(1) YOUNG AGAIN. James Davis Nicoll will be doing a Phase II of Young People Read Old SFF and asks — What short works published before 1980 would File 770 readers recommend?
(2) POTTERPOLOGY DAY. Following her tradition of apologizing for killing off a character on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, J.K. Rowling tweeted today —
OK, here it is. Please don't start flame wars over it, but this year I'd like to apologise for killing (whispers)… Snape. *runs for cover*
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 2, 2017
And as Katherine Trendacosta astutely observed at io9:
See? She knows she’s stirring shit up and she does it anyway.
For the uninitiated, Severus Snape is the third rail of Harry Potter fandom. One side has the completely valid argument that Snape was, despite happening to be on the same side as the heroes, horribly abusive to his students and, whatever Rowling’s intent, less “in love with” Lily Evans than a stalker with “nice guy” syndrome. The other side says that his very obvious flaws make him an interesting and nuanced character, and that, regardless of everything else, he died a hero. Plus, being played by Alan Rickman in the movies made Snape a lot more approachable than he is on the page.
(3) FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. May 6 is Free Comic Book Day when participating comic book shops give away special sample comics free to anyone who comes into their shops. There are a lot of different issues involved – see the catalog.
(4) BEAGLE SUIT. Peter S. Beagle isn’t as broke as people are making him out to be says Snopes’ David Emery in “The Trials of ‘Last Unicorn’ Author Peter S. Beagle”.
Contrary to Internet rumor, the beloved science fiction and fantasy author Peter S. Beagle (perhaps best known for his classic 1968 novel The Last Unicorn) is neither destitute nor teetering on the brink of starvation.
A cry for immediate financial assistance went up shortly after the writer’s 78th birthday on 20 April 2017, in the form of tweets describing Beagle’s circumstances as “dire”:
https://twitter.com/barrydeutsch/status/855603906440814592
Several posts repeated the claim that Beagle, who has been embroiled in a costly legal battle with his former manager since 2015, was having difficulty even meeting basic household expenses such as grocery bills. However, we spoke to Beagle’s lawyer, Kathleen A. Hunt of El Cerrito, California, who told us that her client’s money woes, albeit chronic, are not as acute as they have been portrayed:
It’s true that he doesn’t have lots of money, but it’s not true that his living situation is dire. Peter does need the help and support of his friends and fans, but it is not the case that he’s in danger of being on the street.
We also spoke with Beagle himself, who said he considers himself a lot better off than the average writer:
It’s always dicey, but anybody who makes a living as a writer learns to cope with lean times. Compared to so many other people, I’m fortunate.
The impromptu fund drive nevertheless resulted in a welcome infusion of cash, not to mention an outpouring of love and support from Beagle’s many online fans. “The response was pretty phenomenal,” Hunt said.
The writer’s ongoing money woes are due in part to court costs from a 2015 lawsuit he filed against Connor Cochran, owner of Conlan Press, who had managed the author’s creative and business affairs for fourteen years…
Cochran filed a counterclaim denying the allegations, and posted a series of statements on his web site alleging that Beagle was being unduly influenced by individuals close to him who seek personal gain from the suit…
At present, Beagle says he feels fine and endeavors to write every day (with varying levels of success, he admits), focused mainly on a novel he envisions as a semi-sequel to Two Hearts, which itself he describes as “kind of a sequel to The Last Unicorn.” He will appear at BayCon, the annual San Francisco Bay Area science fiction convention, in May.
The lawsuit is set to go to trial in January 2018.
(5) RHETORICAL VIOLENCE. In The Guardian, Jessa Crispin challenges a popular narrative: “The Handmaid’s Tale is just like Trump’s America? Not so fast”.
…If the television show based on the Margaret Atwood dystopia feels like propaganda, with its depiction of women raped, mutilated, and forced into shapeless cloaks and bonnets in the new American theocracy named Gilead, then it shouldn’t be a surprise viewers are responding to it as such.
There are dozens of thinkpieces claiming this show is all too real and relevant; Atwood herself called it “a documentary” of Trump’s America. Sarah Jones at The New Republic went so far as to compare Gilead to contemporary Texas and Indiana. Women are in peril. We must do something.
If this propaganda is not being used to sell us a war, we should be interested in what it is selling us instead. That so many women are willing to compare their own political situation living under a democratically elected president with no overwhelming religious ideology (or any other kind, for that matter, except for maybe the ideology of greed and chaos), with the characters’ position as sexual slaves and baby incubators for the ruling class, shows that it is always satisfying to position yourself as the oppressed bravely struggling against oppression.
