(1) GENRE RECAPITULATES ONTOLOGY. Damien Walter divides the audience into “The 8 Tribes of Sci-Fi”.
Calling sci-fi a genre in 2016 is about as accurate as calling the United States one nation. In principle it’s true, but in practice things don’t work that way. While crime, romance and thrillers all remain as coherent genres of fiction, it’s been decades since sci-fi could be comfortably understood by any shared generic criteria. What do Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Seas trilogy, the fiction of Silva Moreno Garcia and the erotic sci-fi of Chuck Tingle actually have in common, beyond being nominated for major sci-fi book awards this year?
The answer is they all belong to one of the eight tribes of sci-fi…..
The Weirds Most writers at some point play around with the effects that can be induced by engineering stories with internal inconsistencies, mashing together disparate metaphors, or simply being weird for weirds sake. The weirds take this as an end in itself. With China Mieville as their reigning king they were riding high for a while. However, with newer voices like Molly Tanzer’s Vermillion coming through, the American ‘bizarro fiction’ movement, and with authors including Joe Hill and Josh Mallerman rejuvenating the traditional horror genre, the Weirds are still among the most creatively interesting of the eight tribes.
(2) SILENT THING. According to Digiday, “85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound”.
Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence.
As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers. Take, for instance, feel-good site LittleThings, which is averaging 150 million monthly views on Facebook so far this year. Eighty-five percent of its viewership is occurring without users turning the sound on. Similarly, millennial news site Mic, which is also averaging 150 million monthly Facebook views, said 85 percent of its 30-second views are without sound. PopSugar said its silent video views range between 50 and 80 percent.
(3) YAKKITY CAT. Steve Davidson says an interview with Timothy the Talking Cat will appear on Amazing Stories this Thursday. I’m running neck and neck with Steve in pursuit of interviews with the hottest new talents in the field — he won this round!
(4) JENCEVICE OBIT. SF Site News carries word that Chicago conrunner and club fan Mike Jencevice died May 16.
Chicago fan Mike Jencevice (b.1955) died on May 16. Jencevice entered fandom in 1978, publishing the fanzine Trilevel and serving as the long-time president of Queen to Queen’s Three, a media fan club. He ran the dealers room at Windycon for more than 30 years and served on the ISFiC Board for much of that time. He was one of two associate chairs for Chicon 2000.
(5) VR. BBC News explores “How will virtual reality change our lives?”
Four experts, including Mark Bolas – former tutor of Palmer Luckey, who recently hand-delivered the first VR handset made by his company Oculus Rift – talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the future of VR.
Mark Bolas: Out of the lab
Mark Bolas is a professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts and a researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies. He has been working in virtual reality since 1988.
VR hits on so many levels. It’s a real out-of-body experience, and yet completely grounded in your body. …
To find a way to make it low cost and still retain that field of view, we harnessed the power of mobile phones – the screens, tracking and processing – and we figured out a lens design that was extremely inexpensive.
It’s been really fun playing all these years, but there’s something more important now, which is making it a space that allows us to harness our emotions, our desire to connect with people.
I’m worried by our current computer interfaces. I watch people walking around like zombies with cell phones in their hands, and I have to manoeuvre a mouse to fill out little boxes on web forms in a horribly frustrating way. I think VR will allow us to transcend this.
I don’t worry so much about where VR is going, I worry about where we currently are.
(6) SHEER WEIR. By the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach: “Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian,’ aims his pen at the moon”
Lots of people who are interested in going to Mars have been gathering this week at George Washington University for the annual Humans to Mars Summit, and the star attraction this morning was Andy Weir. He’s the author of the novel “The Martian,” which has sold 3 million copies, been translated into something like 45 languages and served as the basis of the blockbuster movie by the same name, directed by the legendary Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. So, yes, that book did well — remarkably so given that he originally published it in chapters on his website and later as an electronic book that could be downloaded for free.
Weir, whom I interviewed on stage in the summit’s opening session (you can probably find the video here), was scheduled to pop by The Post for today’s “Transformers” event and then visit Capitol Hill to testify before the House subcommittee on space. Busy day! He said he was going to talk about how an interplanetary spacecraft, such as one going from Earth to Mars, can be designed to spin to create artificial gravity. That’s a potential way to moderate the severe physical effects of weightlessness on the human body. Without artificial gravity, the first astronauts on Mars would likely spend many days just trying to recover from all those months in zero-g conditions.
