(1) ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. Ann Leckie’s train delivered her to Chicago on time for Nebula Weekend, unlike last year when she was delayed by a bacon-related catastrophe.
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/730322293495345152
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/730415113451118592
(2) FREE ALLEGED BOOK. Timothy the Talking Cat’s amanuensis Camestros Felapton reports:
Now available from Smashwords, until they decide it is too embarrassing even for them, There Will Be Walrus First Volume V.
Crafted from the finest pixels and using exquisite fonts and typographical metadata, There Will Be Walrus is the ground breaking anthology series from Cattimothy House – the world’s leading publisher of feline edited military science fiction anthologies.
The book comes with additional bonus content and includes features such as:
- clauses
- sentences
- paragraphs
- chapters
Spelling and punctuation are used throughout and in many cases radical new and exciting approaches have been taken. Copy-editing has been applied at industry standards as found in top flight Hugo nominated publishers such as Castalia House or Baen Books.
(3) ZINES ONLINE. The University of New Brunswick Library has posted complete scans of a number of classic old fanzines from their collection, Algol, Luna, Amra, Mimosa, four issues of Tom Reamy’s Trumpet, the earliest issues of Locus, and others. Click here.
(4) BETTY OR VERONICA? CW has given series orders to Greg Berlanti’s live-action Archie Comics series Riverdale. Entertainment Weekly says it will look like this:
Set in present-day and based on the iconic Archie Comics characters, Riverdale is a surprising and subversive take on Archie (KJ Apa), Betty (Lili Reinhart), Veronica (Camila Mendes), and their friends, exploring the surrealism of small town life — the darkness and weirdness bubbling beneath Riverdale’s wholesome façade.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa will write and executive-produce with Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and Jon Goldwater. Cole Sprouse, Ashleigh Murray, Luke Perry, Madelaine Petsch, Marisol Nichols, and Mädchen Amick will also star.
(5) I COME NOT TO PRAISE THEM. ABC has axed The Muppets. Entertainment Weekly ran its obituary.
The comedy series lasted one 16-episode season on the network after launching to tremendous buzz last fall.
The beloved franchise was given a modern-day, adult-themed makeover by producers Bob Kushell (Anger Management) and Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory). The show also some criticism for trying to make the classic family characters more contemporary, including focusing on their love lives. Midway through the season run, falling ratings prompted ABC to make a major change behind the scenes, replacing showrunner Kushell with Kristin Newman (Galavant), who pledged to bring “joy” to the series. Yet the changes didn’t alter the show’s fate.
(6) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman has posted Episode 8 of his podcast Eating the Fantastic, in which he dines and dialogs with dual guests, Lynne Hansen, and Jeff Strand.
Jeff Strand and Lynne Hansen
Lynne is a horror novelist turned filmmaker whose recent short, Chomp, received 21 nominations at a variety of film festivals, winning 7 times, including the Fright Meter Awards Best Short Horror Film of 2015, and Jeff Strand is not only the author of the wonderfully titled horror novels I Have a Bad Feeling About This and The Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (and many others)—he’ll also be the emcee Saturday for the Stoker Awards banquet.
Next episode of Eating the Fantastic, which will go live in approximately two weeks, will feature Maria Alexander, whose debut novel, Mr. Wicker, won the 2014 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel
(7) WOMEN FEATURED AT GENCON. Anna Kreider points out “GenCon’s Featured Presenters are 52% female, and that’s a huge deal”.
[Before I start – full disclosure, I am one of the Industry Insider Featured Presenters for this year’s GenCon. So I’m sure that there are those who will say that me writing this post is self-serving arrogance and/or egomania, but whatever.]
The GenCon Industry Insider Featured Presenters for 2016 have been announced, and holy shit is this year’s lineup amazing! Seriously, take a look:
That’s right, folks. There are 13 female IIFPs and only 12 men. This means there are MORE WOMEN THAN MEN, and that is a HUGE FUCKING DEAL, because that is a HUGE amount of change in a really short period of time. To prove it, let’s look at the numbers:
- This year’s lineup is 52% female! (13 out of 25)
- Just five years ago, the lineup was a meager 6.25% female (1 out of 16)
- The current number of female IIFPs has more than tripled in only two years. In 2014, there were only 4 out of 25 (16%)!
