(1) HANG ONTO YOUR TOWEL. Britain’s Radio 4 has provisionally ordered a six-episode Hitchhikers sequel.
Radio 4 has commissioned a new series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, over a decade since the last series aired.
It will become the sixth series for the sci-fi comedy on radio, with the show’s last run – Series 5 – having broadcast in 2005.
Expected to be titled ‘The Hexagonal Phase’, the British Comedy Guide understands that the new episodes will primarily be based around the book And Another Thing….
This news comes after Towel Day, the annual celebration of the work of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy creator Douglas Adams. The writer, who launched the hit series on Radio 4 in 1978, died in 2001.
In 2009 author Eoin Colfer was commissioned to write And Another Thing… featuring the same characters as seen and heard the previous radio series and books written by Adams. Although Colfer had the blessing of the creator’s widow, the announcement proved to be controversial at the time. Colfer has recognised that there was “semi-outrage” at the idea of another author contributing to the series, but he has been pleased by the reaction the book has since publication.
(2) THEY SAID NO. Esquire shows “This is What The Lord of the Rings Would Have Looked Like With Its Original Cast”.
7. Liam Neeson as Boromir
Details on this one are a little sketchy, so let’s file it under woulda, coulda, shoulda. “I have a particular set of skills… and a big ancestral horn.”
(3) HVP WARNINGS. Vox Day told his readers there will be warning labels on two items in the Hugo Voter Packet (the one for Tingle has already been reported here.)
The WorldCon convention has also issued at least two other “warning labels” to two other Hugo-nominated works in the packet, one a Best Related Work by Moira Greyland, the other a Best Short Story by Chuck Tingle.
(4) BEYOND CHARACTER POSTERS. ScreenRant has nice, large images: yesterday, “Star Trek Beyond: Jaylah & Bones Character Posters Released”, and today, “Star Trek Beyond: Spock and Chekov Character Posters”.
[The] the studio has unveiled two more posters that are obviously meant to highlight the film’s action quotient and its (new) cast of characters – two elements that have appealed to summer blockbuster fans over the series’ seven-year run thus far, and which Paramount clearly is banking on happening yet again. Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard McCoy is featured in one of the posters, while series newcomer Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service, the currently-in-production Mummy) as the mysterious Jaylah takes center stage in the other (see below).
(5) GENERATION HEX. At Observer, “A Millenial Reviews: ‘Star Trek’ Is a Blantant, Boring Rip-Off of ‘Star Wars’”.
I recently watched Star Trek because I never actually watched it growing up (I was busy having sex and hanging out with my friends after school) so I decided to marathon The Original Series. Let me tell you, good Yeezy almighty, Star Trek sucks earbuds. Now I’m a total geek, but I don’t understand how anyone can be expected to actually watch this stuff. Every episode is an hour long. Do you understand how long an hour is? That’s half of a podcast. If I don’t have 10 minutes to listen to Marc Maron talk about his dead cats then I don’t have 60 hours to watch a dudebro white-privilege his way across the galaxy in a deep V-neck. I tried though.
(6) ARISTOTLE! Atlas Obscura carries a Greek report that Aristotle’s tomb has been found.
A group of archaeologists in Greece say they have found the lost tomb of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and likely world’s first true scientist….
The archaeologists had been digging for 20 years at a site in the ancient northern Greece city of Stageira, where Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. Aristotle died 62 years later in Chalcis, about 50 miles north of Athens.
Ahead of the official announcement, the Greek Reporter has some more details on the tomb, saying that “literary sources” say that Aristotle’s ashes were transferred there after his death. It is located near the ancient city’s agora, apparently intended to be viewed by the public.
From the Greek Reporter
The top of the dome is at 10 meters and there is a square floor surrounding a Byzantine tower. A semi-circle wall stands at two-meters in height. A pathway leads to the tomb’s entrance for those that wished to pay their respects. Other findings included ceramics from the royal pottery workshops and fifty coins dated to the time of Alexander the Great.
