(1) FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY. Today’s the day. Aaron Couch of The Hollywood Reporter, in “‘Star Wars’: Unsung Heroes Finally Share Their Stories”, looks at the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, focusing on all the special effects people who made Star Wars great and how no one was sure at the time that the film would be a hit.
Well, not “no one.” There were all the people who had bought 20th Century-Fox stock in the months before it opened and boosted its price before I saw a screening and had that idea myself. I remember talking with somebody who managed a portfolio for the Hughes Aircraft pension plan who said I’d already missed the bargain. Somebody expected it to be a hit.
Star Wars went to San Diego Comic-Con in 1976, and people weren’t all that excited.
To lure an audience to a panel about an unknown property, the Star Wars promotional team employed star power from Marvel Comics, bringing writer Roy Thomas and artist Howard Chaykin to talk about their Star Wars comic book adaptation. Marketing head Charles Lippincott spent time at a table chatting with people and selling posters … which unfortunately for them, few people kept.
“I think they were $1.75 and that poster now is still available on the collector’s market — and it’s one of the two most expensive posters you can buy on the collector market because people didn’t keep them,” recalls Craig Miller, who worked as a publicity assistant. “It sells for two or three thousand dollars now.”
Yes, Miller does have one in his personal collection. (Saving pays off!)
(2) SHOULD HAVE QUIT WHILE HE WAS AHEAD. The BBC’s Nicholas Barber argues “Why Star Wars should have stopped at just one film”. Try not to hurt yourself laughing.
…A New Hope would be a lot more intriguing today if every other episode had been left to our imaginations –to playground games, to pub discussions, to self-published fan fiction. Instead, the episodes which did come along answered its questions, solved its mysteries, filled in its blanks and narrowed its mythical scope to the prosaic tussles within one dysfunctional family. The prequels demystified the iconic villain of A New Hope by showing him as a grumpy brat, while the most recent sequel, The Force Awakens, devalued its victory by showing us how ultimately pointless it was: not only did evil prevail, but two of the heroes (Han Solo and Princess Leia) had a son who grew up to be a genocidal, patricidal maniac….
(3) PHOENIX COMICON. Police may have averted a serious incident at a Phoenix convention — “Armed man arrested at Phoenix Comicon after struggling with police”.
A man armed with multiple guns at Phoenix Comicon is now in police custody.
Police say the 30-year-old Valley man was taken into custody Thursday afternoon for allegedly threatening to cause harm to Phoenix officers.
According to officials, the man was taking pictures of officers and was found at Comicon with three handguns and one shotgun. He also had knives and ammunition.
Police say the man was inside the Phoenix Convention Center and struggled with officers before he was detained.
Big security changes for @PhoenixComicon:
– No weapons, prop weapons of any kind allowed
– Added security screening
– More officers present— Josh Frigerio (@JoshFrigerio) May 25, 2017
(4) THE DOCTOR AFFECTED BY LATEST U.K. INCIDENT. Radio Times says “Doctor Who episode edited for Saturday airing following Manchester bombing”.
This week’s episode of BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who will have a section of dialogue removed as a mark of respect to victims of Monday night’s terrorist attack in Manchester, RadioTimes.com understands.
The excerpt in question from upcoming story The Pyramid at the End of the World made passing references to terrorism as part of a more general discussion of threats to Earth, but the BBC has decided that as a matter of sensitivity it should be removed.
(5) MOTHERBOARD LOSES A PIONEERING MEMBER. In November, Debbie Notkin resigned from the Tiptree Award committee to free her energy for other causes. This month she posted a farewell message.
Last November, after the disastrous U.S. election results, I resigned from the Tiptree Award motherboard. I have been involved with the award from immediately following Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler’s creation of it more than a quarter of a century ago.
I remain deeply committed to the goals and work of the Tiptree Award. When I was trying to make this difficult decision, several people pointed out to me that the work of supporting transgressive artists is resistance, and I agree wholeheartedly. I just feel personally that it’s time for me to put my energy into other kinds of resistance and response.
(6) STAND BY TO FROTH. James Davis Nicoll fires his latest canon — “Twenty Core Speculative Fiction Works About Science and Scientists Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”.
As with the previous core lists, here are twenty Speculative Fiction Works about Science and Scientists chosen entirely on the basis of merit and significance to the field [1]. No implication is intended that these are the only twenty books you should consider.