(8) MEDICAL UPDATE. It was announced on his blog that Darwyn Cooke is being treated for cancer.
It is with tremendous sadness that we announce Darwyn is now receiving palliative care following a bout with aggressive cancer. His brother Dennis and I, along with our families appreciate the outpouring of support we have received. We ask for privacy as we go through this very difficult time
(9) BLOG LAUNCH KEEPS UP MOMENTUM. Our Words’ rollout includes Sarah Chorn’s list of future plans
Anyway, things I envision for this website, so you know what to expect in the near future-ish:
1. I am continuing the guest posts. I love them. I think they are interesting, and I love getting diverse perspectives about many, many facets of disabilities in the genre.
2. I have a few interviews out. Yay! And I really want to keep interviews going.
3. I have a few giveaways in the works.
4. I have launched the book club, which I really, really want to take off.
5. I am currently working on doing a series of questions and answers. The idea behind this actually came from a few convention panels I was on, focusing on the topic of disabilities in the genre. After each panel, a host of authors would stand up and ask a ton of very good, very important questions about writing disabilities. So I figured maybe I can try to bring something like that to my website. I’m not exactly sure the format yet, but the idea is that I will get questions about writing disabilities from people who wish to ask said questions, and then I will send those questions to a few disabled genre authors to answer in a panel sort of format. That will take time to figure out, but it will happen eventually.
6. I have received a handful of books this week to review for this website, so start expecting book reviews.
7. I am trying to drum up a bunch of people willing to write about accessibility issues at conventions. There was some noise about this topic last year, but con season is upon us, and I’d like to get some people over here who are willing to write about it. We need to make some more noise about this. It is so important. 8. I am working on getting some people who are willing to write/do regular features over here.
(10) DAN WELLS. Our Words reposted “Dan Wells on Writing Mental Illness”, which originally appeared on SF Signal in 2015.
One in five people in America has a mental illness. One in twenty has a mental illness so serious it inhibits their ability to function. Look around the room you’re in: do you know who they are? Do you know how to help them? Maybe that one in five is you: do you know how to help yourself? The most depressing statistic of all is that no, none of us do. In 2015, Americans with mental illness are more likely to be in prison than in therapy. As a nation and as a culture we are absolutely terrible at recognizing, treating, and coping with mental illness. This needs to change.
(11) JAY LAKE. Our Words has also republished “Jay Lake on Writing With Cancer”, which the late author wrote for Bookworm Blues in 2012.
Cancer is not a disability in the usual sense of that term. It’s not even really a chronic disease, like lupus or MS. Rather, it’s an acute disease which can recur on an overlapping basis until one is cured or killed. Some cancers, such as indolent forms of prostate cancer or lymphoma, can be lived with until one dies of other causes. Other cancers such as pancreatic cancer can move like wildfire, with a patient lifespan measured in weeks or months from diagnosis to death.
My cancer falls somewhere in the mid range between the two. And though I wouldn’t think to claim it as a disability in either the social or legal senses of that term, it has a lot in common with disabilities.
Cancer has affected my writing in two basic ways. First, the disruptions of treatment. Second, the shifts in my own thoughts and inner life as I respond to the distorting presence of the disease in my life.
The treatments are brutal. Surgeries are rough, but they’re fairly time constrained. I’ve had four, a major resection of my sigmoid colon, a minor resection of my left lung, and two major resections of my liver. In each case, I spent three to six days in the hospital, followed by several weeks at home in a fairly serious recovery mode. I was back to writing within a month every time. These days, when I contemplate future surgery (far more likely than not, given the odds of recurrence for my cancer cohort), I budget a month of time lost and all it good.
(12) FIND YOUR OWN INKLINGS. Rachel Motte tells “Why C.S. Lewis Would Want You to Join a Writing Group” at Catholic Stand.
