(1) UNRELATED TWINS. Darryl Mott tweeted a rundown about why two gaming companies that each go by the name TSR are making the wrong kind of news recently. Thread starts here.
(2) COOL IDEA. IceCon 2021, the convention happening this November in Reykjavík, Iceland has added Ted Chiang as its third GoH. The first two are Mary Robinette Kowal and Hildur Knútsdóttir.
(3) ABOUT HUGO FINALIST STRANGE HORIZONS. Maureen Kincaid Speller, Strange Horizons’ Senior Reviews Editor speaking here as an individual, set the record straight about their interactions with DisCon III in a Facebook public post.
… There has been a lot of pushback against this kind of thing in the last few years, especially as more groups/collectives are nominated, and rightly so. There is something very wrong with trying to reduce the work of many to one or two names, as if there is something inherently wrong in not being a lone creator. Is it not amazing that all these people pull together to produce this material in their spare time? For nothing? Apparently, it isn’t.
Last year, unforgettably, Fiyahcon showed that it is actually possible to work successfully to a different model. Strange Horizons was nominated for the inaugural Ignyte Award (which we won), and the difference in approach was unbelievable. Everything from happily listing everyone in the press releases to checking how we wanted our names pronounced to providing free access to the convention online for the entire weekend. I mean, wow? Winning was purely a grace note in some ways, but god, did I feel seen! Didn’t we all.
And so to this year’s Worldcon. SH gets nominated for Semi-Prozine again! Yay! Strange Horizons has a civil interaction with the Hugo Awards team and it is agreed that all of the collective can be individually named in the announcement, because pixels are not in short supply.
Except, apparently, they are.
Consternation.
We cannot all be listed, because we are too many. I’m not sure what went on behind the scenes but then, suddenly, we were not too many after all, and we were all listed.
I was not privy to the discussion about what would happen at the ceremony, but here are the things I do know, based on ludicrous claims I have seen on the internet this week….
(4) HWA PRIDE. Horror Writers Association’s “A Point of Pride” series features an “Interview with Nikki Woolfolk”.
What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?
Speculative fiction and horror are my go-to regarding explaining the world and reflect current events from a differing perspective. I wrote a short story that was painful and cathartic regarding a beloved cousin who was murdered. The story “L’Chaim” is my way of giving her a chance to live. My editor read the story and informed me that I had written psychological horror.
I had no idea that what I wrote could be seen as horror since I’m kinda a wimp when it comes to consistently watching or reading horror. Looking back I’ve noticed my Urban Fantasy stories have more of a horror slant and it’s surprising to me.
(5) DELANY IN ACADEMIA. Samuel R. Delany answers the question “How did I become a professor?” for Facebook readers.
…Now even then I knew enough about the history of the world to know that people who deluged older folks in a position of authority with long polemical letters are often thought of as basically nuisances whose screeds are to be glanced at and put aside to be looked at later, if not to be simply consigned to the circular file. Basically I was writing across an ocean into a world about which I had no real notion of how it worked: the American academic system.
What Leslie [Fielder]’s letter said was: Would you consider coming to the U. of Buffalo for a term, and teaching here, as Visiting Butler-Chair Professor. It’s an endowed chair. You will have a 10k fund to do with as you wish, as long as it benefits the university, as well as a salary of . . . I don’t even remember what it was. I just know that, other than a job in a rotisserie on upper Broadway (from which I’d been fired after a few weeks because I couldn’t make change) to another as a stock clerk at Barnes & Noble on 18th and 5th to still another behind the counter at a small walk-in soft-core porn and second-hand sex magazine store called Bob’s Bargain Books on West 42 St., for a couple of months each, I’d never had a salary since I was 15, working as a library page at the St. Agnes Branch Library on Amsterdam Avenue.
So Marilyn and I talked about it, and I wrote back “Yes.”
A single term as a guest professor, however, is not the same as full professorship—which did not happen until eleven years later. But it was certainly connected to it….