The text and the thinkpieces make it clear who our enemies are: conservatives and Christians. (It shouldn’t be a surprise The New Republic piece was headlined “The Handmaid’s Tale is a Warning to Conservative Women.”)…
(6) IN JEOPARDY! Tom Galloway reports:
On Monday’s Jeopardy! episode, the defending champion Alan Lin (“a software engineer from Santa Barbara, CA”) was asked by Alex Trebek about his writing. Lin replied that he writes SF short stories, but hasn’t sold one yet. But last summer he went to this writing workshop…. Checking the Clarion site, he’s listed as an alumnus. He’s doing well; as of the end of Monday’s show, he’s a six-time winner at $123,600 and still going. But on Monday’s show, he was beaten to the buzzer by another player on the clue in the category The Book of Verbs of “‘The Cat Who ____ Through Walls’ by Robert A. Heinlein”
(Jeopardy! will be doing an uncommon midyear online tryout test at the end of the month (three nights, May 30, 31, June 1) for those others who want to tryout. See Jeopardy.com for details)
(7) SEVEN TIME STOKER LOSER. Scott Edelman has a story:
Saturday night, I was up for my seventh Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, and emcee Jeff Strand took that opportunity to root for me … if you can call it rooting. Here’s what he had to say during his opening comments. Note that since the livestreamed video was so dark Jeff wasn’t even visible, I replaced that video with a photograph of me after I donned a new button once the results were announced in my category.
(8) DICK OBIT. Anne Dick died April 28 after surviving with congestive heart failure for many years. The former wife of Philip K. Dick published a biography about him in 2010, The Search for Philip K. Dick.
Tandy Ford, Anne Dick’s daughter and Philip Dick’s step-daughter, told a member of Facebook’s Philip K. Dick group, “She was still working away on her computer the night before her passing. She was a force of nature and her loss leaves a great void.”
In a 2010 profile by the New York Times’ Scott Timberg Anne Dick said:
“I think he’s what you might call a psychomorph,” Ms. Dick said recently, sitting in the boxy, modernist home she once shared with him. “He was quite different with each person. He had this enormous gift of empathy, and he used it to woo and please and control. I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”
…After the breakup of their marriage, Ms. Dick said she endured seeing herself reflected in several evil-wife characters in his later novels. Yet when he died in 1982, after a series of strokes, “everything changed,” she said.
“You see a person in the round,” she continued. “I started writing this after he died, because I was still so confused by what had happened.”
(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. When screenwriter William Goldman first tried to get The Princess Bride made into a movie in the 1970s, he wanted the relatively unknown actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the role of Fezzik. By the time the film was made in 1987, Schwarzenegger was a too big star. The part instead when to former wrestler Andre the Giant.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- May 2, 1933 — Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland’s Loch Ness date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.” The story of the “monster” (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast.
(11) THEIR STEELY KNIVES. Mark Lawrence explains how his Stabby Award finally arrived after some difficulty, and treats fans to a photo gallery of all the daggers and double-headed axes his work has won:
And finally here they are with my growing collection of pointy literary awards, along with the books responsible. My quest to win the Fluffy Bunny award for Friendliest Fantasy continues in vain.
(12) VIVA MAX. I can’t stay away from “five things” posts any more than a dog can avoid noticing a squirrel. Today Max Florschutz blows the myths away in “Five Things Non-Writers Should Know About Writers and Writing”.
1) Writing is a Lot of Hard Work This is one of the most common misconceptions I hear about writing. That it’s not work. That’s it’t not hard. That it’s not a “real” vocation (Yes, I hear all of these all the time).
This just plain isn’t true. Writing is a dedicated effort that takes hundreds, thousands of hours worth of both practice, planning, and devotion. Unfortunately, most people don’t think of it as something that does, because after all, they can write. They do it all the time! Text messages, letters, Facebook posts … they write all the time. How hard could it be to write a story?
The truth is that it’s very hard to write a story. It requires a very different set of tools to writing a text message, copying down the minutes of a meeting, or writing someone a letter. These things are straightforward and simple because they’re personal. Writing a story, however, is very impersonal. It has to be written from a perspective outside the writer’s own, and convey it’s tale to a vast audience of varying talent, comprehension, and capability. Writers must figure out how to paint a picture in each and every reader’s mind—a challenge considering that all of them will be very different people, and yet the same words the author pens must in each case create the same vision.
(13) AMAZON AUTHOR. Amanda S. Green continues her Mad Genius Club series with a lesson in Amazon marketing — “It’s really a business, pt. 2”.
Today, let’s talk about the Amazon author page and one or two related topics.
First of all, if you have released anything on Amazon and haven’t set up your Amazon author page, do so now. Don’t finish reading this post. Hie thee off to Author Central. You will sign in with the same user name and password that you have set up for your KDP account. Once you have, the first page you encounter is a general information page. Review everything there because there is some interesting information, especially if you haven’t been publishing for long.
(14) SHADOW CLARKE JURY FINISHES. Tomorrow the real Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist will be revealed. Today, the Shadow Clarke Jury issued its collective decision about who belongs on that list.
