Pixel Scroll 5/10/16 Who Scrolls There?

(1) GO RIGHT TO THE SOURCE. Joe Hill will bring his comic series to the air — see “Locke & Key TV Show Happening with Original Creator Joe Hill” at MovieWeb.

IDW Entertainment (IDWE) announced today that the award-winning, fan-favorite property Locke & Key is being developed as a television series. Author/creator Joe Hill will be writing the pilot and serving as an executive producer. Locke & Key has garnered both awards and acclaim during its five-year run.

Following the titular Locke family as they encounter magic beyond belief and evils beyond redemption, Locke & Key quickly won over readers and has since become a staple in introducing new readers to the medium. With the series adapted in dozens of languages across the globe, and more than a million copies sold worldwide, Locke & Key is an obvious choice to make the transition to the screen. New York Times bestselling author, Joe Hill, has continually captivated readers through his gripping novels and award-winning comic series.

(2) DIG HERE. According to The Independent, a 15-year-old boy believes he has discovered a forgotten Mayan city using satellite photos and Mayan astronomy

William Gadoury, from Quebec, came up with the theory that the Maya civilization chose the location of its towns and cities according to its star constellations.

He found Mayan cities lined up exactly with stars in the civilization’s major constellations.

Studying the star map further, he discovered one city was missing from a constellation of three stars.

Using satellite images provided by the Canadian Space Agency and then mapped on to Google Earth, he discovered the city where the third star of the constellation suggested it would be….

(3) DISABILITY METAPHORS. The Our Words launch included reposting “Corinne Duyvis on Minding Your Metaphors”, which first appeared on SF Signal in 2014.

I’m a co-founder of the website Disability in Kidlit as well as an author who regularly writes disabled characters; both my recently published fantasy novel Otherbound and my upcoming sci-fi novel On the Edge of Gone feature disabled protagonists. On top of that, I’m disabled myself. It’s pretty safe to say I’m a huge fan of disability representation. Specifically, I’m a fan of accurate, respectful, and textual disability representation.

However, when writing science fiction and fantasy, it doesn’t just stop at featuring textually disabled characters. Many SFF stories contain disability metaphors. These span a wide range—from purposeful to unintentional, from obvious to subtle, and from well-done to inadvertently offensive.

(4) SWIRSKY ASKS. Rachel Swirsky conducts a “Silly interview with Spencer Ellsworth whose bedpost notches are real people”.

…Every time I see Spencer, I always ask the same question. You see, several years ago when Ann Leckie was running Giganotosaurus, I sometimes did first-round reading for her. And while Ann and I have very similar taste, we don’t have identical taste. So once in a while we’d come up against a story that I was jazzed about, but that didn’t quite cross her threshold. So every time I see Spencer, I ask about that one story that got away…

(5) PKD COMES TO TV. io9 has the story: “Philip K. Dick Is Getting an Anthology Show, Courtesy of Bryan Cranston and Ronald D. Moore”.

“Ronald D. Moore, Bryan Cranston, and Philip K. Dick” are three names you probably never expected to see in the same sentence together. But that’s what’s happening as the longtime scifi producer and the acclaimed actor are teaming up to bring the legendary writer’s work to TV in a new anthology series for the UK.

Electric Dreams: The World of Philip K. Dick will be a 10-part miniseries written by Moore, who will executively produce alongside Michael Dinner (Justified, Masters of Sex) and Bryan Cranston, who will also star in the series itself. Each episode will be a standalone story that illustrates Dick’s “prophetic vision” and “[celebrates] the enduring appeal” of the writer’s past work. Isa Dick Hackett, whose past work includes The Adjustment Bureau and The Man in the High Castle and is Dick’s daughter, will also produce the show.

(6) WILLIAM SCHALLERT OBIT. His best known role was as the dad in The Patty Duke Show, but William Schallert appeared in dozens of series in a career that spanned eight decades (1947-2014). He passed away May 8.

Most fans would consider the peak of his sf career to be playing Nilz Baris, under secretary in charge of agricultural affairs for the United Federation of Planets, in Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode.

Schallert on Star Trek

His genre work started with many bit parts, like the uncredited Gas Station Attendant in Mighty Joe Young (1949), and most of the time he was a supporting actor. IMDB shows he was in The Man From Planet X (1951), Space Patrol (1951-52), Invasion U.S.A. (1952), Gog (1954), Them! (1954), Tobor the Great (1954), Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Monolith Monsters (1957), Men into Space (1960), The Twilight Zone (1960), One Step Beyond (1959), The Wild, Wild West (1967-69), Land of the Giants (1969), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), The Bionic Woman (1976), Legends of the Superheroes (1979), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Twilight Zone (revived series) (1986), Quantum Leap (1989), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), and Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1994).

