Pixel Scroll 5/2/17 Pixel Packing Mama, Lay Your Pixel Down

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(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 —

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!)

(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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149 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/2/17 Pixel Packing Mama, Lay Your Pixel Down”

  1. (1) Would it be very horrid of me to wonder if they’ve not suffered enough already?

  2. @galactic Journey. I think the People stories are strong enough (they were published separately to begin with after all) but really get their power, all together.

    Hmmm. Has anyone suggested “Day Million” by Pohl, yet. I know its not much of a story and yet…it encapsulates future shock in a way that few longer works can.

  3. I re-read Day Million a few months ago (thanks to the Big Book of Science Fiction) and Pohl’s insights into gender-related issues were truly uncanny. IMHO, Million is so close to current discussions that the story may not impress the youth as being “out there” enough.

  4. @Ghostbird:

    (1) Would it be very horrid of me to wonder if they’ve not suffered enough already?

    You have to make a few omelets if you’re going to break eggheads.

  5. John Arkansawyer

    Missing Man was a novella first, later expanded to a novel.

  6. I would encourage everyone to read Heinrich Böll’s Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen aka “Murke’s Collected Silences – the entire short story collection, including the titular story but also others such as the rather hilarious Es Wird Etwas Geschehen (Action Will Be Taken). Not Science Fiction, but pleasantly surreal and humorous.

  7. Rob Thornton on May 3, 2017 at 5:30 am said:

    I re-read Day Million a few months ago (thanks to the Big Book of Science Fiction) and Pohl’s insights into gender-related issues were truly uncanny. IMHO, Million is so close to current discussions that the story may not impress the youth as being “out there” enough.

    —

    That’s how I feel about Fritz Leiber’s computer chess story “64-Square Madhouse” — it might as well be nonfiction. Except that it was written in 1962!

  9. Re The “real” Clarke shortlist (is that going to be like The Real Ghostbusters?), I certainly prefer it to the Shadow Clarke version. I’m surprised (pleasantly so) that Chambers got a look in for a second year in a row, and I have to admit (again with great pleasure) that I didn’t even consider that Emma Newman would get a nod.
    I do think the omission of The Fifth Season is going to look a bit odd in a few years once the series has finished in triumph and is fully recognised as a masterpiece (fingers firmly crossed for book 3 being good!) but perhaps something that looks so much like fantasy was too much for a science fiction award to stomach? I’d argue it takes more of a SFnal look at its fantasy world than Occupy Me or Underground Railroad do though.

  10. Pixelation 5 (no, the other 5)
    The Scroll and the Walrus

    5 And I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals; and I saw a sea lion proclaiming with a loud voice, “I’m just asking in a civil tone who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”

  11. That’s how I feel about Fritz Leiber’s computer chess story “64-Square Madhouse” — it might as well be nonfiction. Except that it was written in 1962!

    I just read that a few days ago, and was kind of surprised when I found out just how much of the development of computer chess it predated.

  12. (1) I picked ten from the Best Short Story finalists lists for the Hugo Awards.

    1956 Arthur C. Clarke* “The Star”
    1960 Daniel Keyes* “Flowers for Algernon”
    1963 Jack Vance* “The Dragon Masters”
    1964 Poul Anderson* “No Truce with Kings”
    1965 Gordon R. Dickson* “Soldier, Ask Not”
    1967 Larry Niven* “Neutron Star”
    1974 George R. R. Martin “With Morning Comes Mistfall”
    1977 Joe Haldeman* “Tricentennial”
    1978 John Varley “Air Raid”
    1979 C. J. Cherryh* “Cassandra”

    Most of these are stories I remember liking when I was in my teens or 20s. I might not like them if I reread them, but, given the target audience, maybe that’s okay.

  13. For reference, the master list so far is:

    Who Goes There? By John W. Campbell, Jr. as Don A. Stuart (1938)

    A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1934)

    1940s

    Nightfall by Isaac Asimov 1941

    Desertion by Clifford Simak 1944

    With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson 1947

    Vintage Season, C.L. Moore writing as Laurence O’Donnell (1948)

    That Only a Mother by Judith Merril (1948)

    1950s

    Superiority Arthur C Clarke

    All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury (1950)

    The Snowball Effect

    A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber

    Flowers for Algernon

    The Menace from Earth

    1960s

    Baby, You Were Great

    The Smiling Future

    The Ballad of Lost C’Mell

    A Rose For Ecclesiastes

    The Rule of Names

    1970s

    When It Changed

    View From a Height

    Houston, Houston Do You Read?

    (upcoming)

    Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand

    1980s
    Firewatch

  15. 1) Couple of ideas: “Build Up Logically”, Howard Schoenfeld (1949); “The Heat Death of the Universe”, Pamela Zoline (1967).