My final shortlistee is another popular novel among the Sharkes: the reality-bending investigation of light and perception, A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna. While Jonathan approves of its class consciousness in the form of a cynical satire of academia, Maureen is intrigued by the alt-Oxford setting and intricate unfolding of universes, while Nina finds it good for “bust[ing] wide open” the science fiction envelope. The Sharke reviews, so far, have demonstrated just how malleable and diaphanous this novel is.
…Too often in the past, we agreed, Clarke shortlists had tended to feel weighted towards two or at the most three contenders that immediately looked stronger than the others, with the remainder simply making up the numbers. We wanted to avoid that scenario if we could, to present a genuine six-horse race.
And so the discussion proper was soon underway. The first two slots were filled very quickly – indeed, I think we all came to the meeting in the knowledge that Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station? were scoring high marks with just about every juror. Paul Kincaid called The Underground Railroad ‘essential’, and even went so far as to say he would judge this year’s Clarke Award on whether or not the official shortlist included it. Those who read the comments on the Sharke reviews here will know that I am not The Underground Railroad’s strongest advocate myself – and if the book makes it through to the official shortlist I will do my best to write in greater detail about why that is – but as I said to my fellow Sharkes I wasn’t about to step in front of a juggernaut. And as for Central Station, I was only too happy to see this very special book go through, especially since if the Clarke made any sense Tidhar would have been shortlisted twice already in previous years, for Osama and for A Man Lies Dreaming.
With two down and four to go, the question was then asked of each Sharke: of all the novels on your personal shortlist, are there any that you would say, absolutely, should be in the Sharke Six…
(15) THE GHOST BRIGADIER WHO WALKS. So why is the first thing that pops into my mind The Phantom comic strip? It’s not as if John goes around punching people in the jaw. (But if he ever did!)
For everyone asking, yes, that is a Tor ring. And all you have to do to get one is to sign a 10 year, 13 book contact with them. pic.twitter.com/R7abRx4YiT
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 2, 2017
(16) EVERYBODY LOOK WHAT’S GOIN’ DOWN. Galactic Journey gets another letter of comment from 1962 — “[May 02, 1962] A Good Lie (Letter Column #2)” – by a writer who wonders what the heck the U.S. is doing in Indochina.
Anyway, I thought of something I didn’t write about in my first letter to you. (Thanks for sending some back issues of your publication.) I see that you are aware that there is something going on in Indochina that involves the US (March 31, 1961), but now, a year later, yes, it is clear that we as a nation are involved in war, but are just being sort of secretive about it.
(17) SOMETHING FOR MOTHERS’ DAY. Now on eBay, it can be yours for $28,000 – “Bride of Frankenstein Movie Novel Signed by Elsa Lanchester & Forrest J Ackerman”.
First Edition. Signed and inscribed on the half-title by the film’s star, Elsa Lanchester, to Philip J. Riley, the editor of the book ‘The Bride of Frankenstein. Screenplay by William Hurlbut & John L. Balderston. Introduction by Valerie Hobson. Foreword by Forrest J Ackerman’ which reprinted the film’s screenplay. Inscribed: “To Phil, From THE Bride of Frankenstein! Elsa Lanchester. With all my very best wishes.” Additionally signed and inscribed to Riley from Forrest J Ackerman on the front free endpaper: “Phil – Aunt Beeze is fine and here’s The Bride of Frankenstein. What else? Forry, at 59.” Ownership signature dated 1938 on the front pastedown…
(18) MIDNIGHT SEUSS. The Tennessean apprises locals of a chance to see “Dr. Seuss’ secret ‘Midnight Paintings’ at the Factory at Franklin”.
Presented by Ann Jackson Gallery (Roswell, Ga.), the exhibition on view May 5-7 charts the wider reaches of Geisel’s prolific artistic imagination, featuring nearly 100 limited edition reproductions of his work that have been largely unseen by the public. In addition to sketches, illustrations, and political cartoons he created during World War II, the major highlight of the exhibition are the selections from “The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss,” a collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures that Geisel created late at night for his personal enjoyment.
… The paintings and drawings, detached from a narrative, are more formally sophisticated and experimental.
Though they depict familiar Seussian settings populated by flamboyant characters and animals rendered in the same waggish visual vernacular as his storybook illustrations, they are more detailed, diversely colored, and at times more wondrous.
His sculptures, which comprise their own sub-collection of his secret art called, “Unorthodox Taxidermy,” are also remarkable. Using plaster, metal, and taxidermied animal parts, Geisel sculpted what look like the heads of his own outlandish animal creations — a “Goo-Goo-Eyed Tasmanian Wolghast” or “The Carbonic Walrus” — and mounted them on wood like hunting trophies.
[Thanks to Mark-kitteh, Tom Galloway, Cat Eldridge, Scott Edelman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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6) Still regret not going out for tryouts when I lived in SoCal.
And for those who skipped over the Eisner Nominations post, congratulations to Kurt Busiek on being individually nominated for Best Writer, and his Astro City series for Best Continuing Series.
I subscribe to Bookbub for SF, Fantasy & History. It hits better on History for me than anything. I also subscribe to the Baen email alerts.
