact that one of those selfsame original artists had done a “Captain America, brainwashed Nazi” storyline before was shrugged off as irrelevant to the process of declaring it disrespectful to the artist to ever do such a story.
Note: I haven’t read the current storyline and would never argue that anyone should like it. I merely side-eye the idea that turning Cap into a Nazi for the sake of a suspenseful thriller plotline is something that disrespects the guy who had Cap brainwashed and sent off to assassinate Winston Churchill (or maybe some other high-ranking Brit; I forget).
@Soon Lee — there have been several “just a few hours” turnarounds in the last few days.
Care to suggest an over/under for “The Man who Scrolled Too Much”?
@Soon Lee — there have been several “just a few hours” turnarounds in the last few days.
Care to suggest an over/under for “The Man who Scrolled Too Much”? 2 hours? 2 days? Never ever ever?
Mark on April 6, 2017 at 1:17 pm said:
I don’t know about anyone else, but I deliberately wear a goatee in order to force my mirror-universe twin to be a better person than I am! 😀
Greg: No, my point had nothing to do with unintentional slates. My point was very simple: we object to the Puppy tactic; we don’t object to fans of that kind of work, as individuals, voting.
Now, you may think this is too obvious to be worth saying. But sometimes people will argue that there is nothing wrong with the slaters getting some places on the ballot, provided they are not represented disproportionately, because they’re fans too, and if a segment of fandom has that preference, it deserves to be represented. And my response is that if they have to collude to get it on the ballot, it isn’t a real preference. And conversely, when people object to the slating tactic, the slaters will say we are objecting to conservatives voting, and regarding them as not real fans, etc., etc. And that’s not true; we have no problem with them voting for what they like, and if enough voters actually liked it, it would get on the ballot without collusion.
“Scrollapodia is the key insight”
I’m pretty sure it was Jim Henley who first brought Chuck T to Filer’s attention – back in 2015 maybe. VD learnt about him from here not vice versa.
@Cam I probably missed that, somehow. I know I only really twigged to him when he showed up on the Hugo ballot…
Greg Hullender: At the risk of derailing your argument, the first time there were multiple Doctor Who episodes nominated for Best Dramatic-Short Form, in 2006, there were fans of the show who claimed credit for orchestrating the result. They just weren’t stilly enough to write their claims all over the internet.
When people were discussing the collateral benefits of EPH, it is the memory of those rumblings that brought Doctor Who into the discussion, not only the show’s track record of success. (And one selling point of EPH is that no one has to decide whether a particular voting pattern is a symptom of collusion or a coincidental meeting of the minds.)
Dr. Pixuel Johnson’s right about Scrollson Johnson being right!
I may need to look it up and I can’t recall how the topic came up…
We were clearly messing with forces we couldn’t control.
So, thanks to new information, civet-poop coffee is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.
I’ll get my coat.
@Andrew M
Ah, I get it now. Yes, that’s especially clear in the works that were slated purely for the political positions of the writers, despite the low quality of the works. Not even counting the porn nominations.
Of course it’s a separate problem that lots of people can’t seem to figure out that awards are about works, not people. A number of times I’ve had people object to a negative review I wrote on the grounds that “that author is a good/progressive person.” It’s discouraging that so many people can’t wrap their minds around the idea that it’s not about who or what the author is. The pups are famous for this, but they’re not the only ones.
@Mike Glyer
No problem. It was already on the wrong track anyway.