Will R. asks, “I wonder if the tombstone reads, ‘Here Truths Aristotle.’”
(7) BIRDS OF A FEATHER. Scott Tyrell’s pictures of great authors as owls is heavy on British fantasy writers – Rowling, Tolkien, and Pratchett among them.
(8) BIRTHDAY BOYS AND A BAT-GIRL
- Born May 27, 1911 –Vincent Price
- Born May 27, 1922 — Christopher Lee
- Born May 27, 1934 – Harlan Ellison.
Jason Davis of HarlanEllisonBooks.com figures the celebration is incomplete without people buying Harlan’s books and here’s his encouragement for ordering the latest volume of unfilmed scripts, Brain Movies 7.
If you’ve popped by HarlanEllisonBooks.com in the last couple days, you’ll have noticed that I surreptitiously announced that the sixty pages of bonus BRAIN MOVIES 7 content for those who pre-order will be Harlan’s unfinished motion picture adaption of his first novel WEB OF THE CITY; it’s called Rumble, as the book was known when this movie—which was to have starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello—was in development. It’s a very interesting adaptation and illustrates that Harlan was not averse to having a little fun with his own source material.
- Born May 27, 1935 — Lee Meriwether
(9) PUPPIES FOR PEACE. The Huffington Post explains the TV host’s advice — “Samantha Bee Bets On Adorable Puppies To Reconcile Bernie And Hillary’s Feuding Supporters”.
So, in a bid to stop the “Democrat on Democrat violence” that’s been taking over people’s social media feeds, Bee’s team have created a new website: TotallyObjectivePoliticalFacts.org.
Clicking on the link brings up a picture of an adorable animal, alongside a salient quote — such as, “Why can’t we all just get long?”
“Just post that link in any thread where your liberal friends are tearing each other apart and end the argument,” Bee said in a YouTube clip on Thursday.
“Seriously, Democrats, just look at a picture of a puppy and hug it out before it’s too late…”
“She might regret going there….” says Steve Davidson.
(10) PREPARING TO VOTE. First-time Hugo voter and game writer Martin Ralya outlines his approach.
Will I be able to read 100% of the Hugo nominees? Realistically, probably not. I’ll do my best in the time I have, though.
I vote in the ENnie Awards every year, and I don’t even attempt to read/play every nominated work — doing so would entail giving up too much of my time. Instead, I play/read the stuff that interests me, and vote for stuff I feel familiar with. Unlike the Hugos, the ENnies don’t offer up a voter packet, but I make a point of visiting nominated blogs and checking out nominated free products.
I also don’t feel obligated to read every Hugo-nominated work, because fuck the Rabid Puppy agenda. I have a horseshit filter, and you know what? It didn’t stop working when I became a Hugo voter.
If a nominated work stands on its own merits, like Seveneves does, I don’t care if it also appears on the Rabid slate. If a slated work doesn’t stand on its own, or if it advances or supports Rabid Puppy horseshit, it’s going below No Award on my ballot.
(11) RECOMMENDED. Rachel Swirsky finds another story to love — “Friday Read! ‘The Traditional’ by Maria Dahvana Headley”.
I’m a big fan of science fiction that takes vivid, strange images into the future. I think, actually, I always have — and if you look at a lot of classic SF, that’s what it’s doing. That’s obvious when reading someone like Stanislaw Lem, but I think it’s still true about folks who we consider more traditional now. It’s just that some of the weird images they used have been carried on in the conversation so far now that they’ve become standard, and have lost their newness. Stories like this, and space opera by people like Yoon Ha Lee, bring a contemporary disjunctive strangeness to the genre. I look forward to seeing what happens when the next generation gets bored with it.
If you like odd surrealism and lyrical writing, Maria Dahvana Headley is worth perusing.
“The Traditional” by Maria Dahvana Headley….
(12) CHINESE SF MOVIES. Linus Fredriksson has posted the “Chinese Science Fiction Fimography (1958-2016) with lots of links to films, some with subtitles. He explains some of his idiosyncratic choices.
