139 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/22/16 Careful With That Scroll, Eugene”

1. ::ticky::

2. Ticky ticky bang bang?

3. Well done, Aaron – you’ve successfully invaded Beale’s head.

   Oh, and Teddy? Fourth Generation *that*, you narcissistic loon.

4. (6) SHOUTING YOURSELF HORSE

   A slow clap for the caption there, Mike.

5. Today’s Meredith Moment:

   Simon & Schuster has a bunch of their Star Trek tie-in novels on sale for $1.99 and $2.99 on Kindle (don’t know about other formats, but am guessing so).

6. Fifth?

7. Today’s Meredith Moment, Part II:

   Storybundle has a new Adventure Sci-Fi Bundle out, with 7 books for as little as $8, or 14 books for as little as $16.

8. Fifth?

   ETA, true fifth!

9. And I want one of those Nerf guns (16) for dealing with lusers.

10. Sorry, IanP, I guess I ninja’d you. 😉

11. (6) SHOUTING YOURSELF HORSE. – ::points:: Nerrrrrrrrrrrd Fight!

    (7) UP ABOVE THE WORLD SO HIGH. – I’m….kinda tempted actually. I really enjoyed stuff like Dining in the Dark etc, this seems fun.

    (10) THE MIGHTY AMAZON. – I wonder if she’ll be President Prince…I’m gonna give Supergirl a chance. It was really uneven, but had it’s moments. Give me more J’onn, Flash, and the Dorky Danvers Duo, and I’m sold.

12. Careful With That Scroll, Eugene

    …it causes condensation!

    Non-sequential fifth

13. Pixel, Pixel, Pixel of the Scroll. Watch out for that Filer. Splat!

14. (6) Doesn’t Teddy understand that people sometimes want an exciting story that moves from A to B and then lets them get on with their real lives? I’m sure the one-man-army trope doesn’t exist in real life, but it allows the film hero to survive more than the thirty seconds he would on Earth Prime.

15. (6) So much wrong, I’ll stop at pointing out that “how cavalry was, and is, used on the battlefield. It is a secondary arm” covers everything from Egyptians charioteer, Alexander’s hetairoi, medieval knights, Napoleonic cuirassiers, Soviet cavalry-mechanized units of WW2, right up to the mechanized and airborne units that the US Army insists on calling cavalry.
    Saying that all of these forces are to be considered a “secondary arm” seems an oversimplificiation, to say the least,

16. 2). These are unnecessary arguments: neither Shelley, nor Verne, nor Wells (nor Lucien or de Bergerac or ‘The Resident’, or Bacon or Swift or Voltaire) wrote “science fiction”.

    It wasn’t defined, as a genre, until 1926.

    Gernsback did recognize that certain works by Wells, Verne, Poe and others (Leinster, for example) had written works that largely exemplified what he was calling “scientifiction”, and he used them as examples of “the kind of thing he was looking for”, but they aren’t and can’t be “SF” as they predate the genre. Like someone trying to define an automobile before autos might point to a train and say “something like that, but capable of running off the rails….”

    “…first, there are absolutely no grounds for arguing that anything resembling a ‘history of science fiction’ actually existed as a historical fact in contemporary perceptions before the nineteenth century; and second, any wide understanding of science fiction as a genre was at best limited and flawed until Gernsback’s breakthrough in the 1920s. So, if we define a genre as consisting of a body of texts related by a shared understanding of that genre as recorded in contemporary commentary, than a true history of science fiction as a genre must begin in 1926, at the time when Gernsback defined science fiction, offered a critical theory concerning its nature, purposes and origins, and persuaded many others to accept and extend his ideas.”

    “Any genre, to delineate and develop itself, looks to works outside that genre for inspiration and models…[and]…if science fiction can be admitted to the groves of academe only on the basis of its high literary quality, then the case for science fiction must be based on the demonstrated excellence of the works that emerged from the tradition and label of ‘science fiction’, not on the number of distinguished works of the past and present outside that tradition…calling William Shakespeare a science fiction writer does not and cannot make science fiction a respectable genre.” Both by Westfahl – The Mechanics of Wonder

    supporting that – Malzberg -” I think that he (Gernsback) did us a great service and that were it not for Gernsback, science fiction as we understand it would not exist…’Science fiction builds on science fiction’, Asimov said once, and that truth is at the center of the form. Before Gernsback gave it a name…the literature did not exist; before he gave it a medium of exclusivity, its dim antecedents were scattered through a range of popular and restricted writing without order, overlap or sequence. It was the creation of a label and a medium which gave the genre its exclusivity and a place in which it could begin that dialogue,”