Any other suggestions on emailed ebook sales alerts?
Dr. Abernethy: Are you confused about why I closed comments on the 4/28 Scroll? It wasn’t because I wanted that toxic exchange renewed here. I have deleted your comment about it, and will do the same for any answers.
(5) RHETORICAL VIOLENCE. That so many women are willing to compare their own political situation living under a democratically elected president with no overwhelming religious ideology (or any other kind, for that matter, except for maybe the ideology of greed and chaos), with the characters’ position as sexual slaves and baby incubators for the ruling class, shows that it is always satisfying to position yourself as the oppressed bravely struggling against oppression.
Or maybe a lot of women are genuinely concerned about how far down this road the U.S. already is in actuality, and are concerned about things getting much worse, as they appear to be doing under the current regime. Maybe a lot of women are already struggling — or completely unable — to get access to the reproductive autonomy which has been completely taken away in the book.
I am extremely unimpressed with this author’s attempt to paint womens’ genuine, well-founded concerns as Chicken Little’s version of “The Sky Is Falling!”. 🙄
5) I’ve been thinking about Heinrich Boll myself lately, though more about the scene in The Lost Honor of Katrina Blum with the line, “Why not the photographer, too?” But the point about Afghanistan is very well-taken. I have a friend who is so anti-war, except against Afghanistan, because women.
6) That man is a True Heinlein Fan! No one remembers that book. He has bad things to say about Libertarian space habitat in it. It’s like Sixth Column, but worse.
8) I hate to hear that. I missed my chances at meeting her. And I kind of wanted to.
(1) [Recs for]
R. A. Lafferty – Polity and Custom of the Camiroi; The Primary Education of the Camiroi; Slow Tuesday Night
@Dr. Abernathy:
I subscribe to Early Bird Books and I’ve found their recommendations to be pretty good for me. YMMV.
I hope this helps.
“shows that it is always satisfying to position yourself as the oppressed bravely struggling against oppression.”
I thought of JJ when I read this. Seems she did also.
1) How short is short? And how classic is classic? I’m partial to Hilbert Schenck’s “Three Days at the End of the World” and “The Battle of Abaco Reef”. I think those are both pre-1981 and I think either would be interesting choices. Both have some bearing on Modern Times but aren’t exactly on point.
Also, this turned up and had an interesting factoid that I’m still pondering:
It’s an interesting letter and very short. Josh Marshall is getting interested in monopolies. He’s not the only one. I say Watch That Space.
Ah, this really brings back memories of the “good old days” of Brian Z. 😀
@JJ & #5
Yeah, I’d think the time to take action against a looming religious patriarchy is BEFORE it consolidates power and implements its agenda. There’s no need to let it reach the point of maximum narrative drama before doing something. Save that for the fiction.
Dr. Abernethy: My email address is on the About page, where it has been for the last 9 years.
@Dr. Abernethy
(sigh) With all due respect, isn’t it time you stopped beating this poor dead horse?
(1) Rec’s for “Young People Read Old SFF”
I don’t know how “short” James wants it, but I really like Vonda McIntyre’s original novella of what later became Dreamsnake, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.”
That so many women are willing to compare their own political situation living under a democratically elected president with no overwhelming religious ideology
This line of Crispin’s is so very disingenuous. Trump may not have much in the way of personal ideology, but he blows whichever way his advisors tell him to, and the advisors he has surrounded himself with include a lot of far right religious figures: Pence, DeVos, Carson, Pruitt, Pompeo, Perry, and others. Further, Trump ran on a lot of promises to the evangelical right – like a promise to eliminate the Johnson Amendment, and a pledge to defund Planned Parenthood.
IT’S SCROLLIN’ TIME!!
Do I have to add another to the Stylish list?
#rhetorical
For your cut & pasting needs:
img[src*=”fbad556dacbc533fe96a9c479ecf077a”] + span::after, /* Dr. Abernethy */
(1) YOUNG AGAIN.
Donald A. Wollheim “Up there” (1942)
Murray Leinster “The Power” (1945)
Fritz Leiber “Gonna Roll the Bones” (1967)
Joanna Russ “When it changed” (1972)
+1 to Daniel Dern’s recommendation of “Slow Tuesday Night”.
(2) I always thought Snape was interesting because he seemed to be the only character in Harry Potter who actually made a conscious decision to choose a side (even if his reasons for doing so were … questionable).
(9) Another role Schwarzenegger was considered for, at one point — Perseus in the original Clash of the Titans. Myself, intending no disrespect, I’m glad they went in a different direction. (And I have trouble imagining him as Fezzik, tbh.)
[godstalk]
(1) Seconding “When It Changed”.
(4) That’s good news all around.