But he’s also working on another novel, this one about a city on the Earth’s moon that features a female protagonist who is something of a criminal but still lovable, according to Weir.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born May 18, 1931 — Mad magazine cartoonist Don Martin
- Born May 18, 1930 — Fred Saberhagen
(8) THE REAL-LIFE GRINGOTT’S. The BBC tells where the gold is kept.
The largest by far lies in the Bank of England. It holds three-quarters of the gold in London, or 5,134 tonnes. Most of the gold is stored as standard bars weighing 400 troy ounces (12.4 kg or 438.9 ounces) – there are about 500,000 of them, each worth in the region of £350,000.
But the official reserves of the UK Treasury account for less than a tenth of this.
“Just 310 tonnes of the gold in the Bank of England is from the UK Treasury, the rest is mostly commercial,” says Adrian Ash of BullionVault.com.
The gold is held in a system of eight vaults over two floors under Threadneedle Street in the City. This is to spread the weight and prevent the vaults from sinking into the London clay beneath the bank.
“So no maze of caves bored into rock,” says Chip Hitchcock, sounding a little disappointed.
(9) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART ONE. Steven Saus relays “Reports of Harassment at MarCon 2016, including ‘The Chainmail Guy’ who harassed people at CONTEXT” at Ideatrash. (To refresh your memory, see File 770’s post about Context.)
Sadly, I’m hearing from friends who attended MarCon this year that the stance about Chainmail Guy’s harassment – the one that some members of the board decided to destroy the con over rather than censure a buddy who was harassing people – was completely justified.
According to multiple accounts, he was very visible in the main corridor, apparently with a table displaying some chain mail. (Which is exactly the setup that spawned problems at Context.) Sure, he wasn’t a volunteer, but had a very prominent bit of real estate. And, much like the complaints at Context, kept inserting himself into private conversations, just as he did before.
Unlike Context, he was in the main hall – and therefore much harder to avoid.
As one person put it, “if you heard about the stuff about Context, you’d get the very clear opinion that MarCon was okay with all that.”
Sadly, this might just be the case.
There were reports (and these were forwarded to the con chair) of another guy suggesting he should “frisk” a young woman after earlier reaching out to touch her without consent.
A corset vendor walked the line between creepy and harassment by insisting their corset fit perfectly, and any impression otherwise was due to the person’s “body issues”. He told another person that “he needed to see me try on one of the corsets and not in a friendly way…in front of my kids.”
And this is just what’s managed to cross my awareness.
(10) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART TWO. Saus also published “A (Good) Response From One of the Security Team From MarCon about Harassment”. It is signed by JP Withers.
As a fan I really hate it when our community is damaged by harassing behavior. Inclusion is kind of the point of our thing to me.
Our security and operations folks need help making our space better for everyone, and that help is reporting stuff when it happens. I know there can be a lot of reasons someone might not report behavior, but if one of those reasons is a feeling we won’t take it seriously I can tell you that isn’t the case for anyone on my team….
(11) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART THREE. Ferrett Steinmetz, immediately after Marcon, published these generalized comments calling into question how some apply the principle that “A Person Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty By Law”.
…And all the complexity comes to a boil when we’re discussing how to handle missing stairs in a community – potentially dangerous people who have gossip swirling about them, but no definitive proof. (Because most consent violators are smart enough not to do terrible stuff in public with witnesses.) And what do you do to keep your parties free of dangerous players when the only proof you have is the equivalent of “She said Phil didn’t pay her back”? Do you ban people on someone’s word?
Maybe you think the court’s standards are worthy for any institution, which is a noble goal. There is a strong case to be made for “I will hold the people who would spread rumors to the highest of standards,” because yeah, the ugly truth is that there are corrupt cops and there are people who’ll trash folks they don’t like. Having standards for evidence is good, and though there’s no single True goal, having high standards when the penalty is “Banning someone from a party” is not necessarily a bad thing.