When J.R.R. Tolkien retired from his post at the University of Oxford in 1959, he intended to spend his new-found free time finishing The Silmarillion. Though this book is less well-known than his Lord of the Rings, Tolkien considered it his real work—the work he’d spent decades trying to get back to.
One can easily imagine the newly retired professor, still in his tweeds, bent over his desk, glad to at last avoid the professional obligations that had long kept him from the literary project he loved best. Instead, writes Inklings scholar Diana Pavlac Glyer, he found that the increased solitude hampered his ability to move forward with his favorite project. Glyer explains,
He quickly became overwhelmed by the task. He found himself easily distracted, and he spent his days writing letters or playing solitaire… Tolkien had become increasingly isolated, and as a result, he found himself unable to write. (Diana Pavlac Glyer, Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, p. 117)
You probably think of writing as a solitary activity—and, to some extent, you are right. “Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world,” notes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
In the best of circumstances, however, that’s not where the story ends. Although we’re right to think of writing as partly a solitary activity, it’s also true that writers—like other artists—benefit from meeting regularly with other creative people.
(13) CRITICAL THEORY. “Russell Letson reviews Judith Merril” at Locus Online.
The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism: Judith Merril’s Nonfiction, Judith Merril (Aqueduct Press 978-1-61976-093-6, $22.00, 348pp, tp) March 2016.
…Her critical work was more practical than theoretical, but nonetheless systematic and precise. She was a commentator who was also a practitioner, an analyst who was also a fan, with a broad-church sensibility that could not disentangle SF from the cultures that surrounded it.
In The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism, editor Ritch Calvin has gathered and condensed thirteen years’ worth of material into a single volume that includes the introductions and ‘‘summation’’ essays from her long-running series of annual ‘‘Best SF’’ anthologies; book reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; and a single long, reflective essay written for the Science Fiction Research Association’s journal Extrapolation. The chronological arrangement allows us to follow Merril as she explores the shape and extent of the modern fantastic, locates particular writers and works in that geography, and develops an aesthetic and historical-social framework for making judgments. (The full texts of all the items are available as an e-book, which is nearly twice as long as the print version. Omitted material consists mainly of individual story introductions from the annual anthologies.) …
(14) LAST YEAR, WHEN WE WERE YOUNG. Matt interviews Andrew J. McKiernan at Smash Dragons.
The title story for your collection is a fascinating tale about survival amidst a strange and very disturbing apocalypse. I’m curious, how did this particular story come about? Where did you draw your inspiration from?
Like pretty much every story I write, it starts with a title. That’s where I thought Last Year, When We Were Young came from. Just a title that popped into my head that I ran with and a story emerged from it. It is always my wife who points out the real life inspirations for my stories, when here I am thinking they’re just stories, fictions. In this case, my father-in-law had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour and the operation to remove it didn’t go too spectacularly for him. At the same time, my own father had a heart attack and I’d just entered my 40s and my eldest son had turned 18. So, the title story is me trying to deal with the fact that we all age, and that it happens so goddamn quickly. We get older, and yet a lot of the time we still feel like we’re kids and teenagers. The first 20 years of our life seem so long and so important and our mind dwells on those times. I’m 45 now, and yet a part of me still feels like I’m 18 and should be out there playing in a band and getting drunk and enjoying myself. Age creeps up on us so quickly. We’re adults before we know it. Mid-life crisis, I guess, the realisation that I had aged and that I really would die one day, and this story was my subconscious way of examining that.
(15) MARK YOUR CALENDAR. George Donnelly will be having a sale a week from today.
