Pixel Scroll 5/31/18 The Pixel That Parsed The Hornets Nest

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(1) ANOTHER CAT AND SFF STORY TO LOVE. Huge news for Cat Valente:

Deadline has the story: “Universal Options ‘Space Opera’ For Marc Platt & Colin Trevorrow To Produce”.

Universal Pictures has optioned Catherynne M. Valente’s  science fiction novel Space Opera, which Marc Platt will produce for his Universal-based Marc Platt Productions with Adam Siegel, along with Colin Trevorrow producing.

(2) BOOK SALES STATS. Data Guy has posted the slides from the “2018 SFWA Nebula Conference Presentation” at Author Earnings.

(3) KNOW YOUR BEARDS. Camestros Felapton challenges you in the “Puzzle Corner: Help Timothy Spot the Author”.

Poor Timothy is still having problems with human faces. I don’t know what fraction of science-fiction authors have beards but I’d guess 30%? Sometimes feels like more!

Can you match the beard-style (numbered) to the author (lettered) so Tim can tell which is which?

(4) BREAKING IN. Congratulations, Buzz Dixon! He told Facebook readers —

I finally cracked Analog after 50 years of trying!

(Not that Buzz hasn’t enjoyed a highly successful writing career in the meantime.)

The Astounding/Analog Companion has posted “A Q&A with Buzz Dixon”:

Analog Editor: What is the story behind “While You Sleep, Computer Mice Earn Their Keep”?

Buzz Dixon: Often I’ll hear an idiom or phrase and think to myself, “What does that mean literally?” In this case, the phrase was “computer mouse,” and I asked myself how mice could actually interact with a computer. Immediately the old fairy tale of “The Cobbler and the Elves” popped into mind.

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?

BD: If the Computer Mice represent the force of order, then the wild female rat represents the force of chaos. I remember reading Robert Chilson’s “Ecological Niche” in the December 1970 issue of Analog when I was in high school and was struck with his portrayal of wildlife finding a way to be both wild and alive even in the middle of an extremely complex technology. Once I had my opposing points of view, the actual writing went very quickly.

(5) CAT RAMBO. On Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, “My Favorite Bit: Cat Rambo talks about HEARTS OF TABAT”.

One of my favorite pieces of the most recent fantasy novel, Hearts of Tabat, didn’t actually get into the final version, which was a set of chapter headers defining which Trade God each chapter belonged to. The Trade Gods of the city of Tabat embody various economic forces of one size or another, ranging from the large Anbo and Enba (Supply & Demand) to the more particular, like Zampri, who oversees Advertising, or Uhkephelmi, God of Small Mistakes.

(6) FORENSICS. Kristine Kathryn Rusch teases apart a major news story about embezzlement at a literary agency in “Business Musings: An Agent Nightmare Revealed”.

…To the greatest extent possible.

In other words, my friends, Donadio & Olson does not have the financial resources to make up for a theft of $3.4 million, let alone any more potential losses that the forensic accountant might turn up.

The complaint alleges that Webb stole money as far back as 2011. However, according to Law360, he worked for the company since 1999. Did he start this behavior then? Or after Candida Donadio died? (Which seems likely. Agencies go off the rails when their founders leave or die.)

It’s pretty easy to steal from writers’ estates. I worked with a number of them on some projects in 2015 and 2016, and with one exception, the agencies or the organizations in charge of the estates didn’t give a crap about resale, about payment, about anything. Most of them weren’t even familiar with the story I wanted to reprint, and only one of them had an author’s preferred version that they sent to me. (I asked.)

I probably could have reprinted those stories and never paid any of the estates. I probably would not have been caught in most cases. And that’s rather minor theft.

Now, imagine what’s going on with estates like [Mario] Puzo’s, which includes all of the monies still coming in from the movies, from licensing, from the books (which are still in print). These are multimillion dollar ventures, handled every year by Donadio & Olson, with no one overseeing the day to day running of the finances.

Oh, my. The money was simply there for the taking.

The thing is, Donadio & Olson is a “reputable” agency. The New York Post used the word “prestigious” in describing the agency. Donadio & Olson was, until last week, a gold-standard agency, one that most young writers might have aspired to have as representatives….

Then she shares some firsthand experiences.