    Trillion Year Spree, Aldiss’ history that attempts to chart an historical past for SF was largely an attempt to give SF a genealogy that would be respectable to academe, and was written (as Billion Year Spree) during a time when the literature was under attack as “trash”. Being able to say “oh yeah!?! Well Bill the Scribbler wrote some too!” was an effective rejoinder, but not an accurate argument. The fact that some in academe bought it (which led to the acceptance of the genre as worthy of academic study and research) reflects on academe, but does not change the reality.

    Sorry for the long discourse, but if we’re going to argue about what the true origins of the genre are, it helps to be accurate. Shelley is the “mother” of SF – certainly – even if what she wrote wasn’t, couldn’t be, Science Fiction. Same goes for the twin “fathers”. They get credit for pointing the way.

17. “how cavalry was, and is, used on the battlefield. It is a secondary arm”

    The last major military that thought that way that I can think of were the Romans, and even they shifted to the Legions being heavy cavalry. You have foot soldiers to hold the ground, ranged weapons (everything from archers to ground attack aircraft via cannon and muskets) to poke holes in their ranks, and cavalry to go through those gaps and make the opposition run away. The details and equipment change, but the overall methods stay the same.

18. (6) I was curious about the source of Beale’s description of infantry as the “queen of the battlefield”, since it was a sentiment entirely at odds with what I know about medieval attitudes to war. It appears to come from a book titled Gluckhafte Strategie that was published in Germany in 1942. I won’t post a picture of the cover here, but if you want to confirm suspicions about who published it based on that time and place here’s a link: https://p2.liveauctioneers.com/1225/24042/8630423_1_l.jpg

    Ah, well, I suppose that — as he’s done a number of times with similar things in the past — Beale would say that one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

19. Heh, modern British Light Cavalry and Armoured Cavalry are the scouts for the main force. If the little Elk boy thinks that’s secondary I wouldn’t want to be in any army he commanded.

20. Matthew Johnson on June 23, 2016 at 3:42 am said:
    (6) I was curious about the source of Beale’s description of infantry as the “queen of the battlefield”

    I think someone confused war and Warsteiner (“Die Königin unter den Bieren”)

21. I wasn’t planning on making a timelapse yesterday, but then the sunset out the office windows turned golden, and so out went the GoPro. I ended up capturing the start of a violent thunderstorm that went on all night, Gotterdammerung before the referendum…

22. 2. Mark Twain said – ‘It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did.’

    Mary Shelley didn’t invent SF, any more than Wells or Verne or Gernsback did. Then again, she didn’t invent SF any less than they did either.

    6. I seem to have lost the ability to take pleasure in VD being wrong. Have I become so jaded?

    10. Kickass.

23. @ Matthew Johnson:

    The characterization of infantry as “the queen of battle” goes back well before 1942, and we sang it in jodie calls in (American) boot camp. Vox is what he is, but I don’t think he got that rhetorical figure from the Nazis.

24. Before the oxygen was discovered in 1773, people didn’t breathe oxygen. They couldn’t, because it wasn’t defined then. It is a wonder people didn’t suffocate.

25. @Paul_A

    Having read some of his fiction, I can assure that Teddy Beale is quite, quite innocent of any notion of telling an exciting story, or moving it quickly from Point A to Point B. I think he reserves much of his storytelling ability for the source of his money.

    @Matthew Johnson

    I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover such a symbol on the cover of a book Teddy may have referenced.

    @Ianp

    I think we may safely assume that Teddy has the typical regard for scouting, logistics, and all the un-sexy parts of the military machine that so many armchair tough-guys have.

26. @Hampus – that’s specious and I’m sure you know it.

    Literature is evolutionary in nature. There were no chickens before chickens, but plenty of steps necessary steps leading to that chicken. Most of the chicken was there, but it still wasn’t a “chicken”.

27. steve davidson:

    It wasn’t defined, as a genre, until 1926.
    […] they aren’t and can’t be “SF” as they predate the genre.

    Would a rose by any other name not smell as sweet? Where there no roses before someone defined what a rose is?

    The idea that a genre doesn’t exist until someone names it seems rather silly. In general descriptions are made after there is something to describe – meaning you will usually have examples of a thing that predates the common label used to describe it.