Even though we are faced with some small hindrance when setting a date for the birth of science fiction film in China we are facing an even bigger obstacle when it comes to defining what science fiction really is. According to me science fiction film is a film which uses some form of idea, invention, geographical discovery to convey an image of an alternative society different from the one were living in now. So the appearance of futuristic technical gimmicks and/or inventions in the film is not necessary for defining a film as science fiction. On the contrary, some of the films I’ve watched has not gotten in to the list much because the science fiction elements in the movie is merely a way to get the story going and in the end they’re absent of context and doesn’t bring any further narrative development of the impact that scifi-gimmick might have had.
Take for example Bugs … a catastrophe film from 2015 which begins with a foreign scientist trying to develop a protein, in order to end starvation in the world, by experimenting with insects. Instead of relief for starving people he creates a giant bug which sends out smaller bugs that eat human beings and then returns to its host to feed it. The entire movie, except for the first minute or two, is about escaping these bugs and then killing the big bug. It’s lack of motivating the science in the film and being consistent with it, made me choose not to have the film in my list. It’s pretty much the same when it comes to the rom-com film Oh My God … but here I reasoned differently mostly because the film has been advertised as a scifi-comedy whenever I read something about it. Therefore Oh My God is on the list.
Yes, the genre labeling for the films in the list might be a bit arbitrary and inconsistent at times but that’s also why I’m writing this blog post so that other people can have the chance to have a second opinion on the selection of films. At the end of the list I will add all those films which has been labeled as science fiction but which I personally didn’t consider to fulfill the requirements of falling under that category.
(13) THE TOUGHEST AROUND. The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog selects “6 of the Most Fearsome Warbands in Fantasy”.
Kailen’s Twenty, Snakewood, by Adrian Selby
This recent epic fantasy about a disbanded mercenary company plunged back into in their twilight years brings together an instantly iconic collection of gruff warrior types. The Twenty once turned back armies and toppled nations through chemical warfare, tactical cunning, and brute force, but the world has moved on. Kailen, their mastermind and leader, has gone into hiding, and the surviving members of this band of brothers are far past their prime, having retired to more peaceful pursuits or counting down their days working small mercenary contracts. When a shadowy assassin begins hunting them down, offing them one by one and leaving a single black coin on the bodies to signify an act of betrayal, and two of the Twenty, Gant and Shale, receive a desperate message from Kailen himself, they must embark on a journey to save their remaining friends from the legions of people who want their heads—but two past-their-prime swordsmen and an eccentric tactician may not be enough to turn the tide. The deeds of the Twenty were epic, but what truly makes them a warband for the ages is the chance to see what happens to a merc after the battles have ended.
(14) DESPERATELY SEEKING FRED’S TWO FEET. In Key West, they’re threatening to tow this car if they can’t find the owner.
The City of Key West, Fla., put out a call for help to find the owner of a most unusual illegally parked vehicle — a replica of a car from The Flintstones.
The city said in a Facebook post that a Stone Age vehicle resembling that driven by Fred Flintstone and company in the classic cartoon series (and live-action films) was found illegally parked without anyone around to claim the unique piece of property.
How long do you figure it’s been overparked, about 30,000 years?
[Thanks to Will R., John King Tarpinian, Alan Baumler, and Steve Davidson for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
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Firstee!!
::ticky::
Third!
The Aristotle news would be major and exciting, if it turns out to be true.
I get an assist!
(5) GENERATION HEX.
I never cease to be amused by people who think it’s impressive to brag that they’ve got the attention span of a gnat.
ETA: Ah, the excerpt does not make clear that this is intended to be satire — lamely, badly-executed satire.
Also, INADVERTENT FIFTH.
Now that I’ve got my gratuitous First Comment Crowing out of the way, I wanted to say that I just finished Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky, and I have a lot of Complicated Thoughts about it.