Today’s top libertarian fiction authors bring you 99-cent fiction books May 18-20 only. Some are even free. Read on your phone, tablet, browser or kindle
(16) PLANETARIUM PANEL FEATURES CLARKE FINALIST. “Spaceships: Above and Beyond at the Royal Observatory Planetarium”, Greenwich, Thursday, May 26 (18.30-20.30). Click the link for full details and tickets. Here’s the line up:
- Libby Jackson, Former ESA Flight Director now working for the UK Space Agency
- Dr. Adam Baker, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Kingston University
- Dr. Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich
- James Smythe, Science Fiction author – shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016
- The panel discussion will be hosted by Tom Hunter, Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
(17) PANAMA GOLD. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has posted “Every Fan Fiction I Have Started Writing Once I Found out Emma Watson Was Named In The Panama Papers”.
“Mustn’t complain, though,” Harry said after an odd silence. “That’s what our taxes are for, after all.”
“We don’t pay taxes,” Hermione said. “Taxes are for Muggles.” She extinguished her cigarette in the last slice of cake.
“But you’re –” Harry started.
“I used to be a lot of things,” Hermione said decisively. “I have money now instead.”
Harry stopped at every bar on the way home, until he could no longer remember the look that had entered her eyes as she said it.
(18) PIXAR PRAISE. Kristian Williams’s YouTube video “Pixar–What Makes a Story Relatable” explains why Pixar films work — because at their core, they’re great stories.
(19) ADDRESSEE KNOWN. Not everybody Andrew Liptak outs was very far undercover to begin with: “Guess Who? 15 Sci-Fi Authors Who Used Pseudonyms—and Why” at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog.
U.K. Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most famous living science fiction authors, but when she sold her story “Nine Lives” to Playboy, her editors asked her to change her name to U.K. Le Guin, fearing that a female author would make their readers “nervous.” Le Guin remembered it as the only time, “I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer.” She’s never used a pseudonym again, and “Nine Lives” appears under her own name in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
(20) THE NEBULA ON CHAOS HORIZON. Brandon Kempner calls his shot in “2016 Nebula Prediction”.
I’ve spun my creaky model around and around, and here is my prediction for the Nebulas Best Novel category, taking place this weekend:
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season: 22.5%
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy:22%
Naomi Novik, Uprooted: 14.7%
Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings: 13.3%
Lawrence Schoen, Barsk: 10.7%
Charles Gannon, Trial by Fire: 9.5%
Fran Wilde, Updraft: 7.3%Remember, Chaos Horizon is a grand (and perhaps failed!) experiment to see if we can predict the Nebulas and Hugos using publicly available data.
(21) A PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS. Defenestration, for reasons that will become obvious, made sure we didn’t miss this Hugo humor.
Andrew Kaye (known in some circles as AK) is the creator of Ben & Winslow and other questionable comics, many of which can be found in his deviantART gallery and his Tumblr. He’s also the editor-in-chief of this magazine. Duh.
I realize a lot of the folks who read Ben & Winslow might not be familiar with the drama that’s surrounded the Hugos lately–you can find plenty of articles and blogs discussing it in more detail than I can spare here. Basically, unlike other major awards, the Hugos are chosen by science-fiction and fantasy fandom. Last year a subset of that fandom got angry with the growing diversity among the award nominees and the subject matter they wrote about (or in other words, the nominees weren’t all straight white men writing adventure stories). They took advantage of the Hugos’ fan-based voting and hijacked the list of nominees with their own choices. The 2015 Hugo ballot was a shambles–many nominees dropped out, and most Hugo voters chose to vote for “No Award” rather than vote for what actually made it to the ballot.
Well, the same thing has happened this year. The same people are trying to control the award. Trying to destroy the award. And if they’re allowed to continue, they’ll succeed. Needless to say, a lot of people are upset about this. To someone unfamiliar with the award, the whole thing looks like a big joke.
http://www.defenestrationmag.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/04292016-Hugo-Boss.jpg
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Matthew Davis, and Tom Hunter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Was thinking, “What an early Scroll! I haven’t even had dinner yet.” Then I remembered how late I am getting around to fixing dinner tonight.
And indeed, was so discommoded I forgot to invade the space butt…on.
First??
Darn
Jay Lake’s final collection, Last Plane to Heaven, is just wonderful. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes short fiction. Fair warning: the afterword is heartbreaking.
