(1) NEXT STEP. Sigrid Ellis responds to the Orlando attack with a series of autobiographical notes in “The road to murder is paved with microaggressions”.
- I was horrified to hear the news out of Orlando. But I wasn’t surprised. I wish I found murders of LGBTQIA folk to be surprising. But I have been found guilty of being gay my entire life. I know how much, how casually, how thoughtlessly I am hated. Hated not because I am evil, but because I am merely the most horrible disgusting thing people can imagine.
- The shooter went to a place of refuge, of joy, of celebration. He went to a place where queers go when we are told we are too queer to be seen anywhere else. He went to the place where all the shoving and flaunting of queer would have been hidden away from him. He sought it out, this crusader vigilante, this one good man with a gun we hear so much about. He took his righteousness and hunted down the gay he hated and feared.
- So how do we go on. How do we live in a world that hates and fears us?
I cannot stop anyone from murdering anyone else. I don’t have that power. But I am … done. I am done with letting the jokes and remarks slide by. I cannot continue to passively agree that I am a punchline, a threat, a bogeyman, a cautionary tale. I just, … I am done.
I can’t stop the Orlando murders, or any other murders of queers.
But I am done being complicit.
(2) HELPING. Stephanie Burgis researched a list of links about ways to help Orlando victims, and community LGBTQ organizations.
This is not the post I wanted to write today. Today, I was planning to announce a fun new project up for pre-order. I was going to talk about other stuff, the normal, small incidents of life. But I’m still reeling. So I’ll post about all those things another day. Today, I just want to pass on the things I’ve seen that might help a bit:…
(3) DIAMOND TIME. Alastair Reynolds’ story “Diamond Dogs” will be on stage in Chicago this season.
An adaptation by Althos Low (the pen name for Steve Pickering and creatives from Shanghai Low Theatricals) of Alastair Reynolds sci-fi story “Diamond Dogs” will complete The House Theatre’s 2016-17 season.
The production, set in the future, follows characters caught in an alien tower and will be third in the company’s season, running Jan. 13-March 5. Artistic director Nathan Allen will direct.
(4) TIME TRAVELERS PAST. The Economist discusses“Time-travel from H.G. Wells to ‘Version Control’”.
MUCH of what is good in science fiction is not about the future. Rather, the genre uses the future as a canvas on which to imprint its real concerns—the present. Counterintuitively, perhaps, time travel stories are often those tales that are most anchored in the present. As Sean Redmond argues in “Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader”, time travel “provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present”.
One of the earliest time-travel novels, H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”, can, for example, be read as reflecting contemporary anxieties about the effects of the industrial revolution on Britain’s rigid class system. The elfin “upper class” Eloi are seemingly content, but are in fact easy prey for the ape-like “working class” Morlocks. The fear that a strong but supposedly inferior working class, empowered by industrialisation, could come for them would have resonated with many of Wells’s Victorian readers.
Robert Heinlein’s time and dimension-hopping novels featuring Lazarus Long, who lives for over 2,000 years, are rooted in the author’s rejection of the social norms of his times. With their enthusiasm for nudism and free love, the novels, which must have seemed provocative in the 1950s and 60s, can now feel dated.
(5) REYNOLDS WOULD STAY. Alastair Reynolds tells “Why I’m for the UK remaining in the EU” at Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.
Many of the arguments for and against membership of the EU seem to revolve around economics, which seems to me to be an extremely narrow metric. Even if we are better off out of the EU, which we probably won’t be, so what? This is already a wealthy country, and leaving the EU won’t mend the widening inequality between the very rich and almost everyone else. More than that, though, look at what would be lost. Friendship, commonality, freedom of movement, a sense that national boundaries are (and should be) evaporating.
(6) THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD. SF Gate reveals the crime of the millennium — “The great city of San Francisco no longer has a center”.
A brass surveyor’s disk, recently installed on an Upper Market-area sidewalk to mark the precise geographic center of San Francisco, has been stolen.
On Wednesday, city surveyors and Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru visited the spot in the 700 block of Corbett Avenue to call attention to the disk and to the work of the surveyors who had established the spot as the precise center of town.
It wasn’t technically the center of town — that spot is under a bush on a nearby hillside — but it was close, and it was publicly accessible.