(5) There are legislators telling women they should be “hosts” for fetuses. 10% of the states (very large ones) have exactly one place women can go for safe, legal, abortions. Planned Parenthood — which mostly doesn’t do abortions — is constantly under threat. LGBT and non-Christian people are still treated like crap, and it’s perfectly legal to discriminate against LGBTQ. Was Trump democratically elected? He certainly didn’t win the popular vote. Someone’s disingenuous on purpose.
(14) “The Underground Railroad”? Really?
@JJ
I was equally unimpressed by her dismissal of women’s genuine concerns and became even more unimpressed when she stated that she’d rather read/watch Heinrich Böll, bane of my school days, than Margaret Atwood, one of the bright lights of my university days. Never mind that she cherrypicked a single plot thread and not the main one from Billiard at half past nine.
To be fair to Heinrich Böll and others of the dreaded “German textbook authors”, as I used to call them, I did learn to appreciate their work later, when I had more context, e.g. I only learned to appreciate Siegfried Lenz when a professor of German at the university where I was working at the time read some Lenz stories in a Masurian accent at the modern language department Christmas party and I suddenly got Lenz. But the idiotic German teacher who yelled at me for daring not to know what a potato fire was, even though that custom was entirely unknown where I lived, permanently ruined Böll for me.
@John A. Arkansawyer
Like pretty much every German person my age, I read The Lost Honour of Katarina Blum at highschool. It’s definitely one of the better Bölls. Though I wonder what readers from outside Germany make of it, since it is very much tied to the terrorism panic of the 1970s as well as the total lack of scruples of German tabloid journalism. Okay, so the US has unscrupulous tabloid journalists every bit as nasty as ours, but I still feel it’s a very German novel (well, more like a novella) and probably nigh incomprehensible to younger Germans, let alone non-Germans.
For Young People Read Old SF: “I See You” by Damon Knight, F&SF Nov. 1976
@Aaron – Yes! Pence’s ideology is exactly what Atwood was writing about. And from how that show/book makes me feel, and from the conversations about it that I’ve had, nobody is taking the book as prescriptive, but rather hoping that it will wake normal people up to what is going on around them. “Normal” people. People who thought that it made sense to vote for a fascist-quoting con man who not only had no political experience, but also had an extremely primitive understanding of the US constitution.
That article was ridiculous.
::rage-ticky::
Classic SF
I’m afraid that I might recommend something that they’ve already covered, but here’s some.
The Ugly Chickens by Waldrop (one of my faves)
Nerve by Lester del Rey – original short not expanded novel
The Missing Man by Katherine MacLean (love all her work)
1) Fritz Lieber’s The Girl With The Hungry Eyes (maybe more tied to horror than one might prefer), Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God or The Star, Isak Dinesen’s The Monkey….my brain must be tired, because usually I can reel off titles like it’s nothing and I seem be done.
I would recommend the following pre-1980 short stories that have remained (in my view) evergreen and easily accessible:
“Compounded Interest,” Mack Reynolds (1956)
“Let’s Be Frank,” Brian Aldiss (1957)
“Light of Other Days,” Bob Shaw (1966)
“The World as Will and Wallpaper,” R. A. Lafferty (1973)
“The Shaker Revival,” Gerald Jonas (1970)
“The Purple Fields,” Robert Crane (1953)
“Specialist,” Robert Sheckley (1953)
“shows that it is always satisfying to position yourself as the oppressed bravely struggling against oppression.”
I thought of JJ when I read this. Seems she did also.
Funny, I thought of all those Christians who apparently have to hide in catacombs here in America.
@ Soon Lee
Great suggestions for (1)
(5) perhaps the author should read up on maternal mortality in Texas, a rate now among the highest in the developed world, directly resulting from self-described conservatives and Christians in the state legislature, who shut down Planned Parenthood and most of the state’s abortion clinics (the latter with the side benefit of financially benefitting the then Governor’s family). They are killing women, right now, to satisfy their self-declared social principles and religious beliefs.
I need to archive this thread to go back and read through the story recs.
@Harold – Ha!
Reminds me of a book I finished a few months back – The Myth of Christian Persecution, by Candida Moss. Not the anti-Christian polemic I’d thought it would be – the author is a Christian historian. Err… A Christian, and an expert in Christian History.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089LOOF4/
“The Sound Machine”, Roald Dahl (1949)
“The Day It Rained Forever”, Ray Bradbury (1959)
“The Victim from Space”, Robert Sheckley (1957)
1) Seconding Del Rey’s “Nerves” (and yes, the original short story) and Shaw’s “Light of Other Days (having recently re-read that one myself).
Any of the Telzey Amberdon stories by James Schmitz — for that matter, nearly anything by Schmitz is a good choice, though I’d give “Legacy” a pass. “Balanced Ecology” is a good non-Telzey story.
“In Hiding” by Wilmar H. Shiras. (I had to look up the author’s name, but the story sticks vividly in my mind.)
5) What I’m hearing is not that The Handmaid’s Tale actually mirrors what’s happening in America right now, but that we are obviously already on the path which leads to that result, and the time to stop it is NOW, not after the Avengelical Right has consolidated their power-grab.