  17. Young people read old SFF recommendations:

    Micromegas, François-Marie Arouet
    Belfagor the Devil, Niccolo Machiavelli
    The Damned Thing, Ambrose Bierce
    The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allen Poe
    Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, Samuel L. Clemens

    Oh, not that old? Ummm, how about:

    There Will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury
    Air Raid, John Varley
    Cassandra, CJ Cherryh
    Enemy Mine, Barry Longyear
    Thunder and Roses, Theodore Sturgeon

  18. I read Handmaid’s Tale as a teenager in the 90s and I did not find Gilead particularly shocking? I mean, I read a lot of fantasy & sf and there were plenty of stories where the women all got locked up somewhere and that was just a thing? Hell, the kzin and Tolkien’s dwarves and McKiernan’s dwarves and however many Star Trek episodes…and I was already familiar with dystopias, from 1984 to Gate to Women’s Country so while taking the women’s point of view was really cool, the actual society didn’t seem at all out there–yeah, ok, that’s the set-up, sounds awful, but not at all far-fetched.

    Which is a roundabout way of saying that if you think this is heavy handed propaganda, jeez, wait till you get a look at some of the other stuff out there! I didn’t much like getting relegated to breeding stock in The White Plague either, and I was suitably appalled by the plight of the fertile women in In Conquest Born but I’m not buying that it was an attempt to make me feel super oppressed.

  20. while taking the women’s point of view was really cool, the actual society didn’t seem at all out there–yeah, ok, that’s the set-up, sounds awful, but not at all far-fetched.

    Didn’t Atwood draw directly from real-world examples?

  21. Many threads ago (wow, June 25, 2015!), we played the File 770 Short Fiction Recommendations game (which, Alas!, seems to have disappeared along with Kurt’s far more useful re-sort of the data), but of 376 recommendations the Top Ten vote-getting stories were:
    1. “Flowers for Algernon”, Daniel Keyes – 12
    2. “The Women Men Don’t See”, James Tiptree Jr. – 7
    3. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, Ursula K. Le Guin – 6
    4. “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson – 6
    5. “A Rose For Ecclesiastes”, Roger Zelazny – 6
    6. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, James Tiptree Jr. – 5
    7. “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”, Harlan Ellison – 5
    8. “The Day Before the Revolution”, Ursula K. Le Guin – 5
    9. “Harrison Bergeron”, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – 5
    10. “All Summer in a Day”, Ray Bradbury – 4

  22. I mean, when Handmaid’s Tale came out, many parts of Canada had only had divorce laws for 18 years (with no fault becoming the default paradigm the year HMT came out), marital rape had only been illegal for two years and I am not sure married women were allowed to collect unemployment insurance in Nova Scotia yet [1]. Not sure when women started being allowed to open their own bank accounts but I do remember it was surprisingly recent.

    1: The logic was if a woman lawyer was married to a seasonal fisherman, clearly he was the wage earner for the family and giving her pogie would be pointless. It turned out woman lawyers who have been laid off have the time and skills to pursue this in the courts.

  23. Ah, Canadian women first became allowed to open bank accounts on their own in 1964, the same year they got the right to serve on juries (except in Quebec, where it was not until the 1970s).

  24. Seconding “Day Million” and adding Damon Knight’s “Masks”–though “I See You” is an interesting alternative. I used to teach both of the former when I used Those Who Can for my SF course. Of course, “Day Million” isn’t going to have the kick it did 35-40 years ago. Both of the Knight stories, though, ought to generate some useful creeps. All three have stayed with me since I first encountered them and occurred to me without even having to take a memory-refreshing stroll through the anthology section of my library.

    There ought to be something from John Varley’s Eight Worlds cycle in the mix (though like “Day Million,” those stories might seem a bit tame now), and probably a Sturgeon–is “Baby Is Three” too long? I haven’t re-read it for more than 40 years, but it was quite a Thing when I first encountered it as part of More Than Human around 1962, when I was more or less the age of the current Young People.

  25. Lean Times in Lankhmar” (novelette 1959 Fantastic) unless it is limited to SF.

  26. I nominate Greg Bear’s Blood Music (the original short story). That freaked me out when I was a lad and I think the bio-weird plot will provoke a reaction from later generations.

  27. >Rob

    Surely Blood Music is too recent. It was published in 1983.

    How about some Howard Waldrop? Mary Margaret Road-Grader is in the right time-frame. The Ugly Chickens was 1980 so might just sneak in.

    Also +1 for Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days.

  28. I need to get at The Big Book of Science Fiction… it’s near the top of the TBR list for sure.

  29. Completely unrelated to this thread – I’ve been working on learning Spanish for the past several months now and have reached the point in my understanding of verb conjugation and vocabulary that I’d like to branch out into reading non-textbook type texts. There’s always the option to read translations of books I’ve read in English (Harry Potter or whatnot), but I’m curious if anyone here has some recommendations for books that are in the original Spanish? Preferably Middle Grade or Young Adult, and preferably not from Spain. Bonus points for Chilango, as that is the dialect I most frequently encounter in real life.

  31. @ John A: Given that you have been one of the people most consistently saying, “Oh, that will never happen!” while it’s happening under your nose, I am less than impressed with your scold. But seriously, can you imagine anything like the results of the teahadi takeover happening in the 90s, when it was conservatives crying over and over again that the sky was falling? Did it even occur to you during Obama’s tenure that overt, vicious racism was becoming more socially acceptable than it had been for decades? (NOTE: I’m not saying that there is more racism now than there was in the 90s, because I know better — but that people who used to keep it to themselves because they knew it would make other people side-eye are now being defended for appalling racist crap.)