(7) GRAND TURK, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. The Traveler at Galactic Journey is fifteen years too early to see Star Wars but don’t think he lacks for excitement –he’s been watching TV coverage of Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter’s drama-laden mission. “[May 24, 1962] Adrift in Two Oceans (The Flight of Aurora 7)”.
Fun, to be sure, but at the end of the third orbit, Carpenter was in a pickle. Almost out of fuel, the ship misaligned thanks to a balky thruster, and the window for firing his retrorockets sliver-thin, the astronaut fired his braking thrusters a few seconds late. For half an hour, first in the shuddering initial reentry, and then in the chest crushing crashing through the atmosphere, culminating in the gentle sway beneath parachutes before splashdown in the Atlantic, Carpenter had no idea where he would end up.
Neither did the recovery fleet. In fact, Carpenter landed some 250 miles away from where he was supposed to. This did not bother the philosophical spaceman, who spent the next hours relaxing on his inflatable raft, sitting in pleasant companionship with a little black fish nearby. When the boats of the U.S.S. Intrepid finally arrived, hours later, Carpenter was completely calm. In fact, like a good guest, he offered them some of his food.
(8) HALO EFFECT. Mentioning The Saint in Roger Moore’s obituary reminded Cat Eldridge of a passage in Kage Baker’s 2007 review of “Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps”.
It’s easy to grumble about Leslie White’s “The City of Hell!,” a wildly improbable fascist-cop fantasy, but at least the prose is lean and passionate. On the other hand, here is Leslie Charteris, clearly being paid by the word in “The Invisible Millionaire.” After 35 pages of coy overdescription and endless adoring references to the Saint’s perfect features, your correspondent was ready to go out and bitch-slap Roger Moore. And was it really necessary to include an entire badly-written novel (“The Crimes of Richmond City”) by Frederick Nebel? He may have been one of the seminal pulp writers, but surely a short story from him would have satisfied honor….
(9) MORE WHEATON COOLNESS. You can expect to find Wil Wheaton on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 before too long.
I have a small part on the first episode of MST3K’s first revival episode. Erin Gray and I get to deliver all the exposition about Jonah’s backstory. It’s pretty great, and this was a freaking dream come true for me.
https://twitter.com/wilw/status/867476852344061954
(10) TODAY’S DAYS
- Geek Pride Day
The idea for dedicating a day to celebrating geekiness originated in Spain in 2006 when Spanish blogger German Martinez, who chose the day to coincide with the 1977 release of Star Wars. Geek Pride Day spread rapidly across the internet and, soon after, the world, drawing attention from mainstream media as well.One of the events organized to celebrate this day was in Madrid when 300 geeks played a game of a human Pacman together. A list of the basic rights and responsibilities of geeks was also written up. The rights include “The right to not like football or any other sport” and “The right to not be ‘in-style’”, and the responsibilities include “Attend every geeky movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.”
- Towel Day
A tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Towel Day sees fans of the author and the book carrying towels with them to work, to school and as part of their daily activities.
The most important thing that you need to remember in order to celebrate is DON’T PANIC; no matter what the day throws at you, draw comfort from the knowledge that you’re armed with your trusty towel.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- May 25, 1977 — Star Wars was released in theaters. (You may have caught a few hints about this earlier in the Scroll….)
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born May 25, 1944 –Frank Oz, of Muppets fame.
(13) DON’T FORGET TO WRITE. Great series of tweets about entering the writing profession by Nick Mamatas (via John Scalzi). It starts here —
And now, a thread for recent graduates (whether of high school or college) who wish to be writers.
— Nick Buy My Book Mamatas ??????????????? (@NMamatas) May 24, 2017
(14) TALLYING REPRESENTATION. “GLAAD on LGBTQ representation in film: ‘It is not getting better’” —The Verge has the story.
GLAAD released its annual report on LGBTQ representation in film today, and the numbers are bleak. They’ve barely increased since 2015, and when broken out into more specific demographics, they often got worse.
Overall, representation of lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer characters was slightly higher in 2016 than 2015. GLAAD reports that 18.4 percent of the industry’s top 125 films included a LGBTQ character. However, gay men still make up a whopping 83 percent of these characters, and of the 70 LGBTQ characters that GLAAD identified (up from 47 the year before), 14 of them were back-up dancers in one musical number in The Lonely Island’s summer comedy Popstar.