But stop extending that to the idiotic argument of “If something someone says has not been proven in a court of law, it is automatically untrue.” No. If that happens, you are adopting the court’s standard of, “We would rather have someone guilty attending our parties than risk ejecting an innocent person.”…
(12) MARCON HARASSMENT, PART FOUR. Reddit ran its own recap of the latest episode, the essence of which is —
But now a different Ohio convention, MarCon, has had a problem with a harasser… and it’s the SAME GUY:
It’s the same stuff different day syndrome at its worst. There is no way for cons in general to keep these people out since conventions don’t have any kind of shared governance… so even when “missing stairs” are dealt with at one con, they aren’t at another. 🙁
(13) UNPAID MINIONS. The Seattlish has screencaps of the legal papers — “Someone Is Suing Emerald City Comicon for Not paying Volunteers”.
A class action lawsuit has been filed by a former Emerald City Comicon volunteer—the organization calls them “minions”—alleging that the convention violates labor laws by treating their volunteers like employees, but failing to pay them.
The suit, filed in King County Superior Court on May 16 by plaintiff Jerry Brooks and naming ECCC and three members of the Demonakos family as defendants, alleges that as many as 250 people may be among the class.
According to the suit, the volunteers are expected to work essentially as paid workers would—performing functions necessary to the operation of the convention—but aren’t required to be paid for their labor or their overtime due to their volunteer status.
This suit could be hard to prove; the volunteers not only willingly enter into an agreement stating that they’ll work for free, but the culture of the convention fosters a competitiveness for the volunteer positions. A lot of people really like volunteering. In a blog post from 2013, a minion wrote that it “isn’t the kind of thing you do for money.”
(14) STORYBUNDLE. The Story Collection StoryBundle is available for another 15 days. Readers can choose to donate part of each purchase to SFWA. Curator Lisa Mason tells how the bundle was assembled here.
As always at StoryBundle, you the reader name your price—whatever you feel the books are worth. You may designate a portion of the proceeds to go to a charity. For the Story Collection StoryBundle, that’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (“SFWA”). SFWA champions writers’ rights, sponsors the Nebula Award for excellence in science fiction, and promotes numerous literacy groups.
The initial titles in the Story Collection StoryBundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:
- The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams. Two stories in this collection won the Nebula Award.
- Collected Stories by Lewis Shiner. This extensive and multi-genre collection was prepared as an ebook for StoryBundle.
- Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand.
Those who pay more than the bonus price of $12 get all three regular titles, plus five more:
- Women Up to No Good by Pat Murphy. Two stories in the collection were nominated for the Nebula Award.
- Strange Ladies: 7 Stories by Lisa Mason Six Stories by Kathe Koja. The collection was created by the author for StoryBundle.
- What I Didn’t See: Stories by Karen Fowler. The collection won the World Fantasy Award and the title story won the Nebula.
- Wild Things by C.C. Finlay. The collection was prepared as an ebook for StoryBundle and has a brand-new Afterword. Finlay is the editor of F&SF.
(15) NEBULA CONFERENCE. SFWA President Cat Rambo has vivid memories of “Nebula Conference 2016, Chicago”.
For me, so much of the weekend was a reaffirmation of joy in our genre and the worlds that we love, worlds created by some of the best and brightest. Opportunity to talk with so many talented, kind, and outstanding members of the industry. A chance to stand by one of my heroes, someone whose work I’ve read most of my life and who has been one of my role models, and see her body of work recognized. A chance to be in a place where people treated each other with respect as peers and took pride in each other’s accomplishments, where there weren’t the sort of pettinesses that belong on the playground rather than among fellow professionals. A chance to tell people some of what SFWA’s been working hard at in the past year, and some of what’s coming down the pike.
And Liz Argall is still buzzing about Henry Lien’s Radio SFWA.
(16) CONVERT MADE. Say what you like about Seveneves, Bill Gates wrote on his website that it’s got him back reading sf.
“What Bill Gates says: “I hadn’t read any science fiction for a decade when a friend recommended this novel. I’m glad she did. The plot gets going in the first sentence, when the moon blows up. People figure out that in two years a cataclysmic meteor shower will wipe out all life on Earth, so the world unites on a plan to keep humanity going by launching as many spacecraft as possible into orbit.
“You might lose patience with all the information you’ll get about space flight—Stephenson, who lives in Seattle, has clearly done his research—but I loved the technical details. Seveneves inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit.””
(17) STAY INVESTED IN THE FUTURE. Helen Sharman speaks out — “First UK Astronaut calls for more Brits in space”.
Britain’s first astronaut has said the UK risks becoming a “backward nation” if the government does not pay to send more people into space.
Helen Sharman believes the country would lose many of the benefits of Tim Peake’s mission if a commitment to more flights is not made very soon.