(6) THE TV SETS ARE BEING EXTINGUISHED ALL OVER EUROPE. Well, no – and perhaps quite the opposite will happen over the long term: “‘The thought is unbearable’: Europeans react to EU plans to cut British TV” – The Guardian has the story.
…But post-Brexit, politically the will is there to challenge the dominance of British TV and film.
When the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, visited Rome this week to formally approve Italy’s spending plan for its share of the EU’s recovery fund, the Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, hosted her at the Cinecittà film studios in Rome, where €300m (£257m) of the funds are to be invested in development.
“It’s obvious that if Britain leaves the EU, then its productions no longer fall within the community’s quotas,” the Italian culture minister, Dario Franceschini, told Corriere della Sera. “Europe will have to respond on an industrial and content level, and Cinecittà will be strategic on this front.”
Sten-Kristian Saluveer, an Estonian media policy strategist, said EU plans to reassess the amount of UK content – in particular on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon – were inevitable.
“A big catalyst is the increased trade tensions between the UK and France, as well as the EU’s anti-trust procedures,” he said. “The question is not so much about original content produced in the UK as it is about studios in the UK connected to platforms like Apple and Netflix, which are very well positioned to utilise the good relations the UK has with the US – as well as exploiting the European capacity, including everything from work permits to subsidies,” he said.
“When Britain was in the EU there were spillover effects for the rest of the bloc. But now it’s not, the question is why should these platforms be able to exploit the same benefits?”
Saluveer said smaller EU members could stand to benefit from a reduction in UK content, as it could allow more room for their content. He cited the box office success Tangerines – an Estonian-Georgian co-production which was nominated for a Golden Globe – or the Oscar-nominated The Fencer, a Finnish-Estonian-German collaboration…
(7) THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS. MIT Press’ new Radium Age imprint will republish “proto-sf” from the early 20th Century.
Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre.
ABOUT RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF
Do we really know science fiction? There were the Scientific Romance years that stretched from the mid-19th century to circa 1900. And there was the so-called Golden Age, from circa 1935 through the early 1960s. But between those periods, and overshadowed by them, was an era that has bequeathed us such memes as the robot (berserk or benevolent), the tyrannical superman, the dystopia, the unfathomable extraterrestrial, the sinister telepath, and the eco-catastrophe. A dozen years ago, writing for the sf blog io9.com at the invitation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, I became fascinated with the period during which the sf genre as we know it emerged. In honor of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, I dubbed it the “Radium Age.”
Curie’s development of the theory of radioactivity, which led to the freaky insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy constantly in movement, is an apt metaphor for the 20th century’s first three decades. These years were marked by rising sociocultural strife across various fronts: the founding of the women’s suffrage movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, socialist currents within the labor movement, anti-colonial and revolutionary upheaval around the world… as well as the associated strengthening of reactionary movements that supported, e.g., racial segregation, immigration restriction, eugenics, and sexist policies….
In order to help surface overlooked Radium Age texts — particularly works by women, people of color, and writers from outside the USA and Western Europe — Joshua Glenn and Noah Springer have an advisory panel that presently includes Annalee Newitz, Anindita Banerjee, David M, Higgins, kara lynch, Ken Liu, Sean Guynes, and Sherryl Vint.
Here are the covers of the first books in the series.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
- 1966 – Fifty five years ago at Tricon which was held in Cleveland and had Issac Asimov as its Toastmaster, Roger Zelazny would win his first Hugo for …And Call Me Conrad which would later be called This Immortal. It was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, October and November of 1965 and then in book form by Ace the same year. It tied with Frank Herbert’s Dune. It would be the first of six Hugos that he would win and one of two for Best Novel, the other being for Lord of Light. His other four Hugos would be for the “Home Is the Hangman” novella, the “Unicorn Variation“ novelette, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” novella and “Permafrost” novelette.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born June 25, 1904 — Peter Lorre. I think his first foray into genre was in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea film as Comm. Lucius Emery though he was in Americanized version of Casino Royale which an early Fifties episode of the Climax! series as Le Chiffre. (James Bond was called Jimmy. Shudder!) Other genre roles were in Tales of Terror as Montresor in “The Black Cat” story, The Raven as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo and The Comedy of Terrors as Felix Grille. (Died 1964.)