Schallert recorded this promo for MeTV in April 2014 when he was 91 years old.

Schallert featured in one of the Patty Duke Show themed PSA’s the Social Security Administration put online in 2010.

(7) SLATE THOUGHTS. Gary Denton of the Nightly Nerd News said as part of a long comment on Facebook:

I agree that slates violate the intention of the Hugo Awards that individuals should only nominate what they enjoyed and thought worthy of an award for best of the year. I also believe all elections eventually come to be dominated by parties and people have a right to oppose parties or support parties. Just don’t vote blindly folks, have an opinion on each item, don’t follow orders.

I believe that E Pluribus Hugo will only lessen the problem with slates, 20% of voters all following orders on how to vote even with votes on each ballots fractionalized will still allow disciplined Fascists treating this as a show of strength to dominate the ballot. Fascist is the correct term here, they are blindly following orders on what to vote for.

A digression, I dislike the editor nominations. Samples of what they actually did that year need to be included and that seems problematic. On all awards you need to have samples if not the whole thing to cast an informed vote, otherwise it is a popularity contest. If I can’t determine what they worked on last year and make a guess at how well they did they won’t get a vote from me. It is easier with short form editors. Wow, that magazine or anthology had a lot of amazing stories, that editor deserves an award…

(8) IT AIN’T ME. Max Florschutz processes a conflict some young writers have: “Being A Better Writer: Author Morals and Character Morals” at Unusual Things.

…Think about the last book that you read or movie that you watched that has a dangerous, unstable, or otherwise alarming character in it. Maybe they were a sleazy scumbag, or maybe a serial killer. A ruthless businessman, or an unscrupulous social worker. Basically, a character that was dangerous, alarming, or perhaps just unstable.

Now think about that character in relation to the author. And here’s where today’s topic comes into play. Do you think that because the author created a character like that, it means that they are, in some way, like that character?

The obvious—and correct—answer is no. I’ll say that again for emphasis, no, it does not. And this is where we run once more back into the question that plagues so many young writers: how can they write characters like that despite being nothing like them?

The trick is that for many this is not a question of being able to write good characters or filling their pages with creative prose. That’s not the consideration at all.

No, what a lot of these young writers are asking is how you deal with writing a character that’s not just different from themselves, but is different in a way that they find morally objectionable….

Yeah, some of you might be chuckling right now or even laughing and shaking your heads, but this is a real barrier that a lot of young writers run into. There’s a real question of where they stand on their own feet while writing characters that may hold different views than the, attitudes, or morals than them….

These characters are not you. They will swear. They will fight. They will make poor choices and good ones. As the author writing these characters, separate what they believe from what you believe because, unless you’re writing self-inserts (common enough), these characters are going to be as different from you as anyone else you meet in your life, and their emotions, thoughts, and other assorted things are theirs, not yours. That distinction is important. Your morals, ethics, and concepts, the stuff that makes you a person is not the same as theirs.

For instance, I am not a sociopath serial killer who stalks young couples. But one of my characters, Amacitia Varay, is. That doesn’t mean that I agree at all with her mentality, or the things that she says, or at all in any way what she does (all of which you can read about in the pages of Unusual Events). But I wrote the story … and it was her story, from her perspective and about her beliefs.

(9) MEET THE NEIGHBORS. Nerd & Tie’s Trae Dorn has learned Anime Midwest (July 8-10) will be sharing space with a porn convention:

In a bizarre coincidence, this year Anime Midwest will end up sharing the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center [in Rosemont, IL] with the Exxxotica Expo, a touring convention for “Adult Entertainment.” Exxxotica bills itself as “the Largest Adult Event in the USA Dedicated to Love & Sex.”

While Anime Midwest’s management (I’m just guessing) probably wants to distance themselves from Exxxotica publicly, Exxxotica management has embraced the proximity between events. Apparently, anyone with an Anime Midwest badge is being offered discounted admission to the porn expo and is planning “adult anime” events including a cosplay contest and “sexy anime seminars.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

This is… probably terrible? Pretty sure this is terrible. Frankly, many anime convention attendees are under the age of 18, and the idea that these underage attendees are going to be in immediate proximity of this kind of event doesn’t really do anyone any good. There are a list of bad things happen from the merely uncomfortable to the dangerous that are racing through my head.