At the time, surveyor Michael McGee predicted that the small brass disk — attached to the concrete with heavy-duty glue — would suffer the fate of similar markers and be stolen by vandals.
“I’d give it about six weeks,” McGee said.
He was off by five weeks and six days.
On Thursday, an orange arrow and shakily written “Geographic Center of City” were still on the sidewalk. A circular patch marked the spot where the disk had been, briefly.
(7) YOU SHOULD WEAR A HELMET. “Could a satellite fall on your head?” BBC follows German scientists’ efforts to find out.
“There are a lot of satellites in orbit and they will come down sooner or later,” he says. “They’ll probably break up and the question for us is: what is the chance of an impact?”
In other words, could sections of dead satellites survive re-entry to hit something or, worse, someone?
The wind tunnel being deployed for Willems’ experiment resembles a giant deconstructed vacuum cleaner attached to a pressure cooker, arranged across a concrete floor. The gleaming machine is covered in a mass of pipes and wires. Capable of producing air currents of up to 11 times the speed of sound, the wind tunnel is used for testing the aerodynamics of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft designs.
(8) GENRE DINERS. Lawrence Schoen presents — Eating Authors: Naomi Novik, the June 13 edition of his Q&A series.
I’m preparing this week’s post from New Mexico, where I am ensconced at a writers’ retreat and working hard to up my craft (while also enjoying great company, fabulous meals, and some truly awesome leisurely walks through nature). But such things cannot stop the juggernaut that is the EATING AUTHORS blog! Which is about as much of a segue as you’re going to get this week by way of an introduction for my latest guest, Naomi Novik, who should already be known to you for her Temeraire series which blends fantasy and alternate history (or, as it’s more commonly described, the Napoleonic Wars with dragons!).
(9) SEND ONE BOOK. Throwing Chanclas pleads the case for a Nevada high school library looking for book donations. Cat Rambo says SFWAns are pitching in.
I live in a town of 1200 people in the Northern Sierra Nevada –where it meets the Cascade Range near Mt. Lassen National Park and about two hours drive northwest of Reno, NV. Two hundred of that population is students. Over the years as the population dwindled after mines closed, then mills–nothing except tourism and retirement have emerged as ‘industries.’ Many businesses have closed down and with it many things we take for granted—like libraries….
What we’re lacking is pretty much everything else.
We need racially diverse books. We need graphic novels. We need women’s studies. We need science. We need series. We need film. We need comics. We need music. We need biographies of important people. Looking for Young Adult. Classics. We want zines! Contemporary. Poetry. Everything that would make a difference in a young person’s life. Writers send us YOUR BOOK. We have many non-readers who we’d love to turn on to reading. We need a way to take this tiny area and bring it into the 21st century. We have a whole bunch of kids who don’t like to read because all they’ve ever been given is things that are either dull , dated, or dumbed down.
The students who are excelling are doing so because they have supportive parents at home and access to books and tablets elsewhere. But most students are without.
So here’s what I’m asking. Will you donate a book? A real book. Something literary or fun—something that speaks to your truth, their truths. Something that teaches them something about the world. Makes them feel less alone?
I’m not asking for money. I’m asking for you to send a new book or film or cd to us to help us build a library we can be proud of. Just one book.
So who is with us?
Send us one book.
Greenville High School/Indian Valley Academy
Library Project Attn: Margaret Garcia
117 Grand Street
Greenville, CA 95947Thank you for your support.
If sending during the month of July (when school is closed) please send to
Library Project/Margaret Garcia
PO Box 585
Greenville, CA 95947
(10) SFWA. Today was the second SFWA Chat Hour. Streamed live and saved to video, you can listen to Operations Director Kate Baker, member Erin Hartshorn, Volunteer Coordinator Derek Künsken, President Cat Rambo, and Chief Financial Officer Bud Sparhawk talk about the organization’s new member experience, game writer criteria, the state of SFWA finances, volunteer opportunities, Worldcon plans, the 2017 Nebulas, awards for anthologies, what they’re reading, and more.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born June 13, 1943 — Malcolm McDowell
(12) TSF&HF. Leonard Pierce experiments with placing the emphasis on each different word in this six-word phrase, and ends up with a column called “Third Booth on the Left”.
“So, what do you guys sell?”