- Born June 25, 1910 — Elsie Wollheim. The wife of Donald A. Wollheim. She was one of the original Futurians of New York, and assisted them in their publishing efforts, and even published Highpoints, her own one-off fanzine. When he started DAW Books in 1972, she was the co-founder, and inherited the company when he died. Their daughter Elizabeth (Betsy) now runs the company along with co-publisher and Sheila E. Gilbert. (Died 1996.)
- Born June 25, 1950 — Tom DeFalco, 71. Comic book writer and editor, mainly known for his Marvel Comics and in particular for his work with the Spider-Man line. He designed the Spider-Girl character which was his last work at Marvel as he thought he was being typecast as just a Spider-Man line writer. He’s since been working at DC and Archie Comics.
- Born June 25, 1965 — Daryl Gregory, 56. He won a Crawford Award for his Pandemonium novel. And his novella, We Are All Completely Fine, won the World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award as well. It was also a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. I’m also fond of his writing on the Planet of The Apes series that IDW published.
- Born June 25, 1969 — Austin Grossman, 52. Twin brother of Lev. And no, he’s not here just because he’s Lev’s twin brother. He’s the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible which is decidedly SF as well as You: A Novel (also called YOU) which was heavily influenced for better or worse by TRON and Crooked, a novel involving the supernatural and Nixon. He’s also a video games designer, some of which such as Clive Barker’s Undying and Tomb Raider: Legend are definitely genre.
- Born June 25, 1969 — Lev Grossman, 52. Author most noted for The Magicians trilogy which is The Magicians, The Magician King and The Magician’s Land. Winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. His latest work was the screenplay for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things film which was based off his short story of that name.
- Born June 25, 1980 — Jason Schwartzman, 41. He first shows up in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod Beeblebrox’s personal brain care specialist. (Uncredited initially.) He was Ritchie in Bewitched, and voiced Simon Lee in Scott Pilgrim vs. the Animation. He co-wrote Isle of Dogs alongwith Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Kunichi Nomura. I think his best work was voicing Ash Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
- Born June 25, 1984 — Aubrey Plaza, 37. April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation which at least one Filer has insisted is genre. She voiced Eska in recurring role on The Legend of Korra which is a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. She was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as Julie Powers. And she was Lenny Busker on Legion.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Alley Oop runs into a little Moon explorer name confusion.
(11) TURING PASSES TEST. “New £50 note featuring Alan Turing goes into circulation” reports The Guardian.
The new £50 note goes into circulation on Wednesday – but with consumers increasingly going cashless, for millions of people it may be months or even years before they see or touch one….
However, perhaps the new-look £50 – featuring Alan Turing, the scientist best known for his codebreaking work during the second world war – will give the note’s image a makeover.
Its arrival is notable as it means the Bank of England has now completed its switch away from paper money.
The Turing £50 will join the Churchill £5, the Austen £10 and the Turner £20, all of which are printed on polymer, a thin and flexible plastic material that is said to last longer and stay in better condition than paper.
… The new £50 note, which features Alan Turing, contains advanced security features including two windows and a two-colour foil, making it very difficult to counterfeit.
(12) THE KLEPTO CONNECTION. “Stealing Science-Fiction: Why the Heist Works So Well in Sci-Fi” – Justin Woolley explains at CrimeReads.