PhilRM: Jay Lake’s final collection, Last Plane to Heaven, is just wonderful. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes short fiction. Fair warning: the afterword is heartbreaking.
I tried reading that after it came out. After about 3 stories, I regretfully decided that it probably wasn’t to my taste.
ETA: It was disappointing to me, because I really liked The Stars Do Not Lie and Our Lady of the Islands.
Checking box before I start to type.
[ticky]
That repost from Jay Lake is just heartbreaking.
“The Teleteddies were hungry.”
“Hungry!”
“So they decided to make Teddy Toast.”
“Teddy Toast!”
“But Bro broke the handle on the Teddy Toast Machine.”
“Handle broke!”
“There was a terrible mess.”
“Oh no, Bro!”
“Bro was sad.”
“Sad!”
“The New New Heinlein tidied up.”
“Yay!”
“New New!”
“Teleteddyland was happy again!.”
“New New Heinlein!”
::The Teleteddies lie down for naptime. Camera pulls out to pan across fields full of giant Gamma Rabbits. The idiot baby Sun smiles over all. It looks a little like Donald Trump.::
END
@Bonnie seeing anything new or republished with Jay as author or co author gives a little kick in my chest, yep
@JJ:I tried reading that after it came out. After about 3 stories, I regretfully decided that it probably wasn’t to my taste.
I’m losing all faith in you, JJ!
(11) JAY LAKE. As it happens, cancer does let you check the box for EEOC purposes in the USA. And truly, even “successful” treatments tend to leave their mark on one.
Paul
It hurts. I used to converse with Jay, having talked to my daughter who is a medic, and because I have been in hospital a lot of times.
It was obvious that he had a vast desire to live, but then people think the same thing about me. I’m terribly sorry that this blinded him in some ways to the probabilities.
As an entirely personal view. I think he had absolutely no idea what an experimental drug could do to him. He died with a profound belief that science could deal with anything; even when the scientists around him told him that this wasn’t true.
RIP Jay
Politico has the beginnings of an alternate-history anthology of this year’s presidential campaign.
::ticky::
The Gannon book in the Nebula nominations is Raising Caine not Trial by Fire.
(5) I COME NOT TO PRAISE THEM.
I’ve been watching The Muppets and it’s actually pretty funny. Some of the characters just don’t seem right, but I really dig Uncle Deadly and Zoot. Sadly the ongoing relationship stuff doesn’t quite work. (Sam the Eagle has a huge crush on Janice? For real?)
But the original Muppet Show definitely had some racy stuff. It was just a bit more on the down-low so the adults could laugh and the kids wouldn’t get it. But Piggy was very sexually aggressive on several occasions…the one I always return to was her trapping Rudolf Nureyev in the bath.
I could watch a whole show with Uncle Deadly and Gloria Estefan the baby penguin.
(2) – That is one epic book cover lol Floating walruses…. everywhere…. trippy stuff @_@ heh heh
Clicky.
Did I miss a scroll?
I suspect that a lot of people have never tried to rewatch the original Muppets Show as adults. Because when I did, I came across a lot of “OMG, I can’t believe they just said/did that and in a kids’ show, too” moments. Because the original Muppets was truly a show that worked on multiple level and appealed to both adults and kids.
Rewatching the show last year, when it was finally rerun on a cable channel over here, I came across such gems as some very rude oral sex and masturbation jokes from Rawlf and Zoot, the saxophone player, Pigs in Space episodes that were obvious commentaries in the treatment of women in SF, including one that was a clear response to The Cold Equations which ended with Miss Piggy spacing Link, Miss Piggy being sexually aggressive not just about Kermit, but about guest stars as well (Rudolph Nureyev obviously, but also Christopher Reeves – with them and Nathan Fillion, it’s clear that the lady had got a good taste in man) and even a Muppet reenaction of the Stonewall Riots featuring the pigs as leatherboys, Gonzo as a more flamboyant gay and Fozzie Bear as the police, all singing the Village People’s “Macho Macho Man”.
Sorry, but the Muppets were always adult and transgressive. As a kid, you just didn’t notice.