    Like someone trying to define an automobile before autos might point to a train and say “something like that, but capable of running off the rails….”

    If we can trust Wikipedia, the word automobile was first adopted in English in 1897. Which is a long time after the first self-propelled road vehicles.

28. Bah! Of all the ahistorical nonsense! Everyone with a working knowledge of history knows THIS is the Queen of battle:

    https://youtu.be/0Hi8IWqic0U

29. [Set the godstalk for the heart of the sun]

30. @Johan – it’s not the “naming” we’re talking about here, it’s the DEFINING of the elements that go into making it a unique form of literature AND the establishment of critical commentary that accompanies the definition.

    The first auto was created in 1807 – predating the term by nearly a century.

    But glad you brought the automobile into the discussion.

    Take a look at a horse drawn carriage. Wheels, brakes, motive force (attached horses), steering mechanism, seats, storage.

    It’s got most of the characteristics of an auto – but it clearly isn’t one. We can point to it and say “IF the “engine” were to become self-contained within the vehicle….”

    It most certainly is a “vehicle”, a class that includes the auto, just as SF is “literature”. But it is not an automobile as an automobile is defined.

31. It seems odd to me to argue that “scientifiction” counts as Proper SF, but “scientific romance” doesn’t.

32. As Steve Davidson said, it’s not just about there being a novel having “scientific” elements in it–it’s about SF existing as a genre, as a recognizable group of books that have certain elements in common and a relationship to each other. Not to mention a recognizable community of readers. Those ideas of SF start with Gernsback. Shelley and Verne wrote books with “scientific” elements but they weren’t necessarily seen as authors who were doing similar things (they weren’t, really) or in relationship to each other.

    And I think that’s Gary Westfahl you’re citing, yes, Steve? For those interested, his books on Gernsback make this argument quite well.

33. @Coleman “romance” was a term largely interchangeable with “fantasy” at the time. Further, it referred to a “fantasy” that had scientific elements, but not handled as nor necessarily possessing the three primary identifying criteria of science fiction (stf):

    “…a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” (Gernsback, editorial, 4/26)

    and of course, was a term applied to some fiction in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

    The line of demarcation is 1926, or, if we credit the idea that Gernsback was groping towards it a bit earlier (which is reasonable given what we know) then from 8/23 with the “All Scientific Fiction Number” of Science and Invention.

    Prior to that, no one was describing what Verne or Wells, Poe, etc., wrote as belonging to a separate genre with its own unique set of criteria.

    (Failure to respond to future commentary is due to absence, not lack of interest. I’l be back later this afternoon. In the meantime, my detractors would do themselves a good turn if they were to read Westfahl’s The Mechanics of Wonder, which makes the case far better than I ever could. My review and discourse on it is available for a quick read….)

34. @steve davidson et al.: I think we’ve had this discussion before, and my position hasn’t changed – science fiction may have been named by Hugo Gernsback, but it’s defined by the writers who created it, a group which includes Wells, Jules Verne and Mary Shelley, as well as a whole lot of others.

35. @L. Yes – The Mechanics of Wonder.

    It very artfully overturns all of the Aldiss/Campbell/Billion Year Spree arguments – not in general but in specific response to each and every claim made.

    Part of the “reluctance” to admit the superiority of Westfahl’s treatise is the very fact that it undermines not just Aldiss, but our revered JWC as well (which is pretty much heresy in the field).

    Gotta go. Be back later!

36. arrrrrgh @Wright. More later! 🙂

37. @L

    By offering a definition Gernsback certainly would have set boundaries for analysis and criticism but that doesn’t strike me as creating the genre. In what elements are Wells or Verne lacking that doesn’t meet the definition of Science Fiction?

38. Everybody was kung-fu filin’.

    When I worked in the physics department at U of H, one of the professors was named Dr. Hu. Special bonus: his given name is Bam-Bi.

    Cool how super-ventriloquism works. Very effective, but the speaker has to be right around a corner and no more than seven feet away. (My favorite Krypto panel is where he’s in the Legion of Super Canines, and the dog with the giant crystal ball forehead shows him Superboy under a chunk of Green K. “Yip yip!” says Kryp, “My master is in danger!” They don’t make ’em like that any more, lads. And we never see Tusky Husky or Hot Dog or Paw Pooch around any more. I guess the LSC was dissolved, possibly by the government. They don’t come right out and say it, but their salutes give the impression that they were kryptofascists.