Sadly, I am not surprised by any of this. As I have blogged about before, literary agencies are not regulated. Prestigious agencies embezzle. I’ve personally had one of the biggest boutique agencies in the world embezzle from me. (And I suspect they still are, although I can’t prove it. But there are licensed properties—tie-ins—that I wrote whose royalty statements I cannot get my hands on because no one at the licensor will cooperate with me. The books have been in print for 25-30 years and I have never seen a dime in royalties. Ever.) I’ve also had one of the biggest fraudsters in the industry steal from me. I speak from hard-earned life lessons here.

(7) AUREALIS AWARDS TAKING ENTRIES. The Aurealis Awards, “Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction,” is taking entries until December 7.

The awards  are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time in 2018.

Full guidelines and a FAQ can be found on the Aurealis Awards website.

We strongly encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published in the first half of the year by August 2018, then subsequent publications as they are released; our judges appreciate having time to consider each entry carefully.

The same group is also running the Sara Douglass Book Series Award for series ending between 2015-2017, this year. Entries for this special award close on August 31, 2018. More information is available at the link.

Finalists of all award categories will be announced early in 2019 and winners announced at a ceremony to take place in Melbourne in the first half of the year. For more information contact the judging coordinator Tehani Croft at [email protected]

(8) ASTRONAUT OBIT. Donald H. Peterson passed away May 27 reports the Washington Post: “Donald Peterson Sr., who spacewalked from the shuttle Challenger, dies at 84”.

Mr. Peterson’s avid consumption of science fiction in his childhood drove his interest in aviation and space.”

In 1983 he told a reporter:

‘Back when I was a kid, there was no space program,’ Peterson said in an interview. ‘In fact, I was old enough to know about airplanes before there were jet airplanes.

‘My earliest interest came from science fiction. I read a lot of things as a kid, but I read some science fiction and got interested. As I got older, I started reading real things

A trading card featuring Peterson:

(9) IN A SOCIAL MEDIA FAR, FAR AWAY. (Found with the help of Nicholas Whyte.)

(10) COMICS TO BE PRESERVED. Michael Cavna, the Washington Post’s “Comic Riffs” columnist, says that the Library of Congress has acquired most of Steven Geppi’s comics collection, including most of the contents of the Baltimore-based Geppi Entertainment Museum, which will close after this weekend: “Library of Congress acquires its largest donation of comic books ever”.

The impressive acquisition, which is set to be announced Wednesday, comes courtesy of Baltimore-based collector and entrepreneur Stephen A. Geppi, who is donating more than 3,000 items from his holdings, many spanning the eight-decade history of the American comic-book industry. His Mickey Mouse storyboards are from the Jazz Age animated short “Plane Crazy,” which was inspired by Charles Lindbergh. Other items include printing blocks from Richard Outcault’s fin-de-siecle comic-strip character the Yellow Kid, Beatles memorabilia and a No. 2 Brownie camera model F from Eastman Kodak, the library says.

The donation — which the library says it is valuing “in the millions” — was born out of months of conversations between Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, a champion of giving the public new ways to view the library’s scope, and Geppi, who opened Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore in 2006.

(11) BUTLER AT HOME. From Pasadena Weekly — “Octavia Butler’s Pasadena connections informed her stellar science-fiction writing career”.

The Crown City played a major part in her development, both for its major role in the space race via Caltech, JPL and the Carnegie Observatories, and because of the fact it was racially integrated long before much of the nation. Her archives are collected at the Huntington Library in San Marino, having formed the basis of a popular exhibition in 2017 and remaining one of the hottest collections for researchers there.

“Pasadena was a major inspiration, and part of that has to do with JPL being in her backyard, right over the hill and being so close to the space race and growing up with that had to have piqued her interest,” says Theresa Russell, assistant curator of literary collections at the library. “I think Butler felt it was a very diverse place. She talks about her novels not just being filled with black people, but people of all colors. There were white, black, Asian students at Caltech, and it seemed natural to her that the future would be the world she was seeing, filled with diversity.”

Russell also notes that the Pasadena area or a version of it appears in some of Butler’s works. Her novel “Kindred” offers a particularly strong example, as it focused on a writer living in Altadena amid an early career as a writer, and the novel “Mind of My Mind” features a city called Forsyth that was modeled after Pasadena. Yet Russell notes that the dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower” has the most intriguing connections of all to the City of Roses.