Racial diversity in films with LGBTQ representation decreased in 2016, with characters played by people of color down to 20 percent from 25.5 percent in 2015 and 32.1 percent in 2014.
Here is the link to the report itself — “2017 GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index”.
The GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index (SRI) maps the quantity, quality and diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in films released by the seven major motion picture studios during the 2016 calendar year. GLAAD researched films released by 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers, as well as films released by four subsidiaries of these major studios. The report is intended to serve as a road map toward increasing fair, accurate and inclusive LGBTQ representation in film.
(15) PUBLICITY. Meanwhile, the gender disparity in publishing industry PR is measured by Breaking the Glass Slipper’s article “Gender parity in publisher PR”.
Results at a glance
Statistically, Orbit came in as the worst for gender disparity. Every single newsletter I opened was skewed in favour of their male authors. Men were mentioned over three times more often and also featured over three times more often.
Then you have a sliding scale. Rebellion’s parity was generally poor, as was Hodder, Gollancz and Voyager’s –though I received far fewer newsletters from them. Angry Robot achieved near parity between April –October 16, but for unknown reasons, the remainder of the year wasn’t as equal.
Tor.com was the only publisher who regularly featured more women than men, but this was almost solely as authors of articles and short stories published online.
These graphs only record the frequency of simple mentions. Another avenue of interest might be to follow the PR level of books once they’re published compared to the build-up beforehand. Some titles drop off the radar entirely, while others go from strength to strength. If that were tracked, I wonder whether this trend would continue?
(16) SPACE JAM. Dan Tepfer is a pianist and composer whose new album, Eleven Cages, is due out next Friday. He also maintains a keen interest in science — especially astrophysics, the subject of his undergraduate degree. WBGO asked him to elaborate on some recent findings in a faraway solar system, and he came back with this absorbing lesson in the music of planetary orbits: “Dan Tepfer, Pianist and Science Enthusiast, Walks Us Through the Music of the Cosmos “.
Watching the video below made me happy. It brings together two of the things I love most, astrophysics and music. It’s very unusual to find these two subjects talked about seriously in the same sentence, and even rarer when they are able, as in this video, to complement and illuminate each other. Watch as the orbits of planets around a distant star are expressed in sound:
I’m a jazz musician, but I studied astrophysics for my bachelor’s and have always loved science, so it feels natural to me that these two worlds belong together. Thinking about natural processes and mathematics has informed my composing for a long time. And while many artists remain math-adverse, there’s a small but significant number of musicians who think along similar lines. (Composer and saxophonist Steve Coleman, whom I heard at the Village Vanguard last week, is an inspiration to many in this regard, and has used orbital ratios in his work.)
So, what’s going on in this video? How, in the first place, were these orbits figured out? It’s only in the past 25 years that we’ve been able to detect planets in orbit around stars other than our own. This is mainly done indirectly, by (for example) measuring faint dips in a star’s brightness as planets pass in front of it….
(17) WINGING IT IN THERE. Perhaps Devenski should also yell ‘Dracarys!’ when he throws his fastball. MLB.com’s Cut4 reports “The Astros have a perfect ‘Game of Thrones’ bobblehead planned for Chris ‘Dragon’ Devenski”.
The great war is here.
Be ready with the Devo #GOT bobblehead, available only with special ticket package June 28: https://t.co/RLivp5pCQA pic.twitter.com/LxCCxlsFEC
— Houston Astros (@astros) May 24, 2017
(18) WHERE PAPER IS KING. Not that you’ve never been to a bookstore before, but if you want a peek at what Amazon is doing in the Big Apple, Recode takes you “Inside Amazon’s first New York City bookstore”.
Inside, it’s brightly lit with a subtle warmth. And the first table, right inside the door, shows the kind of data-informed curation that Amazon seems to be aiming for: “Highly Rated” books, rated 4.8 stars and above — on Amazon’s website, of course.
Amazon uses its data throughout the store, including up-to-date star reviews on title cards for each book, as well as for other curation.
Here’s my favorite example: An endcap called “Page Turners,” consisting of books that Kindle readers finish in three days or less. Clever.
(19) NAME IN THE NEWS. Chinese sf writer Hao Jingfang’s new celebrity as the winner of a 2016 Hugo has already gained her an automobile endorsement.
Narrator: In the face of the unfamiliar and the unknown, there are a group of people who are fearless to march. To go beyond all the achievements. To imagine. To open up a new world. You are the first ones to create history when others are hesitating. Every owner of Audi is igniting the fire for change.