39. “…of course it is true that science fiction did not appear out of nowhere in the early twentieth century; of course it emerged from a wide and growing awareness of scientific knowledge and its impact which had its roots in the Renaissance and can be increasingly detected in a wide variety of works; of course it can be compared and related to authors and writings far beyond the scope of its tradition. I do not dispute the basic truths in these approaches; what angers me is what others will make of them. For one thing, the very structure of these discussions implies some sense of equivalence: modern science fiction is one of many interesting reactions to the appearance of science, all of which are presumably worthy of equal attention. What is minimized in these presentations is the fact that all these other reactions to science appeared in the scattered works of authors from many traditions which never coalesced into a single, powerful movement; modern science fiction, beginning from the humblest origins imaginable, quickly grew into a recognizable and popular literary genre which came to dominate all discussions of the issue of science and literature. To explain this phenomenon, one must focus on what makes science fiction so different from these other responses; obsessive quests for links with other forms of literature then become little more than a distraction.” Westfahl

40. @Jonathan Edelstein: Thanks for the correction. I followed the phrase to the book British Armoured Divisions and Their Commanders, 1939-1945, which cites the phrase as being a chapter title in Gluckhafte Strategie, but now that I take a closer look I can see that it doesn’t actually ascribe the origin of the phrase to that book.

41. @Kip W: would that fascists were responding to “shake” or “high five”!

42. I love definitional arguments. I still maintain that pretty much every argument is actually one because it’s no fun if it turns out that everyone agrees on the terms.

    In this case, I certainly agree that Gernsback defined something that was later called Science Fiction and promoted the coverage of works that could be fitted into that definition (and, yes, some that clearly did not.) I am not sure that this necessarily makes him the sole arbiter of the term, merely the sole arbiter of his own definition. At least JWC was honest about his definition.

43. Re: 2)

    Regardless of how one classifies something, it’s possible to express one’s feelings about a work. For Ashley, Wells *feels* like science fiction. Shelley does not.

    Copernicus and Bruno both propounded natural philosophic theories before science was a thing. Copernicus *feels* like science. Bruno does not.

44. Now Slate is getting into the Battle of the Bastards with an animated video:

    The Military Strategy of the Battle of the Bastards, Explained

45. RE: The Battle of the Bastards
    Michael Livingston, an author and professor of medieval literature at The Citadel, has thoughts on the battle.
    I trust Mr. Livingston’s opinions on the matter far more than Mr. Beale’s.

46. (3) The article about the Suicide Squad soundtrack doesn’t mention Grimes at all, who is contributing a song called (appropriate to today’s discussion) “Medieval Warfare”. Grimes is of sci-fi fan interest all her own with a Dune concept album, a recent Wachowski-esque video accompanying a song about if Michael Corleone was a vampire, and more.

47. @David Bain – a close analysis of JWC’s definition will reveal that it is, at most, a re-casting of Gernsback’s, perhaps with a slight bit of expansion of terms thrown in. IF JWC’s definition is seen as foundational, then Gernsback’s is the foundation on which it rests.

48. (6) Beale would do better when talking about “historical plausibility” if he knew some actual history. The historical inspirations for A Song of Ice and Fire are pretty clearly the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War (Martin has cited Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings historical fiction series as an influence on his own work), and to a lesser extent some relatively contemporaneous conflicts such as the First War of Scottish Independence. When one looks to the accounts of actual battles from those conflicts one sees cavalry being used in exactly the way it was depicted in the most recent Game of Thrones episode, at battles such as Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers, Verneuil, Falkirk, and Lunalonge. Beale’s imagined idea of how cavalry was deployed is contradicted by the actual history of how cavalry was actually used in historical battles.

    Beale’s claims concerning cavalry use relate primarily to their deployment in later centuries, mostly from the 16th century through 18th. On the other hand, cavalry was deployed by both sides in a frontal charge at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 (and the cavalry engagement was a decisive factor in the battle), so the idea that cavalry was only used for support, and was never used in the way seen in Battle of the Bastards is simply wrong.

49. I hadn’t read Gernsback’s definition in a good long while. It calls out antecedent works right in it’s own statement. From Amazing Stories, April 1926:

    “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H G Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading – they are always instructive. They supply knowledge … in a very palatable form … New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow … Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written … Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.”

50. [ticky]

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