I want to be clear that this is patently not Anime Midwest’s fault. It’s not a big enough event to rent the entirety of the Stephens Convention Center (which also is the home to the much larger Anime Central), and they cannot control what the owners of the site do with the space they don’t have under contract. We’re not huge fans of AnimeCon.org around here (for both obvious and not so obvious reasons), but honest to god there is no way they could have seen this coming.

(10) HOGWARTS. Costume sketches from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

(11) WILLIS, WHITE, AND IAN MCDONALD. Visual Artists Ireland says Richard Howard will speak about The Secret History of Northern Irish Science Fiction at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry on May 19 at 7:30 p.m.

Using the exhibition Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (ending May 21st, info here) as a point of departure, this talk will sketch the history of a science fiction tradition in Northern Ireland. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Robert Cromie, it will trace the development of this tradition in the region, a tradition solidified by Belfast natives Walt Willis and James White, who instigated the Irish Fandom science fiction group in the 1940s and produced the fanzines Slant and Hyphen. Willis and White were eventually joined by Bob Shaw, one of the most prolific science fiction authors the region has produced. Shaw and White’s own efforts in the genre from the mid-twentieth century to its end will also be discussed; short stories and novels that were received in the context of the international science fiction community, but that extrapolated from and estranged the material conditions of Northern Irish society. As the latest iteration of the tradition, there are many schisms within the genre that separates the work of Ian McDonald from those that came before him. The paper will nevertheless attempt to propose a unified theory of Northern Irish science fiction, if only to detect the remainders and contradictions that might answer the questions: to whom is Northern Irish science fiction a secret and why?

(12) IS CAPTAIN JACK COMING BACK? Den of Geek speculates whether Captain Jack will be appearing on Doctor Who.

After he brought back Alex Kingston’s River Song for last year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, it’s starting to look like Steven Moffat may repeat the trick this year by bringing back another long-time absentee from the supporting cast for a festive reprive.

John Barrowman has teased that he has work in Cardiff in the near future, which has led the internet to suggest that he could be appearing in the 2016 Doctor Who Christmas special. Or maybe even the spin-off series, Class.

For the record, all Barrowman said – while promoting his new book in a Welsh Waterstones – was that “I will be back in Cardiff in about a week and a half… but I’m not telling you what for!”

That’s enough to get a rumour started, since the Welsh capital is synonymous with the production of Doctor Who at this stage. Perhaps it’s a bit soon to get excited, but the idea of Captain Jack Harkness bantering with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is a tantalising proposition, isn’t it?

(13) LONDON ROBOT EXHIBIT NEXT YEAR. The London Science Museum’s 2017 show about robots in the Daily Mail is accompanied by a small photo gallery.

Throughout history, artists and scientists have sought to understand what it means to be human and create machines in our own image.

Soon, a new exhibition will explore our obsession to recreate ourselves, revealing the remarkable 500-year history of humanoid robots.

The forthcoming show at London’s Science Museum will include a collection of more than 100 robots from a 16th-century mechanical monk to robots from science fiction and modern-day research lab.

Set in five different periods and places, this exhibition will explore how robots and society have been shaped by religious belief, the industrial revolution, 20th century popular culture and dreams about the future.

As well as celebrating machines of the past, the exhibition will examine scientists’ quest to build ever more complex and human-like robots that are able to learn from their mistakes and express emotions.

Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum Group said: ‘This exhibition explores the uniquely human obsession of recreating ourselves, not through paint or marble but in metal.

Seeing robots through the eyes of those who built or gazed in awe at them reveals much about humanity’s hopes, fears and dreams.’ …

The Science Museum has also launched a Kickstarter campaign that will pay to rebuild Eric, the UK’s first robot.

Originally built in 1928 by Captain Richards and AH Reffell, Eric was one of the world’s first robots and travelled the world to amaze curious crowds in the UK, US and Europe before disappearing.

If the full £35,000 ($50,596 is raised, the historic replica will become part of the museum’s permanent collection, as well as featuring in the Robots exhibition. It will also travel the world as part of the exhibition’s international tour, just like the original Eric did 90 years ago.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Will R., James H. Burns, JJ, and Hampus Eckerman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peace Is My Middle Name.]

227 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/10/16 Who Scrolls There?

  1. Darren Garrison, isn’t it great that we now live in a world where we can be blasé about discovering thousands of exoplanets? <smile>

  2. But it was parodying things like The Man From UNCLE that are hard to dismiss from sci-fi….

    I figure that Hymie the robot, at least, qualifies as SF (or at least “sci-fi”)… 🙂

    And KAOS always seemed to come up with very science-fictional weapons.