For the first two-thirds of the story, I wasn’t sure this book knew what it wanted to be–either a contemporary fantasy, magical realism, or an absurd tome on the order of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This seemed to vary from chapter to chapter (the chapters alternate viewpoints between the two main characters). Because of this, I felt the story meandered more than a little, so that I wondered when or if it would ever get to some sort of point.
I was never tempted to put the book down though, because Charlie Jane Anders is an excellent writer. Her prose is rich and evocative, and she has a knack for metaphors and similes that turned my fingertips green with envy. She also moved the story right along, so even if I thought we might never get to where we were supposed to go, for the most part I was enjoying the trip.
Then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, she dropped the bomb. (Figuratively, from my reaction, and literally in the story.) Looking back now, I can see how carefully the whole thing was set up, and how delicate some of the puzzle pieces were. When everything clicked into place, the book took off like Secretariat exploding out of the starting gate, and all I could do was hang on for what became a helluva ride.
This book is definitely on my longlist. It didn’t wow me quite like Lovecraft Country, but I think it’s well worth checking out.
(x-posted to 2016 Recommended List)
goshstalk
(2) THEY SAID NO. A mixed bag of misses:
1. Nicolas Cage as Aragorn; 2. Russell Crowe also as Aragorn – Viggo Mortensen gets worse as the movies go along and isn’t that great to start with, IMHO. I’ll call Crowe a clear win, and Cage a push.
3. Daniel Day-Lewis as Yet Another Aragorn – This seems like a no-brainer, but I have questions! How well does the Method fare with non-naturalistic dialog? That’s a real question. It seems like historically the Method develops in parallel with the move toward naturalism in screenwriting? LOTR’s dialog is much more stylized than, say, much of the dialog in Game of Thrones episodes. (Please nobody mistake “naturalism” in dialog for realism in setting and plot.)
4. Lucy Lawless as Galadriel – This is the movies getting lucky. It’s not just that Lawless can’t touch Cate Blanchett; Lawless is just not that good. Her guest turn on BSG, which had one of the most capable ensemble casts in television history, made that painfully clear.
5. Sean Connery as Gandalf – Here again the movies get lucky. It’s not that Connery is bad. He’s not, even if he was always more star than “actor.” But McKellen owned that role.
6. Christopher Plummer also as Gandalf – Well who can say? Bird in the hand, though. McKellen was great.
7. Liam Neeson as Boromir – I can’t say this wouldn’t have worked. But Sean Bean did fine.
8. Uma Thurman as Arwen – Okay, this was a tragic miss. A much stronger actor than Liv Tyler.
9. Ethan Hawke as Faramir – Couldn’t have been less memorable than the guy who did play Faramir, whose name will come to me as soon as I look it up on IMDB…David Wenham! Who was apparently cast for his physical resemblance to Sean Bean, since their characters are brothers. But, um, “There’s no hard evidence to back this [rumor about Ethan Hawke] up.”
10. Alison Doody as Eowyn – Dunno Alison Doody. Nothing against her. But Miranda Otto owned.
Re: Wenham. At least he did put some life into Faramir. If you want to see a movie where he is clearly just collecting a paycheck, watch VAN HELSING.
(5) This was a funny-once. I made the mistake of scrolling down to other millennial reviews and it got old fast.
JJ: ETA: Ah, the excerpt does not make clear that this is intended to be satire — lamely, badly-executed satire.
To me, the excerpt makes it incredibly clear. Everything about it screams “damn Millennials, get off my lawn”, with a lot of lame, mean-spirited jabs at kids today. (Millennials were slutty children. Millennials are shallow. Millennials are fake geeks. Millennials are gadget-obsessed. Millennials speak in a ridiculous way. Millennials don’t understand how anything works if it isn’t an app. Millennials love trivial shit and hate everything good. Millennials have no attention span. Millennials have ridiculous SJW jargon that they use to mock our icons.) That excerpt is the work of someone who is deeply threatened by everything that happened after they turned 35, and is just venting his spleen under the guise of “satire”.