Ma Long is the first male Full Grand Slam winner in table tennis.
Hao Jingfang is the first female writer to win the Hugo Awards for Best Novelette.
Cheng Congfu is the first Chinese racing driver to compete in 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Of course, she is not the first women to win the Best Novelette category — that was Joan D. Vinge in 1978. Nor is even unusual for women to win the category — they’ve now done so four of the past five years. But it’s great to see another sf writer in commercials.
And is there something about novelette writers that attracts ad agencies? Don’t forget that Harlan Ellison had won three Best Novelette Hugos by the time they hired him to plug the 1988 Geo Metro.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, ULTRAGOTHA, Chip Hitchcock, Early Grey Editing, Brandy Wood, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, and Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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@Charon D. Audiences were “treated” to a first look at Kashyyyk in 1978, but I’m happy to never ever bring that up again.
@Darren Yes, Ahsoka Tano was the highlight of the Clone Wars for me too – although I’m still hoping for more novelisations to fill in the end of her pre III arc (Ahsoka by E.K. Johnston was great but not quite the era I wanted!) I liked the Clone specific episodes best when they allowed themselves to go to dark places, like the arc right at the end foreshadowing Order 66, but that level of nuance seemed to take a long time to get off the ground and the time jumps in the early seasons tended to screw over the Clone characters most – “see these guys mostly die one by one! Now watch them in a heartwarming bonding exercise oh but don’t get too attached because we already threw them away 🙂 🙂 now here’s some Senate nonsense with Padme!”
Now I’m reminded that I still have half an unwatched season of Rebels, although I’m fairly certain Google would have thrown a million well-meaning spoiler articles at my phone news feed if Ahsoka had come back so… eh. (Don’t tell me if she does!)
I am unfamiliar with the term ‘wedged’ as used above. Can you please rephrase?
@Arifel Thanks a lot! Now I’m going to need to soak in the brain bleach bacta tank again!
I believe we saw Star Wars on the second day it was out here. Only had a write up in either Time or Newsweek to recommend it. I still remember being surprised by the opening sequence with the Imperial Star Destroyer that just kept coming. The theater where we saw it had one large speaker on each of the side walls and they shook as you got closer to end of the Star Destroyer. Try to explain that to kids who have grown up with the Star Wars, ILM, and modern theaters with THX sounds.
I also remember reading The Thin Man in junior high school. (We had an elective class where all you did was read books and then write up book reports on what you had read.) It was quite different from the Nick and Nora Charles I was expecting.
I didn’t get to Red Harvest or The Glass Key until just recently. Mainly branched off from Chandler. (And I got started on Chandler way back because Lou Grant reads the opening of Red Wind in an episode where Mary Tyler Moore is taking a creative writing class.)
I picked some lilac yesterday, and threw some of it solemnly into the river … but alas, while I was wondering exactly when was Lilac Day, that wasn’t the reason. My elder son has been enjoying seeing things tossed off the bridge float away down the river, and the first time he did it, it was with a bit of lilac I picked for myself to take home (Snatched it out of my hand), so this time I had a bit to take home *and* a sacrificial branch.
Didn’t work as well as I hoped; he snatched the lilac at home out of its vase and flushed it down the toilet. (A habit I thought he was over…)
We weren’t exactly kids when we saw Star Wars, first-run in a decent big-screen house–I was 32 and had had the good fortune to spend the previous eleven years on a campus with two film series, in a town with (by ’77) something like a half-dozen commercial screens. I’d been able to see much of the cinema-studies canon, was a fan of Kurosawa, Peckinpah, Kubrick, Fellini, and Ford, and had seen an original large-format print of 2001 in a Cinerama house. And SW knocked our socks off–we sat through it twice right there.
I knew it wasn’t SF of the kind I was covering in my genre-fiction course (which also included Continental Op stories), and the dialogue-writing was so-so, but it was a terrific piece of filmmaking, with a really good sense of what space opera is about, and a great deal of ingenuity (and humor and attention to detail) in getting that sense onto the screen. And at that point the movie felt complete–I didn’t think about a sequel, and I’ve followed the series with diminishing interest and pleasure ever since, though it’s been fun to follow the technical improvements that make the movies’ world so convincing visually.