  3. #2 – The CBC has a much better article on the Mayan city.
    And it makes it much, much more likely to be true. What the kid did was overlay a map of Mayan constellations and found 117 points that matched with known cities, with a extra point that had no known city associated with it. The satellite images accompanying the CBC article are also impressive. Looks like ruins to me. There is already some questions of if the ruins are really ancient or something newer that happens to be in a very coincidental place, but this is solid research.

  4. @Ryan H: The archaeologist at the end of the article points out that remote sensing technologies have been used in Mayan archaeology for years. So when he says that it looks like a fallow field (as do other prominent archaeologists), I’m inclined to believe him.

  5. @Aaron:

    The fetishization of Heinlein by some people (notably a lot of the Puppies) is kind of disturbing. I’ve pretty much read everything that Heinlein published, up to and including his travelogue Tramp Royale, but he was just one author who had a good run.

    It’s funny. My thing is that, while Heinlein Is Problematic, with some pretty deep downs to go with the ups, his career was so much more than that short run of kid lit that calling someone the New New Heinlein based on writing a nostalgia-focused book for middle-schoolers is a bigger slander on RAH than anything any Ess Jay Double-Ewe ever said about him.

  6. I recall an announcement in Locus that a magazine calling itself A Harsh Mistress was getting submissions from people who didn’t understand the sort of contents the editors were looking for. Now I don’t remember if it was a BDSM magazine that was getting SFF submissions or a SFF magazine that was getting BDSM submissions.

  7. @NickPheas

    Thinks: Wonders why the puppies have fixated on Jim Butcher as THE author who really deserves a rocket and Weber’s never come up. Do they respect him enough not to try and make a tool out of him? Does Voxman respect anyone like that?

    I can’t speak for anyone else, but I found Aeronaut’s Windlass to be a great piece. I had not read any of this year’s nominees previously, so to get a head start, I’m buying and reading them. I think Butcher did a great job of world building, character development, and story telling with this story. With 2.5 books read, it is in first place for my ballot by a very slender margin.

    Curiously, it was one of the books that I was sort of dreading. My prior experiences with Butcher’s prior work were less than satisfying. This time around, he has me enjoying steampunk themes (a first), liking cats (sorry, dog person here), and generally being at least somewhat sympathetic with for almost every character in the book.

    Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?


    Regards.
    Dann

    *Just in case, please assume “focused” to not involve some sort of organized cabal and instead refer to a group with a different if non-coordinated perspective.

  8. The Butcher novel the Puppies nominated last year was not particularly outstanding, in my opinion. I’m frankly skeptical that this one is a whole lot better.

  9. Re (2)

    This real confirms something I’ve felt for a while: If iflscience is sharing something, you can be pretty much assured that at best it’s left large amounts out to fuel the clickbait, and at worse is complete bullshit designed to allow a certain kind of web-user to seem smart.

    The boring scientists, the anthropologists, as opposed to the hip, sexy, and quickly meme-able internet “I love Science” scientists, seems to all think these are fallow milpa. As far as having the cities far from water, well, the Maya were world class engineers and and agriculturists who’d design an entire public plaza or temple complex such that it would serve as a giant rain collector, were very good at taping into groundwater, and could stick up serviceable aqueduct over a considerable distance.

    Secondly, we have not idea what the Mayan constellations looked like – rather, the “we” that relies on scientists instead of raving loons on the Internet doesn’t – and the idea of putting cities “under” stars doesn’t really make sense when your realize that latitude is what matters as to which stars are where.

    Now milpa are amazing things, able to get a fairly balanced collection of calories out of the same patch of ground. But they aren’t lost cities, and this is a big demonstrations as to why some ground sense of an area is needed, and not just a computer.

  10. Didn’t BT at some point produce a list of authors who ought to get a Hugo in the next few years? It may be that VD has forgotten this, but perhaps the idea is to go on trying with Butcher until the SJW’s come to their senses and give him a Hugo, and then turn to the others.

    I’ve seen a few good reviews of The Aeronaut’s Windlass. I think it may plausibly be better than Skin Game, because it can’t rely on people’s familiarity with the characters and situation, as that did.

  11. Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?

    I’m not sure that follows. This book seems to be very different from what Butcher has written before, and steampunk style fiction has certainly been nominated for the Hugo in the past.

  12. @dann665 *Just in case, please assume “focused” to not involve some sort of organized cabal and instead refer to a group with a different if non-coordinated perspective.

    I think this is what we’ve been trying to say all along. There’s no organized cabal; there’s no conspiracy to select so-called SJW works. It’s just the taste of the folks that have been voting in the Hugos tend to skew in one direction or another over time. It *does* change, though.