Progressives have been sounding warnings about the drift of America toward being a totalitarian dictatorship since at least the early 2000s, and the response from certain quarters every time has been to pooh-pooh us as cranks and hysterics. And yet, many of the things we predicted have come to pass, albeit more slowly and in slightly different forms than we thought. How many times does this have to repeat before Certain People (looking at you, Ms. Crispin) are willing to admit that yes, it CAN happen here? It’s already starting, but you just don’t want to see it.
12) Show me someone who says that writing isn’t work, and I’ll show you someone who’s never actually tried to write anything.
(14) SHADOW CLARKE JURY FINISHES
(Not entirely finished, I believe they’re going to do a winner from both their shortlist and the actual Clarke one)
Their full ‘shadow’ shortlist is:
The Power?—?Naomi Alderman (Penguin Viking)
A Field Guide to Reality?—?Joanna Kavenna (Riverrun)
Infinite Ground?—?Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)
Central Station?—?Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
The Underground Railroad?—?Colson Whitehead (Fleet)
The Arrival of Missives?—?Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)
Of those The Underground Railroad, Central Station, A Field Guide to Reality and The Power? were clear contenders back in the personal shortlist stage, so not major surprises. The Arrival of Missives is probably the most interesting come-from-the-back-of-the-field contender (JJ will be pleased!) so I guess I really need to get round to reading it!
I can’t say it’s the shortlist I’d have chosen, mine would clearly have had Ninefox, Fifth Season, etc. I disagree with their reasoning in discounting series works – while some series works are fatally incomplete I don’t think that can be a blanket rejection – plenty of series works are sufficiently self-contained even if they also contain the seeds of their sequels.
In terms of character of the shortlist it’s pretty obvious that they’re signalling a desire to go away from what you might call the commercial genre (which always struck me as a very silly phrase – does it imply other writers don’t want to make money?) which is hardly surprising given the stated positions of some of the shadow jury of previous Clarke lists.
It’ll be interesting to see if there’s much overlap with the actual Clarke shortlist announced today. I’ll stick my neck out and predict that the overlap will be The Underground Railroad and Central Station – let’s see how wrong I get it!
@mark Looks like you’re right! The shortlist is out…
https://mobile.twitter.com/sfxmagazine/status/859676419365982208
@Simon
I hadn’t realised it was releasing so early today, for some reason I thought it was to be lunchtime. Looks like I got my prediction down in print just in time!
The real Clarke shortlist has Ninefox Gambit on it, and so all is right with the world.
(5) RHETORICAL VIOLENCE
There’s one point here I agree with: Be moderate with the hyperbole. The title is correct that Trump’s America is not “just like” The Republic of Gilead.
It goes downhill from there, though. For starters, I think Jessica Valenti exaggerates the amount of “just like”-comparisons that’s being made – the examples she gives are IMO meant metaphorically and not literally.
And I think her main criticism of the book is based on not understanding it. In a part not quoted in the scroll, Valenti writes:
So … I fully support her desire to understand her own role in broader terms than simply claiming victimhood. But I think she simplifies The Handmaid’s Tale, and misses an important message in the book, when she thinks she’s simply “meant to hate” the priviledged women in Gilead. (Or is it maybe that while she can “admit I am a participant”, she cannot bring herself to actually take responsibility for that participation, and to see ways she can make herself less of an oppressor?) The way Atwood describes the commander’s wife, the Aunts, and the subtle critique Offred offers at her mother’s feminism, makes me think Atwood absolutely supports that more detailed examination Valenti speaks of.
That Jessica Valenti misses this side of The Handmaid’s Tale is extra strange because she refers – twice – to a column in New Republic that points out it out: The Handmaid’s Tale Is a Warning to Conservative Women. I linked to that article in a comment a couple of days ago, and I recommend it again.
Johan P, and the fact that Valenti – a white middle-class (ish) straight woman living in New York (which in itself speaks to a fairly high income level) — feels entitled to tell other women what they do and do not get to think and feel, just demonstrates a shocking amount of arrogance and cluelessness to me. 😐
@Simon Yep,
Clarke’s Award Nominees, everybody!
AFTER ATLAS, Emma Newman
A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT, Becky Chambers
CENTRAL STATION, Lavie Tidhar,
NINEFOX GAMBIT, Yoon Ha Lee
OCCUPY ME, Tricia Sullivan
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, Colson Whitehead
Hmm two I’ve read, two I mean to read and two I’m not familiar with but sound interesting.
JJ, when Valenti says “I knew I was meant to hate the Christian women who are blind and deaf to their surrogates’ suffering. But this story is too easy”, I am inclined to read that as “I knew I was meant to hate priviledged women like myself. But that was too hard to do so I simplified the story into something I could dismiss as too easy.”
(And there’s probably all sorts of irony in me saying that, being a middle-class white male living in a country that consistently scores top 3 on various “global happiness” or “standard of living” rankings.)