Here is the Muppets’ version of “Macho Macho Men” BTW:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWLarBrwHF8&w=420&h=315%5D
And here, just because I can, is the Muppets’ take on the Village People’s “In the Navy”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTwq1_9VH68&w=420&h=315%5D
I’m barely past the forewords of “There Will Be Walrus”, but boy, this looks great. There’s some real Hugo-quality writing and editing there.
(20) THE NEBULAS ON CHAOS HORIZON.
The Barnes & Noble SFF blog also predict The Fifth Season as Nebula winner.
On the other hand, both B&N and Chaos Horizon were wrong last year…
(2) FREE ALLEGED BOOK.
It looks like we have found our new new Felinelein.
2. Had to stop reading. I have a flu headache, and it was making me laugh too hard.
Dan Wells:
Isn’t the definition of a mental illness that it inhibits the ability to function? The one in five seems like a gross exaggeration. What am I missing?
I’m stealing that line…
[ticky]
Hampus Eckerman: Isn’t the definition of a mental illness that it inhibits the ability to function? The one in five seems like a gross exaggeration. What am I missing?
Clinical Depression (as opposed to the blues, or transitory depression) is not at all uncommon. Add to that Anxiety and Panic Disorders, PTSD, OCD, schizophrenia, dysthymia, eating disorders, manic and bipolar disorders. The success rate for those who seek treatment varies widely. Throw in the stigma of mental illness, and you have a whole lot of people for whom treatment might make a big difference, but who are reluctant to seek it.
Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. — 43.8 million, or 18.5% — experiences mental illness in a given year.
Experiencing syndromes of a mental illness is not the same as having a mental illness. One is how you feel a given year. The other is part of you.
I think this again is a cultural difference in how words are used.
@Hampus: The mental health statistics he’s quoting are here.
Some of it may be explained by depression being considered a disease state in the US. Many (most?) doctors here don’t appear to think of depression as a symptom of other problems. As an example, thyroid hormone test results that would get a person put on thyroid supplements in Europe are waved off as within the normal range here and other symptoms ignored. The person with a mildly underactive thyroid is diagnosed with depression and prescribed an SRI. So are many people with mild breathing issues that primarily present as exhaustion.
Hampus Eckerman: Experiencing syndromes of a mental illness is not the same as having a mental illness. One is how you feel a given year. The other is part of you.
Mental illness is mental illness. It is a part of you. Understand that most people do not simply experience “syndromes” for part of one year. The statistics are worded that way because people may experience it for several years, but get better at some point (and perhaps redevelop it several years farther down the road). Other people will not have experienced it, but will at some point develop it. So they have to have a way of trying to quantify it, and they do that by saying “in any given year”.
Trying to check out swedish statistics, but is not as easy as we aren’t using the same terms. This might be one of the cases where I can’t pick up the nuances of the english language.
Maybe but I think there is a fair degree of variation between English speaking countries in terminology as well.
Rail:
That is absolutely NOT my experience. Every time I saw a new doctor for my depression (it hasn’t happened in a while) the FIRST thing they did was a thyroid test, because fixing that is easy.
I missed The Muppets as a cultural *thing*, so I didn’t watch the new series. A friend has just loaned me a DVD of the first original series, and all the discussion of it transgressiveness has made me much more euthused about trying it!
Cool! I know Anna Kreider so I pointed her appearance here out to her.
Today’s Read — Margaret the First, by Danielle Dutton
(not SFF, but SFF related, as the subject of the book wrote one of the earliest SFF novels)
Historical fiction about, and told from the point of view of, Margaret Cavendish, spanning her life from her childhood to (roughly) her appearance as the first woman to attend a meeting at Royal Society of London. It’s well-written, with beautiful prose, but it’s quite short — shorter, I think, than it can be to fully cover its subject.