    When we say everybody’s allowed to participate in the process, such was always true. What we didn’t want was voting blocks. And no, I’m not buying that the prior usual Worldcon voters were a block, consciously or otherwise. I think it’s more that Worldcon voting was a smaller group and there were clusters of folks that shared recommendations with each other and they all tended to vote. Nothing nefarious at all — we all share book recommendations.

    There’s a difference between that and putting out a frakking press release with your block-vote choices.

  13. I recall an announcement in Locus that a magazine calling itself A Harsh Mistress was getting submissions from people who didn’t understand the sort of contents the editors were looking for. Now I don’t remember if it was a BDSM magazine that was getting SFF submissions or a SFF magazine that was getting BDSM submissions.

    It took the editor all of two issues before changing the title to “Absolute Magnitude.” And later, “Absolute Magnitude and Aboriginal Science Fiction” after picking up the rights.

  14. Books I read some of, and quit (that’s what libraries are for!):

    “All the Birds in the Sky”, Charlie Jane Anders: I saw too much bullying and animal harm coming, I don’t have the starch for that right now.

    “Medusa’s Web”, Tim Powers: Mr Dr Science was right, the density of description is really thick, you know what *everything* looks like, whether it’s important or not. The characters and the situation didn’t grab me hard enough to make me want to do the work of the prose.

    “Every Anxious Wave”, Mo Daviau. Magic realism, i.e. sff with no world-building. I bailed when the past had cell-phone reception. This is Daviau’s first novel, and I might be interested in giving her a try when she stops writing for men — I could get interested in her heroine’s POV.

    “Arcadia” by Iain Pears: very Oxford, very lyrical, very fantasy. I might give it a try some other time, when I’m not jonesing as hard for SPACE.

  15. “Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?”

    Focused Worldcon voters? Well, may…SQUIRREL!

  16. “Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?”

    Certainly! Because there certainly isn’t that much interest in steampunk amongst a lot of writers generally castigated as the feminist LGBT SJWs. Heh, what’s been everyone’s experience with Karen Memory and some of Elizabeth Bear’s other steampunk?

  17. Well, some of the Mayan cities had cenotes, and some didn’t.

    Still, the kid started looking at the constellation map because the Mayan city locations didn’t follow the same patterns as the European and Mediterranean city locations: river or freshwater lake/sea. Why he seized on the constellations instead of, say, a naturally occurring cenote denoting a sacred space to the settlers reminds me too much of “The Giza pyramids are the three stars of Orion’s Belt!

  18. Heather Rose Jones (and robinareid): I know it’s not a typical fannish venue, but if any other filers are planning to be at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo this week

    I’ll be at Kalamazoo this weekend, but I’ve no idea what my schedule will be like–my session is on Friday afternoon, so I’m not expecting to be coherent again until at least Saturday morning. robinareid, looks like I’m going to get there too late for your session, anyway–which is a pity, because it looks like a fun one. Break a leg!

  19. Outside of Difference Engine, steampunk has never really resonated with me. Even when an author like Blaylock takes the subgenre in hand, I don’t get the “shock of the new” that I crave. It’s as if the strictures of steampunk are too tight to really allow the author to break free and really get weird.

    The closest I ever got to digging steampunk was Mark Hodder’s Burton & Swinburne Adventures (The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is the first). It manages to get strange in a very entertaining way.

  20. Currently reading The Fifth Season.

    Oof. (But the good oof.)

    Also I had a dream last night that Seanan McGuire (though Mira Grant was the name my subconscious used) had gone missing and the Rabid Puppies were making truly awful and gross jokes about it. I actually checked in on McGuire’s Twitter feed to make sure she was ok when I woke up.

  21. One the Hugo reading front, I started Seveneves and am about halfway in. Really loving it so far. This is the first book I’ve read from Stephenson (although I own a few of his books, I’ve not got around to them yet). I was really disappointed that Aurora wasn’t on the ballot, but so far this is a good replacement.

    Also, went to a used bookstore and managed to find a few Retro Hugo novels. One question I have, should I read the first 3 Lensman books before reading Grey Lensman, or will I be fine?

  22. @Jack Lint: a fan has periodically threatened to put “We are six looking for a seventh for F&SF” in the local “underground” paper’s personals just to see what reactions occur.

  23. Last year’s Butcher nominee was a fairly weak book, ten+ books into a series.

    This year, his nominated work is the start of a new series. As with the other non-Castalia House works, I will give it a fair shake.

  24. There have certainly been steampunk on the shortlist and longlist over the last 20-30 years in the fiction and graphic/comic categories. No I’m not going to go do the work to prove it. For a change I’d like to see puppy/thinks like a puppy do the work instead of making innuendos or statements without facts to back them up.