Uh oh. I was attacked by a passing Barnes and Noble. Damage was limited to six books, including Nemesis Games and the mass market paperback of The End Of All Things. One Orbit, two Tor, two Angry Robot, and an Ace.
Amoxtli: To me, the excerpt makes it incredibly clear. Everything about it screams “damn Millennials, get off my lawn”, with a lot of lame, mean-spirited jabs at kids today.
I hate to say it, but I’ve seen a lot of non-satire posts by Millennials which bear a strong resemblance to that post.
Yes, it’s mean-spirited — but it’s not that far off the mark for values of “yes, some Millenials are really like this”, even if it is not well-executed as satire.
@simon my wallet hates attacks by passing bookstores too 🙂
@Bonnie – I saw your cross-posted review in the 2016 recommendations thread in my email, and skimmed it, because I was at work and distracted. I’m glad I actually read the whole thing now that I’m home, as it’s got me completely intrigued.
(5) GENERATION HEX. – Have we actually figured out what a millennial is yet? LAst I heard, apparently *I* fit in just under the wire, and I’m not that young….
In other news, a diagram of the Tingleverse (SFW, even).
Have we actually figured out what a millennial is yet?
According to Strauss and Howe, the Millennial bracket is from 1982 to 2004. If you were born within these years, then you’re a Millennial.
Then when the Hell is Gen Y? That’s what they were calling people born after ’80, last I remember. Is that from ’81 to ’82 or something?
Have we actually figured out what a millennial is yet? LAst I heard, apparently *I* fit in just under the wire, and I’m not that young….
It’s Gen Y, people born 1980-2000. So basically everyone from 15 to 35 or 40.
ETA: kathodus, two terms for the same age cohort. Millennial became the more common term.
@Amoxtli – thanks. It’s a better term. Gen Y always seemed super lazy to me, like it was thought up by Millenials…
Books!
The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney: A Greek refugee girl in 1920s England encounters magic, tragedy, and transformation. There is a lot to love about this book— the prose is just so perfect, vivid and engrossing, the sort of writing that you just want to sit back and savor. This is one of those books where the plot moves slowly but somehow never feels like it’s moving slowly. The book description makes a fuss about the narrator’s encounters with a certain pair of Inklings, but those scenes are actually very minor parts of the plot, and were, I thought, handled well. There are encounters with a certain ethnic group (well, they’re explicitly not this ethnic group, but they are repeatedly called this ethnic group, so it’s easy to forget that) that might or might not set people’s backs up. And I’m not quite sure how I feel about the ending. But overall, I thought this was definitely well worth the read.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North: The adventures of Hope Arden, who has a lot in common with the Silence from Dr. Who, in a world slowly being dominated by a mysterious life-altering app called Perfection. I thought this started out really well, but fizzled by the end. The challenges inherent in Hope’s life were engaging, but the more the story segued into corporate terrorism and the crises of characters that I really didn’t care about, the less engaged I was. Near the beginning I thought the author might be constructing a more layered plot than she ended up doing, and she has this habit of having the narrator constantly list random facts in ways that, especially by the end, felt like filler. Overall, this had a lot of potential, and there were parts of it that I loved, but as a whole, it was just . . . a bit too much wasted potential.
Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt: The residents of a town in upstate New York are under a longstanding curse: they cannot leave the town for any extended period of time, lest they become suicidal. People’s lives within the town are centered around managing (and hiding) the 300-year-old dead witch (responsible for the aforementioned curse) who randomly and inexplicably appears in various places throughout the town. This is very much horror/dark fantasy, and I really enjoyed (most of) it. It manages to skillfully blend some very dark horror with farce (the dead witch has parked herself in Aisle 3 of the grocery store! Someone record that on the app we use to track her!) in a way that’s very difficult to successfully pull off. Be aware that if you hate horror, you will hate this. My major complaint is the ending: I read somewhere (probably here) that Heuvelt rewrote the ending for the English release, and . . . let’s just say, I wish he hadn’t.
