(1) TOP COMICS. NPR asked followers the name their favorite comics and graphic novels. Here are the results: “Let’s Get Graphic: 100 Favorite Comics And Graphic Novels”.
We assembled an amazing team of critics and creators to help winnow down more than 7,000 nominations to this final list of 100 great comics for all ages and tastes, from early readers to adults-only.
This isn’t meant as a comprehensive list of the “best” or “most important” or “most influential” comics, of course. It’s a lot more personal and idiosyncratic than that, because we asked folks to name the comics they loved. That means you’ll find enormously popular mainstays like Maus and Fun Home jostling for space alongside newer work that’s awaiting a wider audience (Check Please, anyone?).
Lots of good stuff on this list. Here’s an absolutely chosen-at-random example:
Astro City
by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
At once a sprawling adventure anthology and a witty metariff on the long, whimsical history of the superhero genre, Astro City offers a bracingly bright rejoinder to “grim-and-gritty” superhero storytelling. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson — with Alex Ross supplying character designs and painted covers — don’t merely people their fictional metropolis with analogues of notable heroes, though there are plenty of those on hand. The universe they’ve created pays loving homage to familiar characters and storylines even as it digs deep to continually invent new stories and feature new perspectives. Astro City is a hopeful place that dares to believe in heroes, sincerely and unabashedly; reading it, you will too.
(2) LAST YEAR’S HARDEST SF SHORT FICTION. Rocket Stack Rank has a new post surveying “Hard SF in 2016”.
Greg Hullender explains, “We’d have done this earlier in the year, but we were experimenting with new features like place and time, and we ended up gradually going back through all 814 stories annotating them. Still, I think the result is of interest.
It has been eighteen months since we explored the Health of Hard Science Fiction in 2015 (Short Fiction), so we’re overdue to take a look at 2016. This report divides into three sections:
- A selection of 42 of the best hard SF stories of 2016 together with links to the ones that are free online.
- A list of 21 controversial SF stories of 2016, where RSR disagreed with other reviewers.
- A detailed analysis of hard SF in 2016 with charts and graphs.
(3) TZ REBOOT. Can this writer bring The Twilight Zone back to life? “Christine Lavaf to Pen ‘The Twilight Zone’ Reboot”.
Screenwriter Christine Lavaf is working on a reboot of The Twilight Zone.
Warner Bros has been trying to develop the new movie version of the hit horror since 2009 and a number of directors were lined up to helm the production, but each left the project before shooting could begin.
However, Warner Bros has now announced Christine will be working on the script despite a director having not yet been found to oversee the production, according to Variety.
The original plan for the movie was for it to be inspired by the 1983 Twilight Zone: The Movie horror, which was produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis and had four segments each with a different director. But the new movie will reportedly follow just one story, which will include elements of The Twilight Zone universe.
(4) DRAWING A BLANK. Australian artist Nick Stathopoulos told his Facebook readers “No Archibald joy this year.”
Last year his painting of Deng Adut was a runner-up for the Archibald Prize for portraits — awarded annually to the best portrait, “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia” – and the winner of the Archibald Prize People’s Choice award.
Stathopoulos is a long-time fan, 10-time winner of the Australian NatCon’s Ditmar Award, and a past Hugo and Chesley Award nominee. He is frequently in contention for the annual Archibald awards.
(5) ARTISTS AT WORK. The Meow Wolf “art collective” in Santa Fe got their start with a $3.5 million investment from George R.R. Martin, and many of their “immersive installations” are sf related. Natalie Eggert’s article “This 140-Person Art Collective Is Pursuing An Alternative Model For Artists to Make A Living” for Artsy talks about how Meow Wolf has created 140 jobs with income coming from people who pay $20 to look at their “immersive installations.”
Since the Santa Fe-based art collective Meow Wolf opened its permanent installation, the House of Eternal Return, in March 2016, the project has been an unmitigated success in terms of viewership and profits. Housed in a 20,000-square-foot former bowling alley, the sprawling interactive artwork welcomed 400,000 visitors in its first year—nearly four times as many as expected—and brought in $6 million in revenue for the collective’s more than 100 members.
One of the most popular attractions in Santa Fe, the House of Eternal Return invites visitors into an elaborate Victorian house that is experiencing rifts in space-time. Open up the refrigerator or a closet door and get swept away into a new environment, each one designed by different artists of the Meow Wolf collective. There is no set route to follow and you can climb on, crawl through, and touch everything in sight. Tickets to enter the fun-house-like installation cost $20 for adults (on par with admission to a New York museum), with discounted rates available for New Mexico residents, children, senior citizens, and the military.
The installation’s sci-fi narrative, lawless abandon, and production quality have captured the imaginations of viewers, while its success has caught the art world’s attention. Could this be a sustainable, alternative avenue for artists to collaborate and make a living outside of traditional art world models?