    Although possibly we have been nominating and awarding the wrong steampunk. In which case different taste. Maybe y’all should have been more involved as individuals over the years instead of whining about others not doing things the way you want for longer than some of you’ve been alive.

  25. Loving the Puplein book titles from last page. My favorite so far is Daniel P Dern’s Have Space Suit, Can’t Get Through TSA for the perfect irony.

    @dann665

    Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?

    I liked The Aeronaut’s Windlass and I’m a big Dresden fan, but I don’t understand the calls that Butcher has been “bypassed” or is “deserving” when it comes to Hugo awards. The only books of his I can see as realistic finalists so far are maaaybe Changes and Ghost Story, and those were only impactful to me as a reader because I had read all of the DF up to that point and understood the sort of sea change those books were in terms of the series.

    As a Worldcon voter, I don’t think being good is enough. I want knock-your-socks-off, never-seen-this-before, truly impressive work to pick from on the shortlist. And while Butcher is pretty dang good at what he does, I don’t know that I’ve necessarily seen greatness there yet. I wish he did more standalone work. He gets into the series writing and churns out several books with the same characters and themes like Codex Alera. That sort of thing is popular with readers, but it’s usually safe as opposed to innovative.

  26. Steampunk is such a broad concept, though I think the term has wider and narrower senses, that it would be hard to miss it entirely. (The authors of Girl Genius, which won three times in BGS, say it is not steampunk, but I think they are interpreting the concept too strictly.)

    The obvious example of a steampunk Best Novel finalist is Boneshaker. That’s science-fictional steampunk, though; I can’t immediately think of a work of fantastic steampunk being shortlisted before.

  27. For Steampunk, I’m extremely fond of the Tales of the Ketty Jay-books. Thought Boneshaker was a bit boring.

  28. The Goblin Emperor had some steampunk elements, to my mind, but one could hardly call it steampunk, full stop.

  29. @Dawn

    I’m also working on The Fifth Season. The jury is still out for me. It’s very good, but I liked Aeronaut’s Windlass and Uprooted quite a bit more. Thus far.

    @Rob

    Amusingly, I can buy off on the literal hand waving that goes with most magical systems more easily than most of the explanations of how chemicals (!), gemstones (!), and metals (!) can somehow create an alternative form of energy/technology. Mr. Butcher did a pretty good on that end of it IMHO.

    @Aaron

    I’m not suggesting that Butcher was specifically bypassed. Just that there may have been other work by other authors that was overlooked due to focus being elsewhere. (I’m not going to hork the link back to my blog again….’cause at some point that’s just repetitive and rude.) With five finalists and thousands of books published each year, Isn’t it possible for a needle or two to be missed in the haystack?

    I will bring up de Castell’s “Greatcoats” series as an example of work that is really top shelf material that probably has not been on people’s literary radar.


    Regards,
    Dann

  30. @k_choll: the first two Lensman books (Triplanetary and First Lensman) are tacked-on prequels to the series as a whole, and I think there’s enough expositional backfill in Gray Lensman that you can get by without reading Galactic Patrol.

  31. “All the Birds in the Sky”, Charlie Jane Anders: I saw too much bullying and animal harm coming, I don’t have the starch for that right now.

    Animal harm? I’m totally blanking on that now.

    Surprisingly little bullying after establishing the characters at the start. At least not the traditional being bullied at school bullying. (But get a second opinion as I can be dense in re bullying.)

  32. Just that there may have been other work by other authors that was overlooked due to focus being elsewhere.

    There is always work that doesn’t make it onto the Hugo ballot. As you just pointed out, there are thousands of books published every year and only five slots on the list of finalists. That’s why I pointed out that your conclusion didn’t really follow from your premise: Steampunk material has been nominated for the Hugo, and even won it a few times. I don’t think anyone has missed the fact that good steampunk is out there.

  33. @Aaron

    There is always work that doesn’t make it onto the Hugo ballot. As you just pointed out, there are thousands of books published every year and only five slots on the list of finalists. That’s why I pointed out that your conclusion didn’t really follow from your premise: Steampunk material has been nominated for the Hugo, and even won it a few times. I don’t think anyone has missed the fact that good steampunk is out there.

    My comments were not intended to suggest that steampunk has been overlooked.

    I generally have not enjoyed books with a steampunk theme and/or elements. One of the things I really liked about The Goblin Emperor was that it implied some steampunk elements but then didn’t get wrapped around the axle trying to explain how it worked.