Ms Sharman said that this was the UK’s “last chance” to be involved “in the future of the human race”.
She spoke to BBC News on the eve of the 25th anniversary of her spaceflight.
The government has effectively paid for one spaceflight, Tim Peake’s, according to Ms Sharman. After he returns to Earth in June, it is unlikely there will be more UK astronauts in space unless the nation makes a further commitment of funds at a ministerial meeting of European Space Agency (Esa) member states later this year.
(18) MR. ROBOT SEASON 2 TRAILER. The Hollywood Reporter summarized the preview video.
“This is what revolution looks like,” the text of the trailer reads. “Control is an illusion.”
Although they were successful in their hack, fsociety will face more obstacles in season two. “They need to know we haven’t given up,” Darlene (Carly Chaiken) says. “That we meant what we said about changing the world.”
However, the most worrisome image in the clip is Mr. Robot himself (Slater) as he puts a gun to Elliot’s head. “Our revolution needs a leader,” he tells Elliot.
(19) NEWS FOR HITCHHIKERS. “Towel Day” is coming on May 25, and Nerdist reports a candy store is readying its supply of babelfish.
The fandom of Douglas Adams and his writing is intense, to say the least, and has even resulted in a holiday to honor the late author. Every May 25th, fans around the world celebrate “Towel Day” which itself is a reference to what Adams thought to be the most important item you could have with you through your galactic travels.
As a way of showing their love of everything Hitchhiker’s, a candy shop in Florida that specializes in nerdy confections decided to celebrate by creating some Babel fish of their very own. Using an antique 19th-century drop candy roller, the folks at Public Displays Of Confection rolled out a serendipitous 42 bags of these fish shaped candies just in time for Towel Day, and we can only assume that they went with piña colada flavor because it’s just too hard to perfect the essence of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, Cat Rambo, Chip Hitchcock, Steve Davidson, Tracy Benton, Darren Garrison, Steven Saus, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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I scrolled all the way down before reading to find out who came up with this title. Wow, Will R. Brilliant!
a tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a
Timin’!
Thirfth!
Fourst!
Fifth!
Second Fifth!
Third fifth?
Still wanting a video of “Radio SFWA” with good audio. Also an ID of all the dancers.
Kudos to Will R. for the Scroll title.
(1) GENRE RECAPITULATES ONTOLOGY.
Artificial sub-boundaries within SF are, uh, artificial.
(3) YAKKITY CAT.
What is the secret to securing an interview with a Talking Cat?
Tim-ing…
(16) CONVERT MADE.
Seveneves is flawed but I liked it enough to put in my Hugo ballot.
Also: I am slow of mind. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I realised the title is a palindrome.
Yeah, I had a complicated relationship with Seveneves; and think that I mostly hate it – – and yet I too found myself (somewhat reluctantly…) putting it on my Hugo ballot – I think it was my way of saying “More like this, please.”
I was reading this today http://www.kingborough.tas.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/Keeping%20Cats%20Contained_FAQs.pdf
1) Oh yeah. There’s no way you can divide the different types of horror or romance. There’s certainly not paranormal romance, or Christian romance, or bodice ripper or what not. That’d be ridiculous.
5) I don’t really care about VR. I do want me some Augmented Reality though. Give me glasses that can give me data about the things I look at please.
::godstalk::
[ticky]
Wow. Picked up Seveneves and The Aeronaut’s Windlass from the library today, and both the bloody things are two inches thick.
At that rate, I’m not going to slog through all 500+ pages if they don’t grab me, the way I did with The Dark Forest. Life’s too short. I’ll give them 100 pages or so, and that’s it.
(14) I picked up that Story Bundle, partly because of the collection by C.C. Finlay. I really like what he’s done with Fantasy & Science Fiction, and one of my longlisted stories was his “Time Bomb Time.”
(1) Obviously poor Damian knows even less about romance and mystery than he does about SFF. Because 50 Shades of Crap is exactly the same as Amish romance. And hard-boiled high-violence serial killer mystery is exactly the same as cozy with one dead body and a dog-owning cupcake baking sleuth. Bless his heart.
(2) For me, 99% of all video everywhere is watched without sound.
(3) I await it anxiously! I’m sure Timothy will give us a lot to talk about.
(5) [<– VR 5? Who else remembers that?] It will make me barf more, that's for sure. They still don't have a wide enough FOV and quick enough processing.