(6) SENDAK BOOK MS. REDISCOVERED. Atlas Obscura reports: “Found: An Unpublished Manuscript by Maurice Sendak”.
Since the beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak died in 2012, the foundation set up in his name has been working to collect and sort through his artwork and the records of his life. While working through some old files, Lynn Caponera, the president of the foundation, found the typewritten manuscript for a book. When she looked more closely at it, she realized it was story she didn’t remember, reports Publishers Weekly.
What she had found was the story for Presto and Zesto in Limboland, a work that Sendak and collaborator Arthur Yorinks had worked on in the 1990s and never published. “In all honesty, we just forgot it,” Yorinks told Publishers Weekly.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 12, 2013 — Pacific Rim debuted.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born July 12, 1912 — Artist Joseph Mungaini, who illustrated the 1962 Oscar-nominated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright based on Ray Bradbury’s story.
(9) LUCY LIU. Rebecca Rubin in Variety says that Lucy Liu will direct the first episode of season 2 of Luke Cage coming in 2018. She previously directed four episodes of Elementary.
(10) STAND BY FOR A NEW THEORY. NPR’s Glen Weldon says new Spider-Man wins because we see learning rather than origin: “Origin-al Sin: What Hollywood Must Learn From ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming'”.
Spider-Man: Homecoming dispenses with his origin story completely, which is, at this point, a wise move. Given Spidey’s status as Marvel’s flagship character and his concurrent cultural saturation, it’s perhaps even inevitable, because: We know.
We get it. Spider-bite, spider powers, great responsibility. We’ve, all of us, been there.
And yet! Even without seeing precisely how and why Peter Parker gets from the here of normal life to the there of fantastic, thwippy powers, Tom Holland is eminently, achingly relatable. His Peter is someone in whom we easily see ourselves at our most excited and anxious. Which is the whole secret.
(11) THIS SUCKS. Using ROVs to scoop up invasive species: “Can a robot help solve the Atlantic’s lionfish problem?”. There’s a video report at the link.
Robots in Service of the Environment has designed an underwater robot to combat a growing problem in the Atlantic Ocean: the invasive lionfish.
(12) MAJOR DEVELOPMENT. A league of their own? Overwatch starts city-based videogaming league: “Overwatch: Bigger than the Premier League?”
Its developer Activision Blizzard has just announced the first seven team owners for a forthcoming league. It believes, in time, the tournament could prove more lucrative than the UK’s Premier League – football’s highest-earning competition.
Several of the successful bidders have made their mark with traditional sports teams, and the buy-in price has not been cheap.
The BBC understands the rights cost $20m (£15.5m) per squad. For that, owners get the promise of a 50% revenue split with the Overwatch League itself for future earnings.
The fast-paced cartoon-like shooter was designed to appeal to both players and spectators. It’s low on gore and features a racial mix of male and female heroes, including a gay character – a relative rarity in gaming.
(13) THEY’RE PINK. Adweek covers a parody of female-targeted products: “‘Cards Against Humanity for Her’ Is the Same Game, but the Box Is Pink and It Costs $5 More”.
In a savage parody of women-targeted products like Bic for Her pens, and Cosmo and Seat’s car for women, Cards Against Humanity has released Cards Against Humanity for Her. It’s the exact same game as the original, but comes in a pink box and costs $5 more.
The press release is a gold mine of hilarity.
“We crunched the numbers, and to our surprise, we found that women buy more than 50 percent of games,” said Cards Against Humanity community director Jenn Bane. “We decided that hey, it’s 2017, it’s time for women to have a spot at the table, and nevertheless, she persisted. That’s why we made Cards Against Humanity for Her. It’s trendy, stylish, and easy to understand. And it’s pink.”
Bane added: “Women love the color pink.”
The game is available for $30 on CardsAgainstHumanityForHer.com, which has all sorts of ridiculous photos and GIFs. The limited-edition version “is expected to sell out,” the brand said.
From the FAQ (where it’s in pink text).
When I inevitably purchase this without reading carefully and then find out it’s the same cards as the original Cards Against Humanity, can I return it and get my money back? That color looks great on you! No.
(14) SHARKE REPELLENT. Mark-kitteh sent these links (and the headline) to the latest posts by the Shadow Clarke jury. He adds, “Only two of these, but the Becky Chambers roundtable is likely to provide enough rises in blood-pressure on its own.”
- “‘We need to talk about COCOA’: A Shadow Clarke Discussion of Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit” – Nick Hubble introduces the jury’s remarks.