    Regards,
    Dann

  34. If we made a list of all the authors who have been called “the new Heinlein” on the dust jackets of their books alone, it would probably be too long a list for WordPress to handle without choking! Amazing that VOXMAN is obsessed with one instance of that. Guess it shows how little he pays attention to the field in general.

    As far as I can tell, writing a book with spaceships gives you a 50/50 chance of being called “the new Heinlein”. 🙂

    I don’t read a lot of steampunk, but I’ve still managed to come across a few that have a sense of wonder. One, which I’d generally classify as “ok”, but which definitely had some wild concepts, is Steampunk Cthulhu from Chaosium Press. (Story collection, not game.) Another is the Japanese Devil Fish Girl series by Robert Rankin, who writes like he’s trying to use a few pints of beer to flush the last of the LSD out of his system. 🙂

    @Dann: I definitely agree that the Hugo nominators have blind spots. One easy way to spot some is to look for people with multiple Nebula noms who have never gotten a Hugo nom, or vice versa. But a major blind spot both WSFS and SFWA seem to have is humor! (A flaw they share with many non-genre awards.) As Charlie Stross has commented, writing good humor is hard, but when it works, it tends to look effortless, which makes people undervalue it. Among other authors that have been sadly (IMO) overlooked for at least a nomination, I would list Tom Holt and the aforementioned Robert Rankin; two of my favorite SFnal humorists.

  35. Jack Lint:

    I thought there were Ominous Warnings that gur fvfgre jnf tbvat gb qb ubeevoyr guvatf gb oveqf later in the book (not just first couple chapters). It has to go back to the libe now, I’ll maybe give it another try later on.

  36. Doctor Science, there’s a fair amount of bullying in the first part of All the Birds in the Sky, but it does get better after the first third or so of the book. And the kitten is unharmed, to the best of my recollection. Just saw your ROT-13. Sister didn’t do what you expected.

  37. Today’s read — The Sandman: Overture

    Gather round, and I shall tell you a story of my misspent youth.

    As the 80’s faded into the 90’s, and my adolescence faded into adulthood, I left superhero comics behind, at least for a while. Or perhaps, they left me behind. A change was happening to them that I couldn’t even articulate, and one by one, I didn’t renew my subscriptions. Alpha Flight went first, then New Mutants, then at last my beloved X-Men, which I had followed faithfully for more than a decade. I had lost interest in the plots, lost interest in the characters, and I really, really didn’t like the art.

    (In retrospect, looking back on what became of superhero comics in the 90’s … I was entirely right, dammit. It took a long time for superheroes to recover from whatever the hell happened in that decade.)

    Anyway, I was in college now, with new interests, new vistas before me, and, not incidentally to this story, a girlfriend. One day, I happened to mention to my girlfriend that I used to read comic books.

    “Oh,” she said. “Have you ever read Sandman?”

    (Sandman has been called the first sexually transmitted comic book. I can verify that there’s a reason for this.)

    I told her I didn’t really read comics any more, and she said I should check it out. A DC title, she said. I was … skeptical. If I’d stopped reading Marvel for a while when my adolescence faded, DC was, as far as I was concerned, strictly for grade school. I’d stopped reading DC as soon as I’d stopped being able to take characters with names like “Matter Eater Lad” at face value.

    (In that pre-internet age, I had not yet heard of either Watchmen or The Dark Night Returns. I got to those later, no fear.)

    Anyway, she said, this is a new thing for DC. Vertigo, it’s called. Not like their other stuff. So I walked down the street and picked up whatever the latest copy of Sandman was to check it out.

    Mind. Blown.

    And that introduced me to Vertigo, and brought me back into a different kind of comics for the remainder of the 90’s.

    Fast forward to now. The Sandman has been over for a long time, and Neil Gaiman’s output since then has been mixed. Not bad, not at all, but mixed. After a few false starts, he’s become a very good novelist indeed. Some of his short stories are truly excellent, among the shining examples of that medium, and he’s written some really great children’s stories. But he doesn’t always hit it out of the park, and that makes opening a new Sandman book feel like a bit of a gamble. Will it be a letdown? Will it be good for nostalgia value, but little else?

    Or will it feel like coming home?

    Hint: it felt like coming home.

    Thumbs up.

    (I will note that though I have talked mostly about Gaimian here, a good deal of responsibility for how good the book was lies with the brilliant J. H. Williams III. And if you haven’t seen his artwork on Batwoman, I recommend that, too.)

  38. (And Kurt Busiek pops up as a timely reminder to me that not ALL superhero comics were terrible in the 90’s. I read Astro City from its earliest days with good reason.)