(7) KER-SHPOINK!
(9-12) Why are they not naming this guy, so future cons can avoid him?
lurkertype: (9-12) Why are they not naming this guy, so future cons can avoid him?
He has been named (originally it was his wife who made his name common knowledge).
Despite his apology, he clearly thinks that his behavior is fine, given that he’s done it again.
The question is how many cons will be willing to do pre-emptive banning — no doubt a lot fewer than I’d like. 😐
(1) But, but, but…..I loved Cronin’s “The Passage”. I can’ wait for the final installment of the trilogy to come out this summer.
And, yes, those artificial boundaries are filled with artificial-ness.
Regards,
Dann
Re #1
I talked with Damien in DM regarding his tribes, and that I thought he missed at least one. So he may amend and update the post. Granted, as pointed out above, that any such divisions are in the end artificial, there are large tracts of SFF readers he left out even with his set.
As a sketch of subgenres there is a sense to it but I don’t see it makes much sense as groupings of fans/readers – but I assume he meant it light heartedly.
(1) Damien Walter shows his ignorance of genres….as other filers have pointed out!
While crime, romance and thrillers all remain as coherent genres of fiction. . .
My first response is citation needed, i.e. proof of this genre coherency.
My second is LOL! I don’t know about crime and thrillers, but I can say that there’s a major split in the mystery genre between “cozy” and “hard-boiled,” one I’ve read about, and I bet there are other splits I don’t know about (I’m firmly in the COZY camp myself), and I would consider police procedurals to be ‘mystery’ novels, but maybe that’s what ‘crime’ is? . And romance: ahahahahahahahahahahahahah! Oh, yeah, lots of debates amongst the SUB-genres (could he handle that complicated a term).
As I tell my students, writers gonna write what they want, and that often includes lots of hybridizing, mixing, subverting, and playing around with “genre” conventions (which are identified AFTER the literature exists), and critics are going to trail behind, huffing and puffing and trying to keep up (and maybe some readers are as well–but a lot of people I know who read for pleasure don’t care about anything but the most generic of categories which is how the bookstores tend to sell, i.e. big umbrella categories).
I was surprised to see how fast “paranormal romance” popped up as a separate shelf section/category in the bigger bookstores.
(7) KER-SHPOINK!
Sproing, fwapppp!
(7) Fagroon! Fwoosh! Klomp! (link to alphabetical listing of all Don Martin sound effects)
(1) There are eight kinds of people in the world: (i) those who divide people into eight groups; (ii) those who divide people into twelve groups; (iii) those who divide people into four groups; (iv) those who divide people into other numbers of groups; (v) those who notify the authorities when they see their fellow passengers doing algebra; (vi) those who have a problem with divisiveness and prefer to multiply, add or subtract; (vii) those who aren’t hungry right now but will grab a bite later; and (viii) the rest of us.
Mike Jencevice will be missed here in Chicago.
(16) Seveneves was the toughest choice I’ve had to make in making my Hugo nominations. Were the first two sections good enough to warrant inclusion, or was the last third annoying enough to leave it off? I love Stephenson, and there was a lot to like in the novel, but…
(17) Did anyone else think of Warren Ellis’ and Chris Weston’s Ministry of Space when reading this article?
1) Aww, poor Damien has once again mixed a few nuggets of truth with a lot of stuff that’s simply not correct. Also he seems to have subgenres, styles/modes of writing and reader/critic/fan fractions all mixed up. Also “Ugh, sex cooties here” is neither a tribe nor a subgenre. Besides, E.L. James does not write vampire fiction or indeed any SFF at all, though she was inspired by Twilight. And there is a world of difference between Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris as well as between either of these ladies and Chuck Tingle.
That said, I do believe that there are different fractions in the SFF world, which want different things out of the genre, though my own classifications don’t match Damien Walter’s.
And of course, as lurkertype pointed out, Damien Walter is completely mistaken that other genres don’t have their fractions and schisms.
(19) British people shouldn’t go into space – utterly the wrong genre for them (unless they get there via a madcap inventor).
Clicky.
Is a madman with blue box close enough?
One cannot fail the tickybox. One can only be failed by the tickybox.