Am… am I finally caught up?
For those who missed the catching-up comments in a few earlier scrolls, my power went out around 8pm Eastern on Saturday, and while that came back noonish Sunday, I only got my internet service back up about midafternoon yesterday (Tuesday). So I missed a bit, including what was intended to be the start of some physical-book reading on Saturday night. It is, after all, difficult to read ink-on-paper in nearly perfect darkness.
Anyway, I’ve spent most of the time since the network came back up catching up here, triaging my email, scouting for a flatscreen TV to replace an old set that blew out (along with my old cable modem) during the power outage, and catching up on My Stories (aka the six genre shows I follow that air on Monday and Tuesday). So it’s been a busy time.
The upside is that I did finish Some Kind of Hero (sequel to So Not a Hero, which I believe I mentioned here as I was reading it) during the outage, and I’ve started the new Ellen Klages collection, Wicked Wonders. The first story struck me as nicely Bradburyish, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of them are like.
For the curious, Some Kind was a solid follow-up to So Not, but they would both benefit from additional proofreading. At least the second book didn’t have any continuity or worldbuilding glitches, like the first did.
Example: The main character is a superhero with high resistance to damage, which has the side effect of creating a thin “aura” that protects skintight clothing. (This explains why her costume is of the bodysuit rather than pockets-and-pouches variety.) This results in a couple of battles in the first book which leave her street clothes in tatters but don’t damage her underwear. What had me scratching my head was that one of those battles shredded the seat of her yoga pants – which, forgive me for not being a complete expert on the garment, but aren’t those normally skintight, at least between waist and knees? So… why weren’t the yoga pants protected?
There are a couple of other places in the first book where the heroine replies to things that weren’t said, which made me wonder if I’d inadvertently skimmed over a comment. Nope, they genuinely weren’t there. The closest the second book comes to this type of error is something I consider an improvement: two terms that were hyphenated in the first book are dehyphenated in the second. Yeah, technically it’s inconsistent, but I disliked the hyphenated version. 🙂
I’m looking forward to the third book, but it may be a couple of years before it comes out.
1) I was thinking about Silverberg stories, and having had enough encounters with people who use polyamory as a weapon, I’d nominate “In The Group”. Alternatively, for a story ripped from today’s headlines, “When We Went To See The End Of The World”, which would go in the anthology I will never put together.
@Soon Lee
I did not know that Murray Leinster wrote the basis for the movie “The Power”, and upon researching it (cough Wikipedia cough), I discover the basis was a Frank Robinson novel instead, and that the movie has a Forrest J. Ackerman cameo, all of which I bet everyone knew but me. That movie creeped me out, fascinated me with the name Yvonne DeCarlo, and got me onto playing my guitar with rubber mallets from my bells.
I almost suggested Leiber’s “America the Beautiful” instead–actually typed it out and then thought better of it–but I think those two are a most inspired pairing. I have that story on my mind a lot, too, because it, too, would be in that notional anthology I’ll never do.
@Steve:
Yes. That story haunts me, and speaks to this moment, when we live in the panopticon. Our future is worse, because their record was at least unchangeable.
@K8:
That’s the one Jefferson Starship lifted a song title from. I wondered whether Leiber was okay with that, and I had a song with a title from his work…and now that I check the dates, my memory has corrected itself. I think. Somewhere, I have notes. Anyway, I was going to use that title before it turned up on that crappy record (I can’t think of another great band that turned to crap quite so quickly and thoroughly), and wasn’t sure if he’d be okay with me doing it, so I called him up from Jenks, Oklahoma and asking him. He was very kind and said it would be okay and asked if it was a Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser story, which he said was what most people lifted titles from.
I said no and that I loved those stories but preferred his other work. I still can’t believe I said that to him. I tried to be diplomatic, because I do love those stories, just not as intensely I love most of the rest of his work. And about The Wanderer, as my kid says when someone doesn’t like a loved work, “Fight me.”
For this purpose, though, maybe “The Good New Days” or “The Beat Cluster”? Again, they both speak to our times. One dark, one not so dark.
(You figure Peter Thiel read “Ship of Shadows”?)
(Of course, Merle Haggard got there first. It’s an Okie thing. You wouldn’t understand.)
@World Weary:
Is it based on a short story? I loved that book–for values of “love” that include “scenes in it haunt me to this day”–and keep meaning to reread it to see if it’s as great as I remember it. I suspect it is. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen another book by her. (That one came from the SF Book Club.) Recommendations welcome!
@gottacook:
I might pick “Pacifist”, which I think is 1962. (I can date, or so I think, certain stories by which Merril anthology they’re in.) Another writer I need to know better.
I seem to have missed some excitement.
@ Johan P (and JJ to a lesser extent)
You are kicking the wrong woman. The author of (5) is Jessa Crispin, as noted above by OGH, not the well known feminist Jessica Valenti. You may have been led astray by a link to a Valenti article taking the opposite view to Crispin’s that was embedded in Crispin’s piece. Two different J’s.