…There is something inherently lovable about the heist story. They have been a mainstay of cinema since the mid-twentieth century and feature prominently in novels, TV, video games and across all media. The heist story often gives us many of the things we love in story, underdogs, a sense of style, thrills, adventure and a chance to see characters who are the smartest, the fastest, the best at what they do. Heists are also perfectly set up for the structure of a story. We usually have a clear external conflict from the very beginning, our team versus whatever is protecting the ‘big score’. Then, we get to see how the crew are going to overcome the odds by being (often literally) in on the plan, blueprints and all. Throw some spanners in the works, maybe a betrayal, a few character flaws to be overcome, and you’re primed to go for a terrific caper.
There’s something else I find interesting about heist stories—they are, in many ways, genre-neutral. They appear most commonly as contemporary action stories but also in historical fiction, fantasy and, of biggest interest to me, science-fiction. I am a fan of many genres, including crime and thriller, but I am foremost an author of science-fiction….
(13) IN THE BEGINNING. Mental Floss’ article about “The Early Careers of 12 Famous Novelists” includes entries on Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert, Mark Twain, and George R.R. Martin.
8. FRANK HERBERT
Frank Herbert was a veteran newspaper reporter when he began circulating Dune, his 1965 novel of galactic intrigue over spice. Though it was well-received by sci-fi fans and even serialized in Analog magazine, Herbert had no takers until it was accepted by automotive publisher Chilton. By 1972, Herbert had given up his newspaper career to write novels.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: League of Legends: Wild Rift” on YouTube, Fandom Games says this is “a bite-sized version of League of Legends that lasts half as long” and “has no chat functionality, making it “one of the few games that people who haven’t had their hearts turned to coal by the Internet” can enjoy.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Nic Farey, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Bill.]
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First!
6) THE TV SETS ARE BEING EXTINGUISHED ALL OVER EUROPE. I’m glad that we don’t have these sort of proposed quotas here as those programs such as Midsomer Murders are some of my most favorite series.
Let’s fix that date. This isn’t Galactic Journey where they’re writing from the past!
Clickity
(Everything hurts. Still no dog. But on advice of my therapist, Baby Yoda and cartoon GSD puppy Chase from Paw Patrol have joined my household, at least for now.)
2) I’d like to be at IceCon 2021 right now considering the new high temperature record set today: 42C at PDX. Tomorrow will be hotter.
2) Icecon sounds great
@ruth Sympathies to you and all of my other friends and colleagues in the PNW
9) Aubrey Plaza was also in the fun low-budget SF movie “Safety Not Guaranteed.”
@Ruth
Sympathy and hopes for cooler weather soon from L.A.!
7) No Herland? No The Red Napoleon? No The Iron Heel?
Well, these are just the first month. 😉
Peter Lorre (né László Löwenstein, 1904 – 1964) played Prof. Arronax’s sidekick & valet Conseil in the Disney “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954). Lorre’s co-stars were Kirk Douglas (Ned Land), Paul Lukas (Prof. Arronax), and James Mason (Capt. Nemo). The novel and the film should count as SF. One of Lorre’s first ventures into SF cinema was the German SF film “F.P.1 antwortet nicht” (“Floating Platform 1 Doesn’t Answer” [1932]), based on the novel by Kurt Siodmak.
jayn: I really enjoy Safety Not Guaranteed, and have watched it several times. (Knowing the ending doesn’t bother me.)
(9) Apologies for being pedantic, but the historian in me demands that I push back a bit. If you were to peruse the award trophy that Lev Grossman received you would see that’s not what the award is named. If you were to insert the words “what is now called the” in front of the name of the award, all would be well. Let’s avoid, if we can, rewriting history, even with the best of intentions.
Also enjoyed “Safety Not Guaranteed”. It’s among those small, low budget films that appear occasionally, like “Robot and Frank”, that are hidden little gems of SF that don’t get the recognition they deserve.
Rich Lynch: Let’s avoid, if we can, rewriting history, even with the best of intentions.