“Traditional science fiction and high fantasy.”
“Your average author isn’t 83 years old and nearly dead, then?”
“Traditional science fiction and high fantasy.”
“Oh. Okay. But, I mean, you don’t just do space operas based on the technical education of someone who was an undergraduate when Eisenower was in the White House, right?”…
(13) TEH FUNNY. John King Tarpinian recommends today’s Reality Check cartoon by Dave Whamond.
(14) CHINA SF AWARD. “The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award” reports the Lifeboat Foundation.
This is pretty interesting: during the latest national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology, chairman Han Qide announced that the country would be setting up a program to promote science fiction and fantasy, including the creation of a new major award.
Throughout much of its genre’s history, China’s science fiction has had a legacy of usefulness, often promoted to educate readers in concepts relating to science and technology. This new award will be accompanied by an “international sci-fi festival” and other initiatives to promote the creation of new stories.
(15) HE BITES. A deliberately harmful robot named “First Law” has been built to hype discussion about the risks of AI.
A robot that can decide whether or not to inflict pain has been built by roboticist and artist Alexander Reben from the University of Berkeley, California.
The basic machine is capable of pricking a finger but is programmed not to do so every time it can.
Mr Reben has nicknamed it “The First Law” after a set of rules devised by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov.
He said he hoped it would further debate about Artificial Intelligence.
“The real concern about AI is that it gets out of control,” he said.
“[The tech giants] are saying it’s way out there, but let’s think about it now before it’s too late. I am proving that [harmful robots] can exist now. We absolutely have to confront it.”
(16) VERY LATE NEWS. Appropriate to the previous item, Bill Gates was named 2015 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award Winner – in January.
Story
January 3, 2016 — The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them. The 2015 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Bill Gates in recognition of his fight against infectious diseases, his warnings about artificial intelligence, and his funding of improvements in education since a smarter civilization is one that is more likely to survive and flourish.
About Lifeboat Foundation
The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.
(17) PLAY BALL. “Chewbacca Mom and some special ‘Star Wars’ friends threw the first pitch at the Rays game”, as major league baseball blogger Chris Landers told Cut4 readers.
Over 150 million Facebook views later, “Chewbacca Mom” was born. She sang with James Corden. She was offered a full scholarship to Southeastern University in Florida. She started charging $20 for an autograph. And finally, on Saturday, the cherry on top: Payne threw out the first pitch before the Rays’ 4-3 loss to the Astros.
But, befitting a woman who was brought happiness to so many, it wasn’t just any first pitch. It was a “Star Wars” first pitch — featuring the cantina song, another Wookiee, and of course, Taylor Motter at catcher wearing a Chewy mask.
[Thanks to Cat Rambo, Jim Henley, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]
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Here and still reeling from weekends shooting.
ETA: First & fixed typo & not looking forward to a certain troll in the face of this tragedy.
re: (1), John Scalzi also wrote a helluva article about “Thoughts and Prayers.”
Thrifth
I am not scrolling away my shot!
Bonnie McDaniel, thank you for linking that Scalzi article. I am so tired of platitudes and nothing concrete changing.
Just back from the vigil in Orlando near the city hall it was a beautiful and peaceful ceremony. Many speakers both political, religious, and secular. Some in the crowd were silent, others starting sobbing at various times but it was a mostly solemn observance with some moments of passion but no real anger. The preacher from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church flew down and spoke as well as some speakers from DC – the HRC and Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence. It was a mostly local affair. The vigil ended with the local church downtown tolling its bells 49 times for the victims while the crowd held lighted candles. The Orlando Gay Men’s chorus sang ‘You Will Never Walk Alone’ as people filed out into the night.
A sad moment but a proud one as people came together in the face of tragedy.
Finding out the killer had frequented that bar for 3 years previous was not an unexpected development, just another sad chapter to this story. Self-hatred often is turned on the innocent other.
Present for a moment.
2) HELPING is missing its link.
Not awake.
(13) I’m still hoping for a Florida Man movie.
Bonnie McDaniel: re: (1), John Scalzi also wrote a helluva article about “Thoughts and Prayers.”
Chuck Wendig has also weighed in with some cogent thoughts:
Recipe for a Shooting
Cheryl S: Thanks for catching that — I have added the link now. Appertain yourself a beverage as File 770’s Hero Copyeditor of the Day!