(12) STORIES THAT ADMIT THEY ARE ABOUT POLITICS. The Kickstarter for Cat Rambo’s “IF THIS GOES ON – Political SF Anthology” has raised $3,736 of $10,000 at this writing, with 28 days to go.

Looking at the state of the world today, we are clearly at a nexus of inflection points. Global relations and power structures are changing more rapidly than they have since the cold war. The divide between the haves and have nots is broadening and we are at the start of a new gilded age of robber barons and crippling poverty. Racial, social, and class relations are stretched to a point of breaking. Global climate change threatens to remake our planet.

The choices we make today; the policies of our governments and the values that we, as people, embrace are going to shape our world for decades to come. Or break it.

IF THIS GOES ON asks a very straightforward question – what happens if things continue to be like this and what happens next?

We asked thirty writers to put their minds to it and show us what the future may hold a generation or more from today. To show us the promise of a better world if we embrace our better angels or the cost of our failures if we give in to the demons of divisiveness, if we allow politicians and pundits to redefine truth, and if we continue to ignore the warnings all around us.

Truth matters, stories matter.

The full Table of Contents, organized alphabetically by the author’s last name is:

  • Cyd Athens – Welcome to Gray
  • Steven Barnes – The Dayveil Gambit
  • Rachel Chimits – Dead Wings
  • Paul Crenshaw – Bulletproof Tattoos
  • Beth Dawkins – Tasting Bleach and Decay in the City of Dust
  • Andy Duncan – Mr. Percy’s Shortcut
  • Chris Kluwe – The Machine
  • Kitty-Lydia Dye – Three Data Units
  • Scott Edelman – The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable
  • Judy Helfrich – A Pocketful of Dolphins
  • Langley Hyde – Call and Answer
  • Gregory Jeffers – All the Good Dogs Have Been Eaten
  • Jamie Lackey – Fine
  • Jack Lothian – Good Pupils
  • Nick Mamatas – Hurrah! Another Year, Surely This One Will Be Better Than The Last; The Inexorable March of Progress Will Lead Us All to Happiness
  • Lynette Mejía – A Gardener’s Guide to the Apocalypse
  • Aimee Ogden – Twelve Histories Scrawled in the Sky
  • Sarah Pinsker – That Our Flag Was Still There
  • Conor Powers-Smith – The Sinking Tide
  • Zandra Renwick – Making Happy
  • Kathy Schilbach – Counting the Days
  • Nisi Shawl – King Harvest Will Surely Come
  • Priya Sridhar – Mustard Seeds and the Elephants Foot
  • Marie L Vibbert – Free Wi-Fi
  • Calie Voorhis – The Editor’s Eyes
  • Tiffany E. Wilson – One Shot
  • James Wood – Discobolos
  • Sylvia Spruck Wrigley – Choose Your Own Adventure
  • E. Lily Yu – Green Glass: A Love Story
  • Hal Y. Zhang – But for Grace

Cover art by Bernard Lee. Design by Michael Altmann.

(13) BUY PROP FOR NEVER-MADE TREK MOVIE. Motherboard says this model for the starship Enterprise is going on the auction block with a starting bid of $40,000.

A rare, redesigned version of the starship Enterprise NCC-1701 will go on auction in L.A. (and online) Thursday, with bidding starting at $40,000. The model was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and Ken Adam in 1976 for the ill-fated film Star Trek: Planet of the Titans, which was the first plan for a motion picture after the original series was cancelled. But after months of writing and rewriting the script, it was ultimately shelved, and the redesigned Enterprise was shelved with it. Shortly after, Paramount began working with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry on what would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The model would have changed the iconic look of NCC-1701. The model did appear briefly (though not as the Enterprise) in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s two-part episode “The Best of Both Worlds.” It was in the Starfleet armada which was destroyed by the Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359.

(14) HOT TIP: PLASTICS. NASA now has a combination plastic recycler and 3-D printer to test on the International Space Station. The Tethers Unlimited, Inc. device is about the size of a mini-fridge and was built as part of the Small Business Innovation Research program. It was certification tested at the Tethers Unlimited lab in Bothell WA and at Huntsville AL’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The plan is to deliver it to the ISS on a SpaceX Dragon supply run later this year.