The Everything Box by Richard Kadrey: Thousands of years ago, an angel lost the weapon he was supposed to use to destroy the world. Said box becomes the MacGuffin for a thief, the aforementioned angel, a government agency, and feuding demon-worshiping apocalypse cults to basically just wander around hitting each other. Overall, this was pretty bland. The jokes fell flat far more frequently than they hit, the characters were not memorable, and the plot never really gelled. It felt like a watered-down version of the sort of thing I’d read a dozen times before, and I almost didn’t bother finishing it. There’s no chance of me picking up a sequel.
Company Town by Madeline Ashby: The only non-augmented woman in city of towers by an offshore oil rig finds herself working as a bodyguard to the teenage heir to the wealthy family that’s just purchased the town. She finds herself juggling her own feelings of inadequacy, her relationship with her new boss, and the mystery of a serial killer preying on prostitutes. I thought this was really well done, with the sort of strong characterization and quickly-moving plot that makes a book difficult to put down. There are problems with the ending—suffice to say, I didn’t think the ending felt particularly . . . earned? Or well-explained? Plot-wise?—but I’ll definitely still pick up her next book.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales: The Regional Office—a secret agency of superpowered female agents who regularly save the world from the forces of darkness—is under attack from forces within. I am making this sound way more interesting than it actually is, sadly. While interludes are given about the history of the Regional Office, most of the actual story revolves around dissecting the backgrounds and neuroses of our two narrators, which . . . was not as interesting to me as it clearly was to the author. Honestly, I really hated the prose style: the story is told in this breathlessly repetitive way that makes the story drag.
(6) ARISTOTLE!
Drink!
Emma: Thanks for your array of book comments!
(3) HVP WARNINGS. Gak, thanks for that thought (I read it as HPV).
(6) ARISTOTLE! Somehow fitting that this item’s the second fifth. 😉
@Hampus Eckerman: “Drink!” LOL.
(7) BIRDS OF A FEATHER. These are kinda adorable.
(8) BIRTHDAY BOYS AND A BAT-GIRL. Price and Lee were born on the same day?Spooky!
(13) THE TOUGHEST AROUND. One of the things I like about Barnes & Noble’s lists like this one is that they include old and new books, and sometimes somewhat obscure things, too. The folks working on their SFF blog clearly know and love the genre! (I read their blog regularly.)
@Simon Bisson: Good luck recovering from the B&N attack. If you want some hair o’ the dog, read their SFF blog! 😉
@Emma: Thanks for the book notes! North’s had book sounded interesting, but I only knew about the hook; the actual plot sounds tedious, bummer. I’ve heard good things about Kadrey’s book in other quarters; I’ve never read his work, but I’m going to check this out anyway. 😉 I keep hearing good things about Ashby’s novel, so it’s quickly moving up my “read the sample” list! I’ve never heard of the Gonzales, but between your comments and the oddly mixed NYT review, it doesn’t sound like it’s for me.
Hex is on my list, even though I’m not usually into horror, but the excerpt was creepy without freaking me out, and the story intrigues me. BTW, I’ve read a couple of interviews with Olde Heuvelt, and he talks about moving the setting (and changes needed for that), so I didn’t get the impression he changed fundamental plot elements like the ending. Maybe I missed something, but my impression was it was just rewriting for the setting shift.
Jim Henley
IMO: “Method” doesn’t require “naturalism” so much as a total emersion in the character within a constructed context, whether that context be punk-subculture in 1980s London or elf-subculture in Third Age Middle Earth. The ideal is that the performance that emerges from the interaction betweeb the actor’s internal resources and the constructed reality is compelling and consistent within that context.
Obviously many MANY performances fall short of that ideal – but Day-Lewis has achieved some pretty compelling performances in what might be considered non-naturalistic mise-en-scenes; Hamlet*, Last of the Mohicans, Gangs of New York, Age of Innocence.