5) I’m afraid the S. S. Chicken Little has sailed. To put a slightly different cast on what Lee says about “Progressives have been sounding warnings about the drift of America toward being a totalitarian dictatorship since at least the early 2000s…”–I’d say instead that liberals have been saying that the sky was at great risk of falling, a greater risk than ever before, so much falling you won’t be able to stand it, and probably was going to fall in every presidential election. Then when it actually was at risk of falling in 2016? The turnout by percentage of eligible voters didn’t really nudge up, did it? And now when I rub my non-existent hair, I’ve got plasters on my fingers.
Fortunately, a lot of people–maybe enough, even, if we continue to be lucky–are responding to the reality of the situation. You can only get knocked on the head so many times before you notice they really are peeing on your leg, to mix my browns with my whites and sit on my cigarettes.
On the other hand, I have to admit, when I saw that photo of all the women sitting in a circle and pointing their fingers at the one in the middle, my first thought was, “I can’t believe they are tone policing that poor woman! It’s just like America! We. Are. DOOMED.”
@Cora:
Oh, I feel you on this. I never will get George Eliot. It’s not my teacher’s fault. She was good. But that the other kids in the class–tenth grade English, my last year of high school–didn’t get what I thought was so funny about that one scene? That has soured me.
I bolded Katarina because I had misremembered it as Katrina, possibly because I’m getting old and feeble-minded, possibly because it was the turning point in Bush 43’s presidency, and because after the shock and horror wore off, I realized the silver lining was that President Cheney really didn’t have a plan ready to go. If there’d been active planning and intent to put armies in the street and take care of business–as Silent Cal said to the Bonus Army, “The business of America is the business end of a gun” (I think I have all my facts in a row there)–stage two, maybe three incidents near refugee camps, send the right National Guard units, and Bob’s your uncle.
Those were simpler times. I miss the good old days.
Anyway, I can’t remember whether I saw the movie first or read the book, but I think it was in that order. (I saw the movie in 1982, plus or minus a year, given who I saw it with.) I’m pretty sure it was movie first. In this case, I thought they were roughly equally good and roughly the same story. I might’ve missed something.
But this makes me feel a lot better about my struggle–wait. Let me put that a different way–my very strong efforts to read Habermas productively.
Msb: Ouch. Yes, I’m misidentifying the author. (And you’re right, I was led astray by the link in the sidebar.) My apologies to Jessica Valenti.
@Cora: I forgot to add that the other thing which stood out to me about The Lost Honour of Katarina Blum was the sexism and the slut-shaming. (I didn’t have that last word to use at the time, but I got the idea.) Is that just something inherent in that style of tabloid journalism? Or is there something specific being said there?
That last kiss–I think they kiss, don’t they?–is still a favorite scene.
Glad to see my title picked again. Thanks!
(1) [Recs for]
Young People Reads Old SFF –short works published before 1980 would File 770 readers recommend?
Mack Reynolds and Fred Brown’s “Dark Interlude”
@John A. Arkansawyer
It’s actually The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Katharina with an H. The slut shaming in the novel is quite notable, but then times were more conservative in the 1970s and a woman taking home a man she’s only just met was still frowned upon. But the point is that tabloid journalism will twist facts (He’s a murderer and bank robber – actually, he just opened a safe and stole the contents; She’s a slut and a gun moll – actually, she just met him and had no idea what he was involved with) and create a narrative that has little connection to the truth and that hurts (and sometimes even kills – student activist Rudi Dutschke was shot and later died of his injuries because of tabloid infused hysteria). Often there is sex involved – it’s tabloid journalism, after all – but the slut shaming was just a convenient weapon in this case. Though considering the way Bettina Wulff was treated (former German first lady – her sins: being blonde and reasonably young and attractive and having a tattoo), the tabloids do like to go for slut shaming.
I disagree with Crispin that we were intended to hate the Wives. (Disclaimer; I read Handmaid’s Tale when it first came out, and not since, but I still remember the repeated gut-punches….) My recollection is that… well, it’s more complicated than that. The Wives were just as trapped as the Handmaids. I distinctly remember a scene where the Handmaids are set as a lynchmob on someone; a way to redirect their rage and powerless against a target other than those in power. And the Wives do much the same against the Handmaids, I remember thinking. I disliked the Wives… but I also felt sorry for them. The Wives were in the same prison; it just had gilded bars. They may have helped to install the bars, but they were there all the same.
(And whenever I hear about female genital mutilation, almost always (as I understand it) carried out by women on girls with little or no direct male involvement, I remember The Handmaid’s Tale. We build our own prisons and the guards are also prisoners….)
1)
a) Four in One by Damon Knight (1951, I think)
b) Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven (one of the first I gave to the Young Traveler, and she loved it)
I’d recommend the People stories by Zenna Henderson. They range from good to amazing…but I don’t know how well they work in isolation.