  32. Old SF:

    “The Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn
    “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby
    “Billennium” by J.G. Ballard

    Short, easy to read, pointed.

  33. @15: Scalzi paints his fingernails silver?!?

    I think @12 exaggerates when he says writing is impersonal; some authors are blank but many put themselves into their work (without bleeding all over the page, which tends to fail). For contrast, Ford (in his preface to Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade) said

    A staggering number of [would-be writers] … want to produce a kind of pH-neutral prose, generally described as ‘transparent’, that simply generates fully-nuanced scenes in the reader’s head

    OTOH, the rest of his first 4 points seem spot-on (from my viewpoint as someone who has talked to a lot of writers but not even tried to write fiction since high school); as to #5, I wonder how many readers cavil about the dozen-typos-per-book he mentions versus the generally shoddy work we see from some publishers these days. I also wonder about the insignificance of a typo on page 3 — having done a little copy work, I’d think the reader would be fresher (i.e., more alert) in the first few pages.

    @Daniel Dern: Lafferty’s reactionary views are on full display in the Camiroi stories; I wouldn’t hand them to anyone as an encouragement to read more old SF. I’d support “Slow Tuesday Night” and add “Narrow Valley” — a marker for his gonzo style (including debunking experts) and an obvious referent for Gaiman’s perfect pastiche, “Sunbird”.

    @Galactic Journey: I read “Captivity” long before I saw the collected People stories; I can’t be unbiased about because it hits too many chords (literally), but I would certainly recommend it as a standalone — it supplies enough background but not too much.

    @James Davis Nicoll: I eagerly await your readers’ reaction to “Fire Watch”; I completely missed the point when it came out, and AFAICT I was older then than all your readers (albeit maybe more … self-involved). There’s gotta be Sturgeon in there somewhere, but I’m not sure what — “Baby Is Three” is certainly too long. I love “To Here and the Easel” (and think that it, like “Aye, and Gomorrah” it would wake the readers up to how brilliant some of the old work is) but it’s atypical; maybe “Slow Sculpture”, or “Bulkhead”, or “The Clinic”. (And there are a lot of stories to avoid — you seem to skipping horror (fine with me), and there are a lot of stories with gender-role attitudes that were getting objected to even 30+ years ago.)

    @Jonathan K. Stephens: +1 for #’s 2 (hard realism) and 3 (parable); they’d make a great contrast.

  35. Chip Hitchcock: @15: Scalzi paints his fingernails silver?!?

    That’s a demonstration of the “Scalzi”-named nail polish.

  36. kathodus: I can’t speak from experience, but what about something by Borges? His work has a reputation for being more fully appreciated in the original Spanish.

  37. @kathodus, OGH: I was thinking about poetry and almost posted as much. You have the advantage of often finding books with both the poem and the translation. It provides a good check. And of course there is a lot of stuff on line, often with multiple translations.

    And while we’re on the subject…

    (This was another thought. This was not those other thoughts. I’ve still got those.)

  39. @Peer: “Dogfight” by William Gibson is my pick.
    “Dogfight” is actually by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson, and it’s too recent (1985) for James’ list. (A great story pick, though!)

  40. @philrm Then Ill go with David Ely “time out” and a big plus 1 for Bob Shaw “Light of Other days”

  41. (1) YOUNG AGAIN.
    The pre-1980 criterion is showing the gaps in my reading. My Golden Age of SF is probably the 80s or 90s judging by the number of stories I think of only to find they are too recent.

  42. @Cora,

    Living across the border, with De Telegraaf only slightly less bad than Bild in terms of sensationalism and pushing hard-right politics, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum felt horribly familiar.

    It helped that my German teacher was an enthusiast for the language and culture(s) (to outsiders: Germany is quite diverse) and managed to transfer that to the pupils (at least to me), so I enjoyed reading a lot of German literature.

  43. Mark: Thank you thank you than you! *SNAFFLES* **YAY** (have read some of them individually but thrilled to see this–and there aren’t many authors whose collections of shorter fiction I buy because I usually am novels only).

  44. For short stories… how about Thomas M. Disch’s “Fun With Your New Head”? That one’s stuck with me for forty years…. (I wonder if the Suck Fairy’s been at it?)

  45. @John A. and OGH – Hmm… I’m not sure I’m up to Borges-level reading, but that poem was pretty much understandable to me, particularly with the translation nearby to help.

  46. Mark-kitteh, I came, I saw, I bought! Thanks for letting us know Jackalope Wives And Other Stories is out; I’d vaguely known it was coming out sometime soon, but I didn’t realize that “sometime” was today!

  48. Some more short SF picks. It seems I have a preference for novellas which are all probably too long.

    The Outsider by Lovecraft
    Adam and No Eve by Bester
    All the Way Back by Michael Shaara
    Immigrant by Simak
    Resident Physician by James White

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