Meredith Moment: “Tremontaine Season 1” (no cliffhanger, but stuff left to continue) by Ellen Kushner et al. is 99c on Amazon and Google today! Prequel to “Swordspoint”, but you don’t need to know anything, and it’s a GOOD prequel unlike some others. Fantasy but no magic. Very cool. I can only agree with the Amazon review “kissing! betrayal! duchesses! murder! students! forgers! swordsmen! swordswomen! girls disguised as boys to learn math! chocolate!” There’s also pizza, fancy outfits, and so much more.
Off to Baycon, where I hope to see some of you. Heather, I have at least one of your panels penciled in.
I was a little too young to see ANH in its first run (around 4 1/2 at the time) so I, too, saw ESB first, then saw ANH when it was put back into theaters after ESB.
When I was 10 years old and my siblings were both 5, my parents separated for the first time. To give dad time to move out of the house, mom took us to a movie and let us see it twice. That had never happened before. We were thrilled.
When we got home, we got the “we need to talk” sit down.
That’s an unpleasant milestone, obviously, but not a specific day I’d be likely to remember each year as it rolled around.
Except for one thing: the movie was Star Wars.
Happy 40th anniversary to my broken home!
Huh, a world where Star Wars never happened? At all? Interesting. I think we’d certainly have a lot less bad SF, but I also think we’d have a lot less good SF! (Mumble mumble Sturgeon mumble.) The field was getting rather moribund at the time–Hollywood hadn’t done a big SF movie in a long time, and the SF mags were all suffering. SW reminded people that SF can have popular appeal–that it doesn’t have to be a “ghetto”. Without SW, do we get Moon? Or Arrival? Or even GotG? I’m not so sure.
Sure, SW has a cheesy story, and we can argue all day long whether it really counts as science fiction, but it was a gateway drug for a lot of people, including some great writers…and scientists.
Maybe…maybe…if we hadn’t had SW, the average quality of writing in the field would be a bit higher (although I tend to doubt it–see Sturgeon above), but I also think there’s be a whole lot less of it, and even if the average quality were higher, I suspect the peaks would be a lot lower.
So, a bit earlier today N K Jemisin was tweeting her…annoyance…at the results of an interview she’d given. I have to admit I didn’t think it could be that bad. I was wrong.
Mark: When I read your comment I thought you meant she was annoyed about the reaction to the interview. So I clicked, and…
Oh.
Oh. Oh.
Who is this Octavio Butler guy, anyway?
Oh, and gosh, later she will be talking to John Crowley. I wonder what he will make of it.
For those of us who don’t twit, what were her complaints? Because if the complaint was that the article was tedious, dull, and in serious need of trimming, I agree with her.
(ETA: I’ll admit I barely skimmed it after the first 20%, which I believe covered about 20,000 words.)
@Xtifr
Bigger franchises also likely bit the dust. Star Trek likely never gets its first movie. Also, the special effects industry is easily twenty years behind on the development, which kills a lot of successful movies of the 80s.
Of all the SW movies, IV is easily the one with the most impact. It changed major elements in filmmaking as well as redefined how marketing worked. The entire toy and merchandising industry was upended, and it created the modern formula of the co-managed entertainment-toy approach in the West. There’s been a couple of studies that deep dive into the technological, economic and social effects that either started or where accelerated by SW, and it is interesting some of those lines.
Hollywood hadn’t done Space Opera for a while, but in 1975 there was Rollerball and 1976 there was Logan’s Run. (1973 had both Soylent Green and Westworld, but nothing of real note in 1974.) Plus Close Encounters came out in November 1977.
@Mark–
It can’t really be–
[click]
Oh.
Oh no.
I question the description of that as an interview at all. Can we instead describe it as tedious nonsense that occasionally mentions Jamison?
That interview is all kinds of egregious. I think part of the weirdness comes from the writer removing all the direct quotes when Jemisin challenged a lot of them on their accuracy.
The decision to keep steering the subject away from Jemisin’s work to the writer’s was amazing.
@Darren Garrison
Here. (storify rather than twitter if that helps)
IMO the worst thing about it is that it’s not so much an interview as a blatant piece of self-promotion masquerading as an interview – and not even promotion for Jemisin, but promotion for the interviewer!
ETA: @Lis, oh yes indeed. Shall we dub it a “me-terview”?