Quoting the GeekWire article: “Tethers Unlimited delivers 3-D printer and recycler combo to NASA for space station”.

The Refabricator uses a process called “Positrusion” for recycling plastic parts into fresh filament for 3-D printing.

“Traditional plastics recycling and 3-D printer filament manufacturing techniques involve grinding and extrusion steps that could pose safety concerns on the ISS and often require a lot of adjustment to keep them running reliably,” [Tethers Unlimited CEO Rob] Hoyt explained.

“To create a recycling system that is safe and doesn’t demand a lot of astronaut time, we developed a new method for recycling plastic parts into 3-D printer filament, and integrated it together with a 3-D printer to create a highly automated recycling-and-manufacturing system,” he said.

(15) WATER WATER EVERYWHERE. BBC reports “Two different forms of water isolated for first time”. Not polywater (a hoax) let alone ice-nine (though both have been topics of sf stories), but physics-level differences leading to different chemical behavior.

Scientists have isolated the two different forms of water molecule for the first time.

Water molecules were known to exist as two distinct “isomers”, or types, based on their slightly different properties at the atomic level.

By separating out the two isomers, researchers were able to show that they behave differently in the way that they undergo chemical reactions.

The work appears in Nature Communications.

(16) EARLY INFLUENCES. At Postscripts to Darkness — “PSTD Author Interview: Mike Allen”.

Whether they are historical or contemporary, who are some of the writers whose work has been most influential on, or important to, your own, and what have you taken from their writing?

I think it all boils down to Poe and Tolkien, the first is probably kind of obvious, the second I imagine less so for any readers out there that might know me only through my creative work.

Those two writers set me on the path. A well-meaning third grade teacher read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to our class for Halloween, and while the other kids just giggled it away I was traumatized, with night terrors that lasted for years. Yet instead of staying away from all things horror, I became consumed with morbid curiosity, constantly coming back to this type of story-telling that held so much power over me, leading me to devour stuff by H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Peter Straub and Clive Barker.

With Barker, my favorite writer when I was in my teens, I experienced a paradigm change. I became a gleeful participant in the land of imaginary horrors, rather than a frightened victim. I ended up consuming so much horror that I essentially inoculated myself from the night terrors.

I would bet the idea that I’m best known for horror stories would be a big shock to 10-year-old me. Around 4thgrade or so my dad made me read The Lord of the Rings, because he thought it was the greatest novel ever written and because he was sure I would like it. On that second part, absolutely, he was right. Maybe the first one, too? But anyway, I developed this hunger for all things Tolkien. We lived at the time in Wise, Virginia, a coal town high in the Appalachians. There was no bookstore. There were a couple of other kids who liked fantasy, but didn’t share my obsessive need for it, or at least not my precise interests — as I recall, one buddy was a huge Larry Niven fan.

(17) FELINES AND FANTASY. Can you believe it? Long before the idea was codified by File 770, authors independently recognized the association of cats and SFF. For example, see these Martha Wells LiveJournal posts.

(18) SFWA EMERGENCY FUND. Hey, I didn’t know that.

https://twitter.com/kellyoyo/status/1000867513998200842

(19) SILVERBERG ADAPTED AS OPERA. This is from an interview with composer Emily Howard by Richard Fairman in the May 26 Financial Times (behind a paywall).

Howard, 39, tells how she was working with her librettist, Selena Dmitrijevic, on a story about a person being shunned by society.  A draft scenario, in which that character was arrested and sentenced to being ‘invisible,’ was already well advanced when they discovered it came from a short story that Dmitrijevic had on her shelf at home, Robert Silverberg’s ”To See The Invisible Man.’

There is a strong flavour of Kafka, or perhaps Margaret Atwood.  ‘In our opera you never know exactly what the Invisible’s crime was,’ says Howard.  ‘We assume we are dealing with some authoritarian regime, where society is forced to operate within very narrow parameters of human behaviour.  It is a wonderfully constructed story, because it opens with the Invisible’s crime of coldness, and then(when the Invisible is apprehended for trying to help another Invisible in distress) closes with the crime of warmth.’