(6) – I read the story about the marker being installed, and was surprised only at how quickly the disk disappeared.
(Maybe they should have marked the location the way the USGS sets its markers.)
(13) Really? Yet we still haven’t had a Wonder Woman or Black Widow movie, not to mention any of the other female superheroes.
@Bonnie McDaniel & JJ
Thanks for the links
@Shambles
Thanks for sharing your Vigil experience. My heart goes out to the victims, their families, and friends.
(9) SEND ONE BOOK.
This story really hit home for me. I grew up in a town of 2000 people. The town library was pretty bad for a miserable, outcast, precocious child — lots of kiddie books. I pretty much bypassed juvenile literature and started reading adult novels around age 7. But at least the school library was somewhat better. At some point in the early 70’s, the school library acquired a set of display racks made out of heavy cardboard and stocked with all kinds of paperbacks from Signet/New American Library. Many of them were science fiction and fantasy. If it hadn’t been for those books — a blessed escape from the misery of my childhood — I probably would not be alive today.
So I Googled for a list of latina authors, and a half-dozen books are on their way from the South American River.
(1) (2) Thank you for the links- I’ll pass them on to my friends. I haven’t been able to write at all about Orlando. It’s like being in shock, without being surprised. But I can pass information on.
Traditional box clicking and Fifth joke.
(1) NEXT STEP.
I alternate between hope & despair, because compared to when I was growing up, we have made a lot of progress, but still, atrocities are being committed by humans on each other.
(2) HELPING.
I was going to ask where the link was, but saw that they’d been added when I refreshed (reading this Pixel Scroll *very* slowly while making dinner).
(3) DIAMOND TIME.
It’s a horror: I remember being creeped-out reading it.
Re: Disk at the center of San Francisco. Personally, I’d check to see if it’d moved some distance to the left.
So, I just finished watching Ex Machina, and thought it was pretty good. I found a thread about it from a while back, here: https://file770.com/?p=22506
I have a tendency to miss big problems with works (and so I’m posting here, wondering about other people’s opinions), but so far, it’s definitely going above the Disney movie with Han Solo, and probably the Disney movie without Mad Max, and maybe The Martian, in my voting. Though really, I want to BURN DOWN the BDPLF award because the Disney movie with anthropomorphized emotions didn’t even get on the list, you jerks!
ps. ::ticky::
I heard the fan saying something
The Admin says he’ll credit you
And he says he needs Filing fans to
Read the post and comment away
Was it you that said How long
How long?
They say the book recs come so thick that
You add them faster than you read
They say that Mount TBR is
A hopeless goal for all who scroll
Was it you that said How long
How long
How long to the Point of Scroll Return?
Mike Glyer he says he needs you
Mike Glyer he says he wants you
Mike Glyer he welcomes your words
How far
How far to the point of scroll return?
To the point of scroll return
How long, how long?
Today I posted lengthy comments
on the File where all can see
You wrote that when you could read it
You filked the song and sang along
Was it you that said How long
How long
How long to the Point of Scroll Return?
My compliments to Kip W for the earworm.
Re: 2.
Yet another reason I should get off my encounter-suited butt and finally visit Chicago
I think it is fair to say that opinion is divided between whether it is a film that examines misogyny or a film that indulges in it.
(15) HE BITES
Presumably Mr Reben doesn’t know about Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy.
It is a good idea, but I feel it could benefit from being more organized,otherwise they may end up with multiple copies of a small number of popular books (something like this, but hopefully not with that particular book.) They should set up an Amazon gift wish list for at least some things they would like (assuming that buying one of the books removes it from the list–i don’t know how those work.)
::progstalk::
one can’t help but admire the irony when comparing Scalzi’s article to the diarrhea that JCW offers up
predictable
The best I can google up for that is “Bonaire Donkey Protection.” Did the donkey protectors of Bonaire have a problem with Inside Out?
Darren Garrison: They should set up an Amazon gift wish list for at least some things they would like
They did. But I went through it, and there were not many spec-fic selections. So I chose to identify some women spec-fic authors of color and send books by them instead.