Here are the comments of Jemisin
https://storify.com/nkjemisin/how-not-to-interview-an-author
Ninjad by Mark. Oh well…
Technically it should be an “intraview”
Well, Mark did say the results of an interview. An interview took place, and that is the result of it.
Thanks for the Storify links. I noticed that there was lots of self-reference in the parts I skimmed, but didn’t know if it wasn’t supposed to be some sort of Gonzo journalism.
Mark notes So, a bit earlier today N K Jemisin was tweeting her…annoyance…at the results of an interview she’d given. I have to admit I didn’t think it could be that bad. I was wrong.
Yeah that’s bad. Publicists, particularly book ones, offer GMR upwards of a dozen interview possibilities a week. We rarely do them as a well done interview with questions that are worth answering are really hard work.
It’s actually easier to do an interview with a band or member of a band, particularly the folk ones we review, as you’ve got the hook of a CD that both you and the band like. (I’m serious — I’ve had bands that hated a contractually done recording.) And music interviews can be a great deal of fun, particularly if they’re done at a frstival or a concert.
Lis Carey on May 26, 2017 at 12:54 pm said:
Oh yes.
I didn’t get through it, it was that bad. (No, I’m not even going to look for stuff by whatever-her-name-is. Jemisin is on my automagic check-for-new-stuff list.)
Heck, how about two treatments and a rough outline?
https://smile.amazon.com/Return-Thin-Man-Richard-Layman/dp/080212156X/
Well, on the positive side, I just learned the name of N.K. Jemisin’s cat.
The Norwegian public broadcaster have put lots of their archives online, including a Filmmagasinet – “The Movie Magazine” – from January 1978, discussing the Star Wars episode IV. The host had invited SF writer and fan Jon Bing to comment, and Bing expresses much of the same view that some here have said: That the movie was a bit to cartoonish and simple, and wishing for more “serious” SF.
I’d say it’s worth a look for the few people here capable of understanding the language – it’s the first six or so minutes of this program:
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/filmmagasinet/FFIL00000178/24-01-1978
(Also, the program from a month later covers Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which gets a much more favourable review. The coverage includes a ~5 minute interview with Steven Spielberg starting here:
https://tv.nrk.no/serie/filmmagasinet/FFIL00000278/22-02-1978#t=26m30s
Kurt Busiek, thanks! As far as I can tell from this, the second half of one of the treatments is what I was lacking. This not only has that, but I can probably dump the magazine next time I run into it. It goes on my Amazon wish list!
@PJ Evans. Ack you are right, I was meant to be answering Soon Lee
No sweat. I just got it from the library recently and read it — it’s a very interesting book, with fascinating historical essays to go with Hammett’s treatments.
Paul Weimer on May 26, 2017 at 4:06 pm said:
Not a problem – I knew you meant it for someone else!
Mark: So, a bit earlier today N K Jemisin was tweeting her…annoyance…at the results of an interview she’d given. I have to admit I didn’t think it could be that bad. I was wrong.
OMG, that’s just… appalling. “Here, let me shoehorn a few sentences from an interview I did into a lengthy self-promotion piece where I repeatedly compare myself to a Hugo-winning author and point out where and how my work as a science fiction author is even better than hers. Also, watch me demonstrate that I am utterly ignorant of the history of women authors in science fiction.”
… and I see that the author is over on Twitter intent on not just destroying her career, but completely obliterating it. 🙄
If she were smart, she’d delete her Twitter account and her Amazon account, and come up with a pen name to use going forward.
So, an “interview” with NKJ that consists of the interviewer’s life story (usually told in a way that tries and fails to make her look better than NKJ), multi-paragraph block quotes of the interviewer’s work, and an occasional condescending mention of the ostensible interviewee? Someone also needs to tell the interviewer where they keep the commas.
That’s ten minutes of my life I won’t get back — but who, exactly, is stone dumb enough to think Jemisin would let them get away with that?
That “interview” is the written-equivalent of photobombing, with the interviewer repeatedly jumping in front of the interviewee.
Kurt Busiek
I just read the long introduction to the book and the shorter one to the first treatment. That’s as much as Amazon put in the free preview, but it was sufficient for a nice sit down and read.
I may have mentioned this at some point, but there’s an interesting one-off Sam Spade radio original that’s a tongue-in-cheek sequel to the Maltese Falcon. It’s from the “Suspense” series: “The Kandy Tooth.” Howard Duff plays Spade. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that Robert Montgomery was a producer of the show, and since he was a radio Marlowe, they put in a cameo where Spade calls Marlowe up to check on some detail or other. It can be found at archive.org (them again!), or as any of several YouTube videos that can be found easily enough without me helping. Runs an hour.