Note that Silverberg’s ‘Invisible Man’ has become the gender-neural ‘Invisible.’  It is one of Howard’s most eye-catching ideas that the role of this person is to be sung by two singers:  a soporano and a bass.  When the Invisible is alone, they will sing it together, but out in society, where he/she is unable to be themselves, only one voice will be heard.

To See The Invisible is going to be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival  from June 8-11.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Bill, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, Tehani Croft, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

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108 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/31/18 The Pixel That Parsed The Hornets Nest”

  1. 2) Yes, there IS a metric boatload of mostly pretty bad SFF being sold via the Kindle. I suppose that’s a good thing. For somebody.

  4. @rochrist
    Also Kobo – I see a metric sh*tload of it in the sale titles. Mostly urban fantasy/paranormal/whatever-the-f*ck they call the stuff with vampires and were-critters. About 95% is by authors I’ve never heard of, and even if it’s getting N number of great reviews on Goodreads or it’s an “NYT best-seller” – that doesn’t mean it’s any good.

  6. (4) There are literal computer mice in Hex, the computer in some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. The computer got more complicated over time (as they do), starting with ants, and eventually including mice, a teddy bear, and the need to occasionally have someone type enter the words “dried frog pills” so it would keep working properly.

  8. Michael Cavna, the Washington Post’s “Comic Riffs” columnist, says that the Library of Congress has acquired most of Steven Geppi’s comics collection

    I don’t think they’re getting most of Geppi’s collection.

    They said 3000 items, and it sound like they’re getting the cream of the crop, but that’d be less than a tenth of my collection, and Geppi’s collection has got to make mine look like an accumulation of dryer lint.

  13. My packet login works, I just used it to snag some related works. In that category, there are lots of pdfs and only two mobis (groan). (Earlier I said epub was my favorite format but I lied, it’s really mobi, which ports directly into my Kindle phone app so I can read while commuting.)

  14. I tried logging in to the packet site yesterday with no response and tried again tonight, again with no success. I also tried using my credentials to log in to the actual voting site and was not able. I’ve sent an email with all the details of my system and failure mode to the admins. (“No success” = “when I click on ‘login’ the button changes color but nothing happens”.)

  15. Wow – Titlle credit AGAIN? THanks, MIke! I wont even complain that my original quote was Hornets Text, not nest…

  16. Charon D. My packet login works, I just used it to snag some related works. In that category, there are lots of pdfs and only two mobis (groan).

    I spent 4 hours getting the packet downloaded (with numerous downloads which failed halfway through and would not resume), and then ended up deleting almost 2/3rds of it as unneeded different formats. I really appreciate the generosity of the creators and their publishers, but it would have been nice if the downloading was optimized for member accessibility.

    Not everyone has fast fiber broadband and unlimited data plans, including me. At least I’m okay financially, but I shudder to think what downloading the packet is like for fans who have painfully-slow broadband, or who have to go to a library or cafe to get internet access. 😐

  18. Huh, the login works on my iPad – which is a good spot for reading the files but not such a good spot for unzipping and picking out the files I want. Weird.

  19. Do not be too eager to deal out scrolls and pixels, for even Our Good Host cannot see all files.

  20. @microtherion: In fact Shagrat was the third bookstore cat that Other Change of Hobbit had. Their first was a tuxedo named Balrog, who didn’t last long but was immortalized in a calligraphed sign that hung for many years reading “Shoplifters will be eaten by the Balrog”. Then they had a long-haired black cat named Shelob, who didn’t disappear the way that Balrog did. That’s why when they were in the downtown Berkeley location, the upstairs was “Shelob’s Lair”.

  21. (1) Woooo! It makes me want to… dance. Except I can’t. Still a long way from actually showing up at the local theater, though.

  22. (1) the same Marc Platt who wore all those hear Doctor Who scripts for the classic series and Big Finish? Woo!

  24. For those whi suffer from completist syndrome US Amazon has New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson for $3.99. I didn’t have time to check anywhere else.
    I personally am very happy since I won’t have to attempt to hold that monster book to read it.

  25. I just finished New York 2140, and was shocked to discover that I actually rather like Kim Stanley Robinson’s meandering narratives with compelling but static characters…? You’d have to be into New York and/or finance to truly get the most out of the book but once I got to the end I was happy that I’d read it. It’s not going to trouble my top 3, but neither will it be bringing up the rear on my ballot.