The Library has also got a somewhat-local independent bookstore which has agreed to participate by making recommendations and taking orders, and is offering a 20% discount for the Library Project.
clif: one can’t help but admire the irony when comparing Scalzi’s article to the diarrhea that JCW offers up
I took a brief glance at that, and got the hell out before any of the sewage got on me. Ugh.
I increasingly feel that going to JCW’s site is the modern equivilant of touring Bedlam to gawp at the mad people.
No Donkeys. Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.
BTW, does the scroll title mean this is File770’s season finale? Or just a cruel, weaponized use of an earworm?
I’m not clicking on the link to JCW’s post, because I doubt he is in conformity with Pope Francis’s call to pray for the victims and to work to end such terrible violence.
Meanwhile, if you are an American who is able to donate blood, please consider donating blood at your local blood bank. The Nebraska Blood Bank has sent blood to Orlando to aid the treatment of the survivors, and I doubt that it’s the only blood bank in the nation to do so. Something like this puts a strain on the whole system, so every donation helps. I’ve got my appointment scheduled.
Accomplishment: I gave someone an earworm for a song I don’t know.
I’ve already topped my own goal for the day. Back to bed, triumphantly!
Misery loves company:
Scalzi gets to the root of it. Similarly, the parody account of Rep. Jack Kimble tweeted yesterday to the effect that he passed a horrific house fire on his way in to work and offers them his thoughts and prayers.
It’s compassion fatigue on an institutional scale. Giving a damn is reduced to a formula: a bowl on the porch with a sign. We’re not home, but please take one thought and one prayer. Thank you, and now go someewhere we won’t see you.
Well, I was already signed up to donate blood on Thursday, so at least there’s that.
Reading-wise, I finished the last of the shortlisted novellas. Enjoyed all of them; right now, the top spot is probably oscillating between Binti and Penric’s Demon. I still have three shortlisted novels, but I’m taking a brief break first to read The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea, the third in Night Shade’s five-volume collected works of William Hope Hodgson.
Not going to go look at the JCW link. Some forms of diarrhea are extremely infectious. And I’m out of bleach.
Thanks for the reminder about donating blood.
Two Massachusetts members of Congress have publicly refused to take part in the House “moment of silence” for the Orlando victims, in protest of the House Republicans’ continued silent refusal to do anything that might stop gun violence.
If you want to pray for the dead, fine: but it’s not enough by itself, and “I prayed for them” should not be used as an argument for not doing anything to prevent future murders. And certainly not what amounts to “I prayed for the dead, so you shouldn’t try to help the living.”
I’ll argue that the JCW link deserves a look because it’s an excellent example of how someone could be taught by others to be so repulsed by what they were that they would find a rampage acceptable. It’s also a useful antidote to the idea that these shooting happen due to scary other people from some scary other place, and not due to hatreds we brew right here at home.
But I do understand that JCW places stresses on the soul and the spoons not everyone has time for.
I haven’t seen this flagged up here (though I could have missed it): Mythic Delirium have a sale on the ebook editions of all five of their Clockwork Phoenix anthologies (all major platforms) here.
Should be available for another week or so.
No Donkeys Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form seems oddly specific and exclusionary.
That’s Sierra Nevada; the town itself is in California, in Plumas County.
California has a Nevada City (the seat of Nevada County). For balance, I figure Nevada should have named Washoe County and Reno “California County” and “California City” respectively.
(At least Nevada City is in the county for which it is named. To the west, in the area where I grew up, we have Yuba County (seat Marysville), just across the river from Sutter County (seat Yuba City). Yes, Yuba City isn’t in Yuba County.)
Shrek was nominated so it must be a new rule.
I thought it referred to the creatives behind the films, like… Bob Donkey and… Martha Mule… and….um…
It means we’re no longer in Kansas. The rest of the band has asked us to leave. Maybe we can start Toto Two.
@TYP: Oh all right.
I see he falls straight into the “This kind of thing can’t be avoided” falacy regarding gun control.
Yes, the murderer was a security guard. In the vast majority of the developed world a civilian security guard would not be given lethal weaponry, and even if he was, he wouldn’t expect to take such things home with him.
I grew up in the UK, so my bloods no good, apparently.
As more comes out, sounds like the Orlando murderer was conflicted/confused/struggling with his own sexuality. So sad for all the victims.