Mike and Cat have made an editorial decision on how they’re going to refer to the award, and that is something they are perfectly entitled to do.
11) “Polymer” currency–gives a whole new meaning to the idea of “plastic money.” I think a 50-quid note is somewhere a bit below a $100 bill in value.
7) Although I often agree with the late Damon Knight that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12,” I also agree with many others that it really does have a beginning date (MIT’s 1935 is as good as any). In my own mind the Radium Age ought to go back slightly farther to 1895, when Becquerel and the Curies began work on radioactivity and its sources. This would place Capek, most of Burroughs, almost all of Wells, Doc Smith’s early works (3 Skylarks, the original Triplanetary, and Spacehounds of IPC), and many other greats squarely within the Radium Age. Also Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger yarns. Cinematically, we have King Kong, plus Fritz Lang’s silent classics Metropolis and Frau im Mond. Many thanks to MIT for coining the label.
For the 19th century, the Gaslight Age might fit–I take this idea from a long-ago Moskowitz anthology covering the period, “Science Fiction by Gaslight.” Also from Passepartout’s constant worry during his travels with Phileas Fogg. He’d left the gaslight on in his room when he left on his trip, burning at his own expense.
(11) An estimated five million adult Brits have no access to a bank account, and many more (myself among them) still routinely use cash for smaller retail transactions. That said, I rarely carry anything higher than a £20 note, out of courtesy to the other party.
Peter Lorre appeared in “Mad Love” in 1935 for MGM where he was a mad doctor who replaced the injured hands of a concert pianist with the hands of a executed murder who killed by throwing knives. This an adaptation of the novel “The Hands of Orlac” first filmed in Austria in 1924 as “Orlack’s Hande”
Also mentioned is 1932’s “FP1 Antwortet Nichts” starring Hans Albers (the future star of “Munchhausen” in 1943 is very much a Science Fiction movie about an artificial platform in the middle of the Atlantic that serves as a refueling stop for airplanes to and from America and Europe. (As was common at the time “FP1 Antwortet Nichts” was also filmed in English at the same time as “FP1 Doesn’t Answer” and in French as “IF1 Ne Reponde Plus”. All were based on a SF novel by Kurt Siodmak.
I have no memory of offering this scroll title (or was it another Bill?)
It’s 106 miles to Sadalbari, we got a full tank of warp plasma, half a pack of soylent, it’s dark… and we’re wearing radiation visors.
What you’re asking for is unnecessary. When something is renamed it’s cumbersome to continue to use both the old and new name to describe it. In the case of the Astounding Award this also perpetuates the problem a name change was undertaken to resolve.
When people say the Edmonton Elks won 14 Grey Cup championships, it doesn’t matter that they were called the Eskimos for all 14 of them. They are still the same franchise despite adopting the new name Elks to stop disrespecting Inuit Canadians. When people call Caitlyn Jenner an Olympic gold medalist it doesn’t matter that she was using another name at that time.
There’s only one award and it’s called the Astounding Award. Calling it something else when referring to past winners makes it sound like two different awards are being described. Lev Grossman won the same award in 2011 that R.F. Kuang did in 2020. The name changed. The award didn’t.
There’s precedence for this one-name-fits-all approach. John Clute is called a four-time winner of Best Related Work even though it was Best Non-Fiction Book in three of those years. The category has a cohesive history even though the scope and the name changed. It isn’t treated like the category began in 2010.
As the years go by no one’s going to care that it was called something else when Grossman won it. The awareness it was ever called something else will recede. I think it’s a good editorial decision to just to refer to it as Astounding Award for past winners instead of engaging in “award formerly known as” pedantry.
Here’s another example I like: Elsevier has adopted a policy that lets transgender authors go back and change their names on the peer-reviewed articles they published before they transitioned. It doesn’t matter that Person X was known as Person Y when a paper was written.
Also this day in history (well, yesterday as I type this): Dragonslayer, a movie I think is seriously underrated or at least not well-remembered, was released 40 years ago on June 26th, 1981.