    Also, while its definitely a monster to hold and I’d recommend getting it on ereader for anyone who doesn’t get on with heavy books and has one accessible, I don’t think the text itself is quite as long as the doorstop edition suggests – there are plenty of mostly blank pages with weird quotes (all skippable, I think).

  26. Was happy to get the Hugo packet; mostly for the novelettes & short stories &c. (I already owned most of the novels & novellas, and the only novel I’m missing (Six Wakes) is one that I believe was not provided in full).

    I’m currently engrossed in a reread of Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books, but once I finish those, it’ll probably be time for more Hugo material.

  27. @Kathryn Sullivan: TFTL; I was wondering about Rusch’s insistence that everyone represent themselves and am interested to see counter-arguments. “All X are Y” seems debatable to me — and my small experience as an editor/copyeditor makes clear how useful a second set of eyes can be. I note he says his agent tells him to also read the contract on that principle; ISTM that one of Yog’s Laws should be that “Don’t bother reading this contract” is a red flag.

  28. @Arifel

    That’s reassuring, I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about 2140. I tried the kindle sample but it didn’t really reveal anything about how the story was going to go.
    (I haven’t tried the packet sample – pdf with a watermark doesn’t really enthuse me to get to it)

  29. Please be aware that for the Martha Wells entry in the Best Series packet, the EPUB and MOBI versions of “The Dead City” has several short stories, but but the PDF only has “The Dead City”. So I’m told, anyway; I deleted the MOBI and PDF versions right away in the interest of space.

  31. @Chip Hitchcock

    TFTL; I was wondering about Rusch’s insistence that everyone represent themselves and am interested to see counter-arguments.

    Rusch’s advice goes too far, I think, being informed by her experience. But there is an underlying truth which is that as an artist, you can’t just fluff off at least tracking and being aware of your sales, royalties and money owed, and placing everything on just one person is a bad idea.

    A good friend of mine is a modestly successful fine artist and illustrator. She’s sold in several different galleries in four cities and has been in demand for book covers and advertising for over 15 years. In her first reasonably upscale gallery show, over half of her work was essentially stolen, using some kind of dodge via a third party to attribute pieces to another person connected with the gallery. In the same year, she had a cover which she was supposed to get smaller scale royalties for reprints and foreign press versions if they used the same art. They were and she wasn’t paid a dime. So, she switched representation and took a number of courses on contracts and financial documentation. Every contract, she’s got a set of terms she specifically looks to ensure are included and if there’s a change, she sends through a firm that specializes in the field for review. She hired an accountant, who she meets with once a month with her numbers from publishers, agencies, etc, who crunches the numbers and squares it with her incoming revenue. And she has her books audited yearly against numbers obtained directly from publishers and agencies, not vetted through her representation only. Her advice was that, as an artist, financial and contractual negligence or illiteracy is simply something you can’t afford to indulge in and that nothing scares potential crooks straight as much as knowing that third party oversight on the contract and the finances is going to be involved from the start.

  32. Weird – the Hugo Packet login isn’t working for me any more. Anybody else having problems? I accessed it earlier in the week without any problems.

    I was having the same problem. After some experimentation, it seems that when I access the worldcon76.org web site via an encrypted connection (https://) the login does not work, but when I access the site via a regular connection (http://) everything works fine.

    In particular, when I followed the link from the @worldcon2018 twitter feed (where they link to their site using http://), the login worked for me, but later when I followed a link from a Google search (which links to the site using https://), the login did not work.

    But this probably isn’t the full story, since it also depends on which browser I use to connect. With some browsers, it seems that connecting via https:// also works (apparently by automatically downgrading the connection to an unencrypted one?) … with others, it does not.

  33. (1) I have Space Opera in my TBR, but have not yet started it. Partially because Oh woe, I used to have so much time to read, I’d frequently go through a few books a week, often reading 2-3 at a time, switching from one to another if I got bored, or reading one in the morning and one at night, etc.. But now, ugh. I go through bursts of reading, but rarely seem to get more than a few minutes a day. This is partially because of my schedule, but mostly because I spend too much time obsessing over the news and grazing the fetid fields of social media. I’ve been stuck on Raven Strategem for over a month now, which is slow even given what I’ve said above. The problem is that the book was extremely slow going for me for the first 1/2. I find the world difficult to grasp and the prose is not crafted for speedy reading. I am enjoying the book, especially as I near the end (I’m 70% in now, up from 50% two days ago). Having just downloaded the packet, and needing to read quite a few novels between YA, novel, and series, I’m hoping to find more time and faster reads in the near future.