@JJ:
Well, ya got me to click on The Twitter and see this person calling many Hugo-nominated authors big meanie-pants. And gloating over her hits and number of new followers. I guess she doesn’t believe in bad publicity…
Dawn Incognito: Well, ya got me to click on The Twitter and see this person calling many Hugo-nominated authors big meanie-pants. And gloating over her hits and number of new followers. I guess she doesn’t believe in bad publicity…
She’s butting into exchanges between people offering sympathy and support to Jemisin, offering to send them a copy of “the real interview” and providing them with “the other side”.
In other words, she thinks that admitting that what she published was not “the real interview” helps her case, rather than further making her look incompetent and self-absorbed.
And “the other side”? I can’t imagine what she thinks she could present which would mitigate what she’s already done.
It’s just painful watching this kind of train wreck. It’s as if she’s been taking lessons from the Puppies.
@Nicoll: roughly, stuck hard and irretrievably into indefensible positions (and in Jerry’s case, savage when some of the errors are pointed out).
@Darren: in the end, how can we really know anything at all? You might be hallucinating the machine on which you’re reading this… but personal experience is relevant.
*waves to lurkertype from Baycon panel*
Mark: … the alt-history version where this plan has actually been put into action and there are hippo-riding cowboys protecting the hippo farms from the feral hippos terrorising the bayous…
I have to admit that that sounds… not the slightest bit appealing to me.
But then I’m not a big fan of Westerns, either.
I’ll settle for reading Filers’ descriptions of what they read in the book, I think.
@Mark (Kitteh): “Who do I need to tell about that sort of detail – the current Hugo admin (i.e. Nicholas) or the Hugo site (which I bet is Kevin, because that sort of thing is always Kevin!)”
I didn’t see a reply to this. If it’s a Hugo site correction (i.e., for thehugoawards.org), check their Contact Us page, but yeah, the admins don’t run the site – Kevin’s responding to question on the Contact Us page (which also has an e-mail link BTW) and IIRS co-runs it.
I appreciate the further Hammett recommendations, and will look for these books.
In return, a couple of short stories by him:
They can only Hang you Once
His Brother’s Keeper
This Little Pig
Nightmare Town
The Internet Archive hosts The Collected Dashiell Hammett, which is public domain in Canada. If you don’t live in Canada, it may not be appropriate for you to download it.
On the plus side, maybe Andy Weir would decline his interview with her now.
Chip; I was making a joke because I thought that was a typo. I had no idea that “wedged” has been nounified.
(Meanwhile, we really need parodies of that “reporter” interviewing other authors. “Ray Bradberry says that he wrote a book called Halloween Tree. When I was 12, I dressed up as The Little Mermaid for Halloween. Oh, and Brad says he wrote about some kind of elevator to space. But I would make an escalator to space instead. Those are more fun, and you can walk on it if it isn’t going fast enough, plus it is good cardio and you won’t get all flabby like Brad Rayberry.”)
Bill, I’ve not read “This Little Pig,” so I went right to that. I see that their version of the story lacks the continuation. This happened to me recently with H. Allen Smith articles in the same format. Go to the cover of the issue, find which article in the contents will contain page 66, and read or download both.
There, I just saved somebody three seconds figuring that out.
Oh, and for this one, you’ll need to do it twice. For a new Hammett story, though, why, heck. I’d do it three times.
Thanks for the link! This has been a good week for me, Hammett-wise. (As far as recommendations, I’ll endorse any Op story, and the two Op novels. His others are often as good, though it has been known to take me several readings to realize it. )
I didn’t get to see A New Hope until sometime in the 80’s. It was all the buzz with my classmates in ’77 and I was dying to see it. Our neighbors though convinced my mother ANH was satanic…
@Bill
Piling on to all the other Hammett recommendations. One of my favorite authors. There was a fair amount of other good writing in the 20’s and 30’s too. Sticking to noir another good one to check out is Eric Ambler. A good starting point being A Coffin for Dimitrios.
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@Paul Weimer (if you’re still reading this),
Obviously PJ Evans & I are twins. Only our mothers can tell us apart…
(P.S. Hope you’re enjoying your time in the Southern Hemisphere.)