I don’t know what kind of Aragorn he would have created – but I find myself really, really wishing we had had the opportunity to find out.
Disclaimer: much as I admire great method actors, I never, ever, ever want to have to work with one again.
*(OK, tested the limits of method by driving him to break-down sobbing on-stage when he saw his own father’s ghost rather than Hamlets).
That seems to be a popular opinion with a lot of my former colleagues in the film and TV industry…
Thank you, Emma! Hex seems to be something for me.
Emma –
Thanks for the reviews! I will be snagging a copy of Company Town. Ashby’s vN knocked my socks off, and many say the sequel iD is better (iD is nearing the top of Mount TBR, but behind the Hugo reading). vN is a great deconstruction of Asimov-style robots — or, to paraphrase the author’s description, a robot girl loses her inhibitions and the shit hits the fan. TW: Though it doesn’t happen to the main character, there are references to people who want robots that appear to be children for very squicky reasons.
Also, several sample chapters of Clare North’s The Sudden Appearance of Hope are available for perusal. The first is here.
Wait. Then which ones are Gen-Xers?
Damnit, how am I supposed to remember the dismissive labels for youngsters if people keep changing them?
GSLamb: Damnit, how am I supposed to remember the dismissive labels for youngsters if people keep changing them?
Not only that, every 15 years or so, they create yet another dismissive label for the newest generation, giving us old fogies even more labels to try to keep straight! 😉
I’ll be at Balticon today in a short-sleeved oliveish shirt. Going to get my copy of Armageddon Rag signed–woot!
Title Suggestion: “Is this a pixelscroll I see before me?”
[!klatsdog]
Amazon UK bargains for the Bank Holiday weekend:
Robin Hobb, Dragon Keeper (99p)
Ted Kosmatka, The Flicker Men (£1.99)
Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos (£1.99)
We have dismissive labels for elders also. My fathers generation used to be called “Giant Plug Orville”.
Inspired by @Rob Thornton:
Pixelkrantz and Guildenscroll are Dead
And has anybody offered up either of these tributes to the “worst-ever Hugo-winning novel”:
They’d Rather Be Wrong
They’d Rather Be Wright
(can’t find either in the ‘Complete Litter of Puppy Roundup Titles’)
@GSLamb: guttersnipes, idjits, good-for-nothings, ankle-biters, lawn-walkers, yard monkies, munchkins, know-nothings, slackers, MTVers….
There’d be no need for insults, but they seem to be incapable of staying off my lawn! They’ve no respect for boundaries, apparently can’t read (when I point to the “Stay Off My Lawn” sign, they shrug and ignore it), act as if the world owes them an existence, are tethered to their texting (operating under the delusion that they can “multi-task”) and have the attention span of a gnat with ADD (I know – whenever I start yelling at clouds they lose interest in about two seconds), have utter disdain for everything that has gone before (and which gives them the existence they feel entitled to) and are so stupid that some of them will read this whole thing. If they can read….
I don’t remember the details, but Mahvesh Murad interviewed Thomas Olde Heuvelt on a recent episode of Midnight in Karachi, and one topic of discussion was the changes he made when he wrote the English-language edition of the book.
http://www.tor.com/2016/04/28/midnight-in-karachi-episode-53-thomas-olde-heuvelt/
Clicky
The whole generational taxonomy (including “Millennials Rising”, 2000) under which so much clickbait and poor journalism now labours was dreamt up by a Baby Boomer whom I remember better from The Capitol Steps singing “Super-frantic-unproductive-nothing-legislation”, “Seventy Six Bad Loans”, and “Little Doc Koop” to fill in a couple of minutes occasionally on late night American TV in the early 90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Strauss
*sigh* In another installment of “Get Off My Lawn”…
Why do people want to listen to a half hour of mostly fluff instead of spending five to ten minutes reading an article?
By the time I get to the advertised part that caused me to click on it in the first place, I’ve usually tuned it out from boredom.