While it touches on many aspects of Cavendish’s life, it focuses primarily on the intersection of her extreme self-doubt and insecurity about her writing, and her hunger for recognition and self-promotion (which was remarkable for a woman of her era). These are matters that come up *a lot* both in Cavendish’s own writing and in the writing of others about her, so it’s not a poor approach to take, but I felt it gave short shrift to the other parts of her life and work. It didn’t ignore them by any means — it touches on such things as both her genius and her errors, her fashion-defying mode of dress, both the respect her husband had for her work and the inescapable power inequalities in her marriage, and once on the occasional mentions in her writing that she thinks it’s perfectly natural for women to fall passionately in love with other women — but it does little more than touch on them, and I would have liked to have seen them explored in more depth.
8) Sadly, Darwyn Cooke passed away overnight.
Margaret the First is beautiful, but it touches on everything so lightly, I never really felt that it was enough. I’m a bad reader for it, though; I prefer my books long and meaty, where this one is small and delicate, like a bouquet of flowers compared to a tree.
Copy-editing has been applied at industry standards as found in top flight Hugo nominated publishers such as… Baen Books.
Ouch.
My understanding of the Emma Watson thing is that it’s stalker-avoidance, not tax-avoidance. If it were incorporated in the UK, she’d have to make her personal information publicly available.
I have declared the birth of a new (sub?) genre of science fiction today; There Will Be Walrus First Volume V as an exemplar, today on Amazing Stories. (at 11 am est)
I’ve taken the train into Chicago several times, and it is indeed awesome. Did we mention Leckie when the whole Amtrak residency thing was going on? She’d have been a great choice. (I hope I didn’t just miss that she was.)
2) THAT sounds like a helluva deal.
4) I’ma consider watching that.
7) TEddy is on Twitter whining that Women have “taken over” Gencon, which is a wierd way to say that the gender parity now resembles that of the world at large.
8) God Speed, Darwn Cooke. Thanks for the comics. You will be missed.
15) Those are … some covers.
21) Thaddeus Bahls seems like an appropo pen name for Teddy.
@Jim Henley,
Man, you should work for Castalia House.
@alex
Re: “Taking over Gencon”. That goes with the whole perception that if a minority manages 1/3 of the representation and visibility, that’s seen as parity in the eyes of the majority, and parity is seen as overdominance on the minority’s part.
So 52% women? It’s the apocalypse! Everyone with a y chromosome is going to be sent to reeducation camps!
Amusingly, this ALSO reminds me that in Expanded Universe, Heinlein seriously proposes giving the franchise and governmental positions to women and only women, for a good long while. Don’t see many of the Church of Heinlein clamor for THAT.
@alexvdl: Thanks for keeping my Teleteddies script from sinking without a trace. 🙂
Props to @Camestros and Timothy, who must never sleep given that quantity of output. The squirrel-attack advice is surprisingly practical and will come in handy, and I’ll be putting a couple of my rare previous volumes up on eBay (teaser: not all the copies of a certain volume were destroyed upon re-entry, and no, that’s not a pun).
In short, I’d say these are the best parodies since the originals themselves.
We have the DVD sets of the first three seasons of the Muppet Show. (And we really wish Disney would get around to releasing the last two seasons– Season 4 was first promised years ago.) I enjoy them a lot.
I watched an early episode of the show that aired this year, and didn’t like it. My main problem wasn’t that the show had “adult” or “edgy” bits in it– as others have pointed out, things like that were there in the older show too, though usually expressed in a way that kids could ignore. Nor was it that the show’s format was different from the old variety-show format. My main problem was that I didn’t *like* any of the principal characters as they were portrayed. Sure, in the original show all the characters, including the leads, had obvious flaws of various kinds. But I didn’t get the sense that they were all at base petty, mean or selfish. I got from that vibe from the episode I saw, without seeing much basis for them being lovable underneath. (It looked for a while that one character might be, and then they said something really callous at the end of the episode that undermined the character for the sake of a quick laugh.)
I’ve heard better things about the more recent episodes, where it sounds like they tried to make the characters more likable as well as making the show format more like the old one. But I’d lost enough interest by that point that I didn’t go seek the episodes out. It sounds like I wasn’t alone in that.