  34. Hey nerds! Thanks so much to everyone who helped detangle the voter’s packet. Especially to whoever figured out that missing space in the NetGalley URL, I don’t remember who it was, but they are a GENIUS. I jumped on the YA offerings first, even though I had promised myself I’d finish reading Scalzi’s novel before wandering off. So I’m halfway through T. Kingfisher’s Summer in Orcus (I think) and really loving it. Been a long week and a YA magic adventure is balm on my weary soul.

    Much thanks to the generosity of all the creators and their publishers! As always, thanks so much to @MikeGlyer for having us all here! Mike, I’m pretty sure I’ve already read everything in your packet, but thank you so much for taking the time to put it together for us! See you nerds in San Jose! I can’t wait to meet y’all in person!

  35. @rochrist

    2) Yes, there IS a metric boatload of mostly pretty bad SFF being sold via the Kindle. I suppose that’s a good thing. For somebody.

    Good for readers with an increased range of offerings at the price point they can afford.

    Good for authors with increased royalties.

    Good for previously marginalized people as their stories have few obstacles to publication.

    Bad for traditional publishers who, based on editorial taste and basic production capacity, formerly prevented (actively via taste or passively via production capacity) works from being published.

    In my experience, there are many gems to be found outside of the traditional publishing route. Traditional publishing also isn’t immune to publishing stinkers. One interesting feature of the Author Earnings report was that MilSF was the top-selling sub-genre and that the big five and large trade publishers make up a small fraction of that market.

    If unblinkered economics were in play, then you’d think that the big five and large trade folks would be chasing MilSF authors like crazy as a matter of profit. Might editorial taste be a factor in the decision not to pursue MilSF?

    It was also surprising not to see “grim dark” as a sub-genre.

    —-

    The Hugo packet site worked for me last night for the categories in which I am interested; graphic novels, professional artist, fan artist. I bought/read the novels already. I started the podcasting category already which means I probably won’t be using their submissions.

    Elisa beat me to the punch on New York 2140. However, todays “daily deals” via Goodreads also has most of Glen Cook’s Black Company series on sale. Sadly, book 1 didn’t get a discount. The discounts on the Black Company series expire in about 16-17 hours from now.

    My novel reading is done for the Hugos. Not a great experience. I guess everyone can’t be N.K. Jemisin. The non-Hugo book I read afterward was Michael Sullivan’s Age of Myth. That was satisfying and a relief.

    Regards,
    Dann
    The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. – Isaac Asimov

  36. Dann – In my experience, there are many gems to be found outside of the traditional publishing route.

    And trying to find those gems can be a real pain in the butt.

    Kind of curious how many of the indie authors on that graph are also well known authors publishing a novel independent of their publisher as it seems a lot of more well known authors have sort of spread their work out to include multiple revenue options.

    While some might see that list and argue about trad vs indie to me it appears like for SFF there’s a multitude of avenues to pursue that people continue to manage to do well in and having more choices gives authors more leverage for any contracts they’re dealing with and also ability to have more or less control over the whole process which is great. Also for readers to consume the content in their preferred method.

  37. Hugo Packet Downloading:

    A bit of investigation shows that one of the components is generating links for the downloads pointing to an Amazon AWS instance starting with “http://”. If you’ve started from https://www.worldcon76.org/hugo/packet.php then that gets blocked for being mixed content. For anything where the page is HTTPS a browser will either warn about or block any HTTP assets. I wouldn’t normally expect a download link to be considered an asset and would expect a “redirecting to insecure page” warning instead, but there’s a lot of Javascript involved which could be confusing things. If your browser has a setting that can be temporarily enabled to allow mixed content then it should work, but that’s a potential security problem. But then so is using plain HTTP.

    TLDR version: No, downloads won’t work with HTTPS, use HTTP with the usual caution.

  38. Ariel: I just finished New York 2140, and was shocked to discover that I actually rather like Kim Stanley Robinson’s meandering narratives with compelling but static characters…?
    When I finished the book, and it was a slog in the beginning until I got into the flow, I thought the meandering was an homage to both Melville’s and Whitman’s style.