  39. My comments were not intended to suggest that steampunk has been overlooked.

    So if you weren’t talking about books by Butcher, or steampunk, what were you trying to say when you said this:

    Maybe….just maybe….this is the type of work that has been bypassed in recent years because WorldCon voters have been focused* elsewhere?

    What “type” of work are you talking about? Books that don’t get Hugo nominations? Because that list is enormous, and being on it says almost nothing about a book.

  40. De Castell got a fair bit of coverage on Tor.com in 2014 when Traitor’s Blade was coming out (review post, excerpt post, competition post). So far from ignored by the supposed SJW central (not saying that Dann is doing any of that supposing).

  41. @Dann665 – I’m not a fan of steampunk, generally, either, though there are exceptions. It just isn’t a subgenre that calls to me. I’ve been curious about Butcher’s venture into it, and am hoping to get it free in the Hugo packet. Same with de Castell.

    Very off-subject… does any Filer know of a digital collection of Bloch’s horror stories, particularly those of a Lovecraftian bent? I’ve poked around, looking for them and had very little luck.

  42. Here’s the Table of Contents for File 770’s submission for the Hugo Voter Packet. I turned it in last night. Sixty pages. I must have identified 300 pages worth of highlights, but we all know about TL;DR. (I’m also putting in the magazine-format File 770 #165.) The blog sampler includes links to the summary pages which have complete sets of links for the roundups, and Kyra’s and everyone else’s brackets. My original plan was to put those link sets in the sampler, then I discovered just the lists filled 10 pages by themselves!

    2 Taral Wayne
    File770 Banner
    3 John King Tarpinian
    Viewing the Remains of Bradbury’s Home
    6 Mike Glyer
    Puppies Fetch Hugo Nominations and the Neighbors Have Plenty To Say (April 5, 2015 Hugo Roundup)
    15 Mike Glyer
    A Puppy Epilogue
    17 Juliette Wade
    An Account of Juliette Wade’s Withdrawal from Sad Puppies 3
    Including comments by Brad R. Torgersen
    21 John Hertz
    A Far Verse Thing
    22 Kyra, Camestros Felapton, RedWombat, Simon Bisson, Jim Henley
    This Will Ring Your Chimes
    29 RedWombat
    If You Were A Platypus, My Dear – A Play In As Many Acts As Is Required
    32 May Tree
    They Had It Coming
    35 James H. Burns
    CLANKY!
    37 John Hertz
    Frankensteinly Speaking
    38 Kyra
    Kyra’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy competition brackets
    51 John Hertz
    On the Wing
    53 Brandon Engel
    Top 5 Leonard Nimoy Guest Spots
    55 Tim Marion
    Ned Brooks: A Pair of Obituaries
    58 Dawn Sabados
    Orphaned Rover Still Available
    60 Kyra
    Science Fiction from A-Z
    Cover cartoon by Joe Mayhew

  43. Looks like a representative sample to me; good work, Mike. That must have been a very hard job…. (I see the Balrog posts didn’t get in, but then, the Balrog posts would probably be 50 pages all by themselves…)

  44. Will R.: Time enough for LOVE IS REAL!

    While my record as a prognosticator is suspect, I am going out on a limb to predict this will be today’s Scroll title.

  45. The new Butcher strikes me as standing more chance because it’s not part of a densely plotted series (something that never does well) though it’s likely to be judged more harshly because it was a puppy pick.
    My money’s on Fifth Season.

  46. Butcher:
    The only books of his I can see as realistic finalists so far are maaaybe Changes and Ghost Story

    Myself, I thought Ghost Story was the perfect end to the Dresden series. And as far as I’m concerned, it was.

    Butcher is not a bad writer though, so I’ll be willing to look at his steampunk novel, though I’m unlikely to vote for it. But hell, it’s waaaay down the list at this point. I just finished Greywalker (nice atmosphere and worldbuilding, pacing problems), and am starting Mystery Child of the Mysterious Sea of Mystery (OK, OK, Child of a Hidden Sea). The first few pages seem promising. Then there’s Fifth Season, Ancillary Mercy, and…and…

    And then I have to re-read Cart and Cwidder, after I pointed out to my partner that the princess that married the travelling bard who used magic to win her, might have a VERY different view of the situation than her son. Diana Wynne Jones, so good at letting horrible implications percolate up past the perception filters of the main characters…

    Busy summer this year.

  47. Re (9): I’ve worked a number of conventions with folks who are security staff at large anime cons. From the stories they tell, the underage attendees are going to get an eyeful even if they’re not sharing space with an erotica convention. Or try looking up yaoi or hentai. Go ahead, hit those links. It’s just text, so reasonably safe for work. Try google images for a rather astounding set of examples.

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