The part about Hex starts at 6:23, the translation discussion at 8:57 the changes at 12:50. Not as bad as some I’ve tried to listen to/watch, which spend as much as a half hour gossiping about the interviewers’ lives or gushing over how all of them are crushing so hard on their upcoming guest.
Yay books!
All The Birds In The Sky is currently on my awards-nomination longlist. It’s an early contender, so it may or may not stay there as other works accumulate, but I was pretty impressed by it. Weirdly, I had almost the opposite reaction from Bonnie McDaniel, though — I was extremely enthusiastic about the beginning and middle, and then found the end a bit of a let-down.
vN sounds super-interesting, LunarG. I think I will check that out first, and maybe go on to Ashby’s other books like Company Town if it turns out to be as good as it sounds …
Emma’s description of The Sudden Appearance of Hope summarizes my reaction to every Claire North book I’ve read. Both Touch and The First 15 Lives of Harry August started out with a fascinating premise and main character and then ended up sort of getting bogged down in stuff I’m not all that interested in. What’s most odd to me about this is that I LOVE North’s writing as Kate Griffin (which is very different). Although I wasn’t taken with her writing as Catherine Webb (which is also very different from the other two). I will say this — every name she writes under is so stylistically different from the others it might as well be a different author, which is quite a feat. But there’s only one of them that really caught me. I will probably still pick up The Sudden Appearance of Hope, though, just in case. If I don’t like it, I suspect I will give up on North and Webb and stick to Griffin.
Hugo Packet ready for download.
Honestly, I thought #5 was weapons grade snark. Maybe I’m the only person who thought it was funny? Yeah, it’s mean, but I still giggled my way through it.
re (5)
And in other news, the kids play their devil music too loud, while being on my lawn, while like science fiction that isn’t real science fiction; and non trufen think their cons can actually be cons, and not pale imitations that all good trufen must continually point out aren’t real cons, attended by real fans.
Wait. Then which ones are Gen-Xers?
Gen X was born within 1961 – 1981.
I’ve seen some pop demographers set the border for Millenials at 1996. This is a huge issue since it determines whether my daughter, born in 2000, is a Millenial or a member of “Generation Z,” which determines – …well, it determines fuck-all I guess. One of my co-workers, who is at the older end of Millenialism, and by the way superb at her job so take that stereotypers, is very much on the “Millenials are older than you think” train and favors the earlier line. I’ve also seen a different generational scheme that starts the baby boomers earlier – during WWII – and ends them earlier too, so that none of us born in the 60s fall into it. That alternate scheme makes cultural sense to me, since it throws many boomer cultural touchstones born during the war – everyone from the Beatles to Chip Delany – into the boomer generation and pushes those of us who were teens post-Vietnam during punk rock out.
@jrlawrence: Thanks for the insights into method acting. That was really interesting.
Look, it’s very simple. All you have to do to separate the generations is look at their generation-defining movies. But how do you find these generation-defining movies, you might ask? Nothing easier, it’s obvious when you think about it:
The Beat Generation — Children born 1931-1940
Hallucination Generation — Children born 1941-1950
Target: The A-Go-Go Generation — Children born 1951-1960
The Lost Generation — Children born 1961-1970
The Feral Generation — Children born 1971-1980
Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation — Children born 1981-1990
The Junkfood Generation — Children born 1991-2000
The Doom Generation — Children born 2001-2010
Underworld: Next Generation — Children born 2011-present
Generation Z — Children who will be born after 2020, until —
Star Trek: Generations — Children who will be born Stardate 9500–9999
It is the devilman agenda. *nods*
Yeah, I’ve read the Millenial Reviews Star Trek piece now, and as so often Mike excerpted the best part. 3/10 Would Not Click Again.
Btw, I really liked the Generation X book. It was one of those books you could pick up, turn to one page on random, read and still have a very good time. Not sure if I ever read the whole thing and if so, I’m quite sure it can’t have been in the correct order.