  39. @JJ — it would definitely be helpful if the contents were listed somewhere and we could pick which ones to download.

    I have nice fast broadband but I have a different download issue … I mainly read on my phone and sometimes my Kindle, but I do most of my downloading on my laptop. To get non-Amazon titles from my laptop to my e-readers I have to email them, or try to drag them through the network while synching my phone (unsuccessfully attempting that with Oathbringer right now). And so many of these best-series books are too big to email. So I’ve got all this delicious new Tsundoku but it’s all stuck behind a forcefield. (Unless I feel like reading them in uncomfortable formats.)

  40. @Charon D

    I’ve used Dropbox in the past for similar transfers. Kindle app can import supported formats from there, after conversion in Calibre if necessary.

    If not using Kindle app your millage may vary.

  41. (13) BUY PROP FOR NEVER-MADE TREK MOVIE.

    And it looks like the auction closed with no bids. Not surprising at $30,000 for an opening bid.

    Still it’s interesting that the design was basically reused as the basis for the Discovery in Star Trek: Discovery.

    (14) HOT TIP: PLASTICS. NASA now has a combination plastic recycler and 3-D printer to test on the International Space Station.

    I got an early experience with plastic construction/recycling “in this vein with a toy. It melted plastic in a chamber, and then you used a piston to fill cartridge molds for various toy shapes. Then you could melt down the toys and make more toys. Naturally something like that would never be allowed around children now. Also, being impatient, I would never wait for the plastic to fully melt.

  42. Oathbringer is bigger as an epub than most books are as PDFs. It’s not migrating to my kobo because it would eat up as much memory as 20 regular ebooks…

  43. Okay, this is late, but has anyone seen this May 23rd article in The Guardian about how left-leaning action movies were in the 80s, and how now it’s all about upholding authority and capitalism?

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/23/action-commando-robocop-total-recall-avengers-batman-schwarzenegger

    As someone whose teenage years were spent almost entirely in the 80s (just two years in the 90s), and who loved both action films and the Dead Kennedys, I can only say whaaaa? Okay, yeah, Robocop. But otherwise, whaaaa?

  44. For those that might be interested, nearly the entire Black Company series is a Kindle Daily Deal of the $2.99 variety.

    ::is deeply, sorely tempted despite owning all the dead tree books already::

  46. The last entry in BBC’s Ten Films to Watch in June looks fascinating but doesn’t show a US release date — maybe because it’s in July, maybe because it was too alien for distributors to touch. Has anybody heard anything about Maquia? If anyone actually sees it, please report.

    @kathodus: I haven’t seen any of the 80’s films he cites; I wonder whether he’s confusing “capitalism” with “the world”, given his assertion that he’s missing the one-person-against-the-world plot (which I acknowledge is not a feature even of the 1990’s Batman movies).

  47. Good tip on Dropbox. It sounds like Oathbringer is a Mount Tsundoku unto itself; I think I’ll hit the 20 regular books first. I was able to get at least one of each best-series book onto my phone, so I can tell whether I feel like going back for seconds.

    Summer’s nearly here and my phone is stuffed full of unread SF; life is good!

  48. Re free kindle stuff:
    By chance I came across Fatal Boarding by E.R.Mason. Its quite classic, somewhere between Star Trak and Battlestar Galaktica, but tightly written and it was enough to also read the (standalone) sequel, that was not bad either, but less tight.
    Its the only free book that was worse reading though (although I havent tried many)

  50. @Nate – The first book is $8.99 on Amazon, US version. The 9-book series is $32.91 (~3.66 each). I bought that. I have a compendium or two, but haven’t read all nine books.

    @Chip – That may be the case. My memory of 80s action movies (and I haven’t seen one in 20 years or so, but I watched a lot of them up to and including “The Last Action Hero”) is that the bad guys were sometimes the Mob, sometimes Russia, sometimes other Communist states, occasionally big corporations (a stand-in for Capitalism, you could argue), and then started edging toward Muslim terrorists around when I stopped watching them. My recent viewing of the entire MacGyver series jibes with that impression. MacGyver was very much of its time, and often mimicked or referenced current action movies.

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