(1) I feel like in Damien Walter I have finally found something to agree about with the Puppies (aside from certain classic SF authors). People have already brought up his obvious blind spots re other genres, which call to mind fancy-pants literary types poo-pooing SFF (anyone remember the recent articles in The Guardian(?) about Pterry?). But then he just can’t help but make petty jabs at MilSF. He’s proving himself to be a boring provocateur.
This was a particularly great Pixel Scroll, Mike!
(1) GENRE RECAPITULATES ONTOLOGY.
Other people ably dealt with the fact that all this means is that Damien Walter doesn’t read crime, romance and thrillers, but I already copied the text for the blockquote.
(5) VR.
So, a) uh, sure, dude; b) “this” is singular.
(6) SHEER WEIR.
How big and how slow does Weir want to make his spaceship’s hub to mitigate the problems of the centrifugal-force gradient and the Coriolis effect? And does he want to test the impact on the human body of long-term exposure to low-grade Coriolis effects before launching his Mars mission?
(8) THE REAL LIFE GRINGOTT’S.
This makes me appreciate once again that Goldfinger had one of the very few non-insane villain schemes in the Bond oeuvre.
(17) STAY INVESTED IN THE FUTURE.
Effing spare me.
And that was my “last chance” to be involved “in the future of the box ticking.”
This makes me appreciate once again that Goldfinger had one of the very few non-insane villain schemes in the Bond oeuvre.
This is one of the few cases where the movie was better than the book. In the book, Goldfinger’s plan actually was to steal all of the gold, by putting it onto a train.
@Aaron: Right! Thanks, I read the book but didn’t remember it in detail. (I don’t find most of Fleming’s novels particularly memorable. Casino Royale and some of the short stories are all that really stick with me.)
@Jim: The thing I remember most from the books was that for several of them, Bond used a .22 Beretta, which is a tiny gun that weighs almost nothing, and went to the trouble of lightening it even more by giving it a skeleton grip.
Also madcap inventors of pop-culture count because of Bowie 🙂
I feel like I should make a joke about spin doctors but I can’t think of one. I’ll leave the punchline there for somebody else.
Dinner was delayed slightly because I was reading the last few pages of “Too Like the Lightning” while snapping beans.
Wow, what a complicated book. This is SF you have to keep your brain on for. Written in a 18th-century style including digressions, talking to the reader, and Homeric similes, it is actively in dialogue with the Enlightment: Voltaire and Diderot, Madame de Pompadour and De Sade. It’s a novel of ideas, plot, and world-building, past and future.
I can only love a book when the author calls it part of “the path which flows from Gilgamesh and Homer to the stars.” That’s it, that’s why I love SFF.
I’ve left more detailed comments on the spoiler thread at Making Light.
Not sure if this counts as a news item or a plug or what, but people might like to know about this planned project, a comic-book biography of Philip K. Dick. The author, Zak Sally, is soliciting monthly support on Patreon – donors can get various rewards as well as an early look at pages as he finishes them – but you can also see some early process stuff there without donating. Sally is a non-prolific but really interesting cartoonist who also runs the micro-press La Mano, and was formerly best known for playing bass in Low. I expect that this book will be idiosyncratic, thoroughly researched, and beautifully drawn.
WEIR: “…to testify before the House subcommittee on space … to talk about how an interplanetary spacecraft, such as one going from Earth to Mars, can be designed to spin to create artificial gravity”
I’m all in favor of informative lectures to Congress, but am I the only one who thinks this sounds a little odd? I mean, I wouldn’t imagine that the House Subcommittee on Space would normally have anything to do with spacecraft design… or if they did, that they would be totally ignorant of a very well-established concept that was vividly illustrated in one of the most famous science fiction movies ever. It seems just one step beyond giving the subcommittee a lecture on how a mission to Mars would probably require rocket engines and spacesuits. I don’t know, maybe there is more to Weir’s talk than that description, but unless he’s going to provide detailed engineering diagrams it sounds like this would be an extremely short talk…
@Doctor Science
I may have to stalk that spoiler thread, since I’m currently torn on whether to read “Too Like the Lightning” or not. The blurb and the narrative voice drew me in, but when I read the excerpt at Tor.com I found myself wanting more Mycroft and less sensesayer dude. Plus, several reviewers seem convinced that the future world depicted is a utopia of sorts, when it strikes me as anything but.
The standard for excluding harassers shouldn’t be the criminal standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”, but the civil standard of “on the balance of probabilities”. Numerous repeated reports of harassment, banninations from other conventions, etc, may not guarantee that a con would be better off without someone, but it does make it probable that the con would be better off.