Vermithrax Pejorative remains the best dragon I’ve seen on screen, and still has the best name.
1) I have fond memories of Star Frontiers and have a strong feeling that I should avoid the new so I can keep those memories intact.
My mother bought into the fake satanic panic about D&D so Top Secret SI and Star Frontiers were the role-playing games I was allowed before high school where I gained the freedom and pocket-money to branch out.
Regarding name changes: I think it makes a difference whether the name is changed from a divisive one into a broadly accepted neutral one (e.g., Campbell becoming Astounding) versus being changed from a neutral one into a deliberately divisive one (e.g., Washington National Airport becoming Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998). In the latter case, DC-region locals and others have reason to want to use the old name (i.e., simply “National”); that doesn’t exist in the former case, except perhaps among a limited number of Campbell acolytes.
7) Jeanne, MIT isn’t starting the Radium Age in 1935, it’s ending it then. It’s listing the Age as 1900-1935.
I don’t see the actual publication dates for its first books on the MIT site. Amazon is listing them as March 15, 2022.
11) @Jeanne £50 is currently a few cents less than $70 US. Personally I’m very unlikely to use the new note – like most people in the UK I never use anything larger than the £20, in fact in my entire life I’ve handled a UK £50 note exactly four times (they’re so memorable!), most recently in 1994 when I took one as back-up cash when I went to Canada for ConAdian, and swapped it for a Cdn $100 note which I promptly spent on a $96 day trip from Toronto to Niagara Falls! I did once unexpectedly receive an Irish £50 note from an ATM in Dublin in the late 90s, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a UK ATM that dispenses 50s.
Actually, apart from paying the window cleaner (once), and my brothers’ grandkids’ Christmas and birthday money, I haven’t spent any banknotes since the first lockdown began, and despite how much I love the kids, they don’t get £50 a time. I took a fiver out of my wallet last week, and I’d swear the Queen blinked at seeing the light for the first time in over a year…
9) It says something that Schwartzman, born in 1980, could have appeared in a TV show that originally aired from 1964 to 1972, and a radio show that aired in 1978 and 1980. Except that, no, he appeared in movie versions, both from 2005. This is not a complaint, just a reaction to apparent incongruity.
When Hugo Finalist Skiffy and Fanty did skits as part of its Torture Cinema episodes, I played Peter Lorre as a character
Count me as another fan of Soon I Will Be Invincible and “Safety Not Guaranteed”
JJ says Mike and Cat have made an editorial decision on how they’re going to refer to the award, and that is something they are perfectly entitled to do.
We started doing this as soon as the name was changed. It seemed the reasonable thing to do given that is what all other Awards do when they change their name. We also did this with the Other Award which was the James Tiptree Jr. Award.
Arwel Parry says Actually, apart from paying the window cleaner (once), and my brothers’ grandkids’ Christmas and birthday money, I haven’t spent any banknotes since the first lockdown began, and despite how much I love the kids, they don’t get £50 a time. I took a fiver out of my wallet last week, and I’d swear the Queen blinked at seeing the light for the first time in over a year…
I’ve gone the past fourteen months not spending any cash with the exception of that which Farhia, my Personal Care Assistant uses to do my laundry elsewhere. Everything else is digital in nature, either online or local. Most of my bills are paid automatically online so I don’t even have to think about them.
Same here, and pretty much everything else online. I took a taxi back from my first vaccination and it took me quite a while to remember how to use my credit card to pay.
Agree with what others have said about using the current name of Astounding (same for the Otherwise). Any need for connecting the names and always referring to both is past. It’s also nice not to need to specify that you’re talking about the one for new writers and not the other one.
Let’s see now, the current name of Astounding is Analog, isn’t it?
Grrrr…if we were talking about a magazine it would be necessary to refer to previous issues under their then current name. But not with awards.
(2) I wish I could go, but we’ve booked nearly a month off for the train trip to Worldcon as a “circle trip” (EMY-CHI-WAS-CHI-NOL-LAX-EMY, in case anyone is curious, never repeating any route except small amounts of terminal trackage.) I’ve been through Iceland twice now, using the IcelandAir “free stopover” fare, and I enjoyed it a lot. So did Lisa Hayes, but her enjoyment was muted on our trip back from Dublin due to the bug she thinks she picked up from the food-service workers in the Dublin Convention Centre. She managed to be ambulatory for a while, but I’m glad we were able to pick up some face masks from the pharmacy near our hotel. She was masking up pre-pandemic, in order to reduce the chance of infecting other people.
David Shallcross says Let’s see now, the current name of Astounding is Analog, isn’t it?
It is. There was a brief period, just some months in fact, that Campbell used both names in the title. Indeed at Seacon sixty years ago, the Best Professional Magazine Hugo went to him for editing Astounding/Analog. The following year it would be just Analog.
Once again I am struck by the fact that smart dudes who prioritize showing everybody they are smart dudes often say things that aren’t smart.
@Mike
🙂
@Mike: I am for historical accuracy. Really disappointing to hear that’s not a smart thing.
Oh, please. Saying it’s for “historical accuracy” really doesn’t help in the appearing smart department.
It’s a bit sad that Turing is on the £50 note. Pretty much no-one will ever see one, and hardly any shops will be prepared to take it.
7) Does anyone know who did the covers for the four Radium Age books? Reminds me of the Canadian artist Seth.
@Iphinome:
I wrote a fairly long Twitter screed about the fact that this is shaping up to be Star Frontiers quite literally in name only – Ernie’s talked about how they have rights to the name, but not the IP, so no Volturnus, no Dralasites, and likely no future Zebulon’s Guide volumes. Plans as to what it WILL be are still up in the air, but rest assured that he’s gonna slap “Star Frontiers” on it!
I don’t care about the NAME except in conjunction with the materials that made it up, but evidently he’s banking on having THAT logo and using THAT name (and being A Gygax) as the key to nostalgia. [shrug]
(This is leaving aside all of the reactionary utter dickery on his part, mind.)
Rich Lynch, I’m not trying to start or continue a fight, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but get over it.
@1
What the everlovin’ f?
@3
Yes! Americans fancy themselves bold individuals entrepreneuring themselves up a long ladder of bootstraps, but sf has always been a collective endeavor. It’s def within the tradition for the group to take a bow for the effort and fruits thereof. Which is why the most recent Hugo difficulty is so weird for me. Sf has always been FUBU, and recently the U has expanded. Like AO3. Back in the halcyon day of yore that the old timers wax nostalgic for, writers threw ideas together, stole bits.and pieces from other writers’ stories and made new contraptions to test some other writer’s notions, and it was all good fun, and sometimes there was money, and that’s how we got here.
These days there may be only one name on the byline but every story is workshopped at least once, or at least has been beta read by somebody before being submitted. Editors collaborate too, working those stories, honing…. Is there a story published today that isn’t built on the foundation cobbled together over the last 150 years? It’s collaborators all the way down to paraphrase a possibly apocryphal little old lady from a Stephen Hawking anecdote.
Yes! Group effort, group credit. It’s both new fashioned and old-fangled.
Sorry. That was weird. Didn’t know I had it in me.
1: Buh? Buh. Buh!
I mean, what? How could someone expect that business income (even if it’s “donations”) would NOT be taxed? Nor that a business (Kickstarter, in this case) would fail to charge for their services?
I mean, OK, I could probably quibble as to what constitutes a reasonable level of charge (but, honestly, 5%-10% looks superficially sane). But missing that there’d be taxes owed? That should’ve been in the “I want to run a business 101”.
I can’t even get enough spoons to comment in detail on the rest of the self-destructive behaviour.