(But then, I think VD and any publishing house he runs should be ineligible for the Hugo. Sometimes you just have to screw your courage to the sticking place and kick someone in the arse.)
Eli – given how congress seems to work, I’d bet he’s being used to drum up interest from a group of politicians who may or may not even believe in space, but could totally throw a few billion dollars at it out of excitement about meeting a cool celeb.
Doctor Science on May 18, 2016 at 9:11 pm said:
Recently covered by Language Log, of all places. Language Log, in addition to giving the world the “eggcorn” and “crash blossoms“, has been a major proponent of singular “they” for many years. Prof. Liberman, who posted the article about Too Like the Lightning, is one of the world’s greatest experts in computational linguistics, and one of the people I hope to become when I grow up. 🙂
(Prof. Liberman seemed to like the book, but some of the linguists and occasional non-linguists who commented in response had more mixed opinions.)
kathodus – for a moment I thought you meant the politicians don’t believe that outer space exists. Which is disturbingly plausible, actually.
@Kate – That was my point, actually. I was thinking of various members of science-oriented committees who don’t believe in eg evolution.
I think I’m a little too full of snark tonight. Some of the Hugos-related posts I’ve been reading are stimulating the wrong parts of my brain.
@kathodus, that’s a good point (the celebrity promoter angle, I mean). It hadn’t occurred to me that it didn’t necessarily matter what Weir was going to talk about.
Charon D. wrote: “(1) There are eight kinds of people in the world: (i) those who divide people into eight groups; (ii) those who divide people into twelve groups; (iii) those who divide people into four groups; (iv) those who divide people into other numbers of groups; (v) those who notify the authorities when they see their fellow passengers doing algebra; (vi) those who have a problem with divisiveness and prefer to multiply, add or subtract; (vii) those who aren’t hungry right now but will grab a bite later; and (viii) the rest of us.”
Regarding (vii): How many ways do they divide the check?
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Doctor Science wrote: “Dinner was delayed slightly because I was reading the last few pages of “Too Like the Lightning” while snapping beans.”
Was this an alternating method (turn page, snap beans, turn page, snap beans) or have you developed a technique for one-handed bean-snapping? (Since the shoulder surgery scheduled for July 21st will have me in a sling for a month or so, any one-armed kitchen techniques and hacks would be useful.) (I picked up some methods after the first shoulder surgery in 2012, but more are always welcome.)
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Earlier today I came across a claim that 1996’s AMARYLLIS by Jayne Castle (aka Jayne Ann Krentz aka Amanda Quick) was the first “paranormal romance”. That’s probably a silly claim, with many earlier books that could be so classified, but it might have been the first to have the “paranormal romance” label put on it as part of its marketing, instead of just being a romance that happened to have paranormal elements. I’d call that the first (maybe) example of “paranormal romance” branding, rather than the first paranormal romance.
@Aaron: In the book, Goldfinger’s plan actually was to steal all of the gold
I’ve read Goldfinger and the only thing I can remember about it is that the golfing scene was, if possible, even longer than it was in the movie. Fleming seemed pretty determined to create a fully believable fictional game of golf and give you the full experience of being there all… the… way… through… it. However, since the extent of my understanding of golf is that there’s a ball and you hit it with a thing, it was a very strange effect for me– as if Bond and Goldfinger were acting out their rivalry within some alien dream world full of meaningless actions.
Eli wrote: “However, since the extent of my understanding of golf is that there’s a ball and you hit it with a thing, it was a very strange effect for me– as if Bond and Goldfinger were acting out their rivalry within some alien dream world full of meaningless actions.”
Since I’ve actually ended up working for a company that makes golf equipment, it would be impolitic to overly agree with the last half of your statement. (The company is actually very good to work for, and treats its employees well.) But “there’s a ball and you hit it with a thing” pretty much describes the basics of the game.
Though, working where I do, I’ve found a tremendous amount of engineering and math and prototyping goes into trying to squeeze the last, tiniest bit of control and accuracy out of the equipment. Which is then given into the hands of human beings, blowing the hell out of all that engineering and scattering handfuls of n‘s and Xs and WTFs into all those math equations.
I’ve only actually tried to play golf once in my life. I sucked so badly at it the other players took the club away from me and wouldn’t let me move on to the second hole. I believe the words “public menace” were said.