The inclusion of A Closed and Common Orbit on this year’s Clarke shortlist follows hard on the heels of Chambers’s 2016 shortlisting for her debut novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. In a very short time, Chambers’s books have proven extraordinarily popular and drawn an enthusiastic fan response. Unsurprisingly, ACACO has also been shortlisted for the 2017 Hugo. The novel has also drawn praise from reviewers, such as Adam Roberts in the Guardian. However, despite the shadow Clarke jury being split fifty-fifty between those who found ACACO to be a compulsive read and those who struggled to find any interest in it whatsoever, this is also the novel that has come closest to unifying what is often a more diverse body of opinion than it might appear from the outside. We are unanimous in thinking that ACACO is not one of the six best SF novels of the year and, in contrast to the other five works on the list, there is nobody among us who would make any kind of case for its inclusion on the Clarke shortlist.
I am possibly not the right audience for this novel. I have read a number of stories by Yoon Ha Lee before this without being particularly impressed by any of them. The novel, Ninefox Gambit crystallized some of those discontents. In no particular order:
1: Yoon Ha Lee has read too much Iain M. Banks. The influence is everywhere and inescapable: the grotesque deaths, the over-elaborate weapons (including one I couldn’t help identifying as the Lazy Gun from Against a Dark Background), and, of course, the central conceit in which the mind of an ancient general is implanted in a younger person on a suicide mission is a straight lift from Look to Windward. But Banks’s humanity is missing. With Banks you always knew where the author stood, ethically and emotionally; not so with Lee, this is a cold book.
(15) FROM PERKY TO UNBEATABLE. Lesley Goldberg of The Hollywood Reporter, in “Marvel’s New Warriors Sets Its Cast–Including Squirrel Girl”, says that the cast of this ten-episode series on Freeform has been set, and Milana Vayntrub, best known as the Perky Salesperson in 5,271,009 AT&T commercials, has been cast as Squirrel Girl.
Milana Vayntrub (This Is Us) has landed the breakout role of Squirrel Girl, while Baby Daddy grad Derek Theler will stay in business with Freeform after landing the role of Mister Immortal in Marvel’s first live-action scripted comedy.
The duo lead the ensemble cast in the 10-episode series about six young people learning to cope with their abilities in a world where bad guys can be as terrifying as bad dates. Joining Vayntrub and Theler are Jeremy Tardy as Night Thrasher, Calum Worthy as Speedball, Matthew Moy as Microbe and Kate Comer as Debrii.
(16) ETCHED IN STONE. It’s been awhile since I checked in on Declan Finn, and I found one of his posts on Superversive SF that could lead to lively discussion.
In “Pius Rules for Writers”, Declan Finn’s advice comes from his viewpoint as a reader.
I was recently asked what rules, as I reader, I wish writers would follow. I came up with a few.
Rule #1: Don’t preach at me. Tell the damn story…
I think this is self explanatory. Heck, even Star Trek IV, which is straight up “save the whales,” did a fairly good job of this. It was mostly a character driven comedy: let’s take all of our characters as fish and through them so far out of the water they’re in a different planet, and watch the fun start. Even the whales that must be saved for the sake of all of Earth are little more than MacGuffin devices, there for the story to happen.
But 2012? Or The Day After Tomorrow? Or Avatar? Kill me now.
Serious, I went out of my way to make A Pius Man: A Holy Thriller about the history of a Church, complete with philosophy, and it somehow still managed to be less preachy than any of these “climate change” films.
(17) NEWMAN’S NEXT. Joel Cunningham of the B&N Sci-FI & Fantasy Blog has great news for Planetfall fans (and a cover reveal) in “Return to Emma Newman’s Planetfall Universe in Before Mars”.
I still remember the feeling of closing the cover on a early, bound manuscript copy of Emma Newman’s Planetfall in 2015, sure I had read one of the finest science fiction novels of the year—even though it was only April (I wasn’t wrong).
Considering it’s a complete work, I was surprised—and very pleased—at the arrival of After Atlas, a standalone companion novel set in the same world—another book that, incidentally, turned out to rank with the best of its year (but don’t just take our word for it).
I just can quit being fascinated by this setting—a near future in which 3D printing technology has made resources plentiful, but post-scarcity living has not been evenly distributed, where missions to the stars only expose the dark secrets within the human heart—and it seems Newman can’t quite break away from it either: she’s writing at least two more books in the Planetfall series, and today,we’re showing off the cover of the third, Before Mars, arriving in April 2018 from Ace Books….
(18) NOT YOUR TYPICAL POLICE SHOOTING. Consenting cosplayers suffered a tragic interruption: “Police Shoot People Dressed As The Joker And Harley Quinn”.
Australian police shot a man and a woman dressed as comic book characters while they performed a sexual act at a nightclub early Saturday morning, news.com.au reported. The man and the woman were dressed as the Joker and Harley Quinn.
Dale Ewins, 35, was shot in the stomach by police. Authorities said they shot him because he pointed his toy gun at them and they believed it was a real weapon. However, club security said Ewins did not aim the gun at them.
Zita Sukys, 37, was shot in the leg. Both were attending the Saints & Sinners Ball, described as a party “for Australian swingers and those who are just curious.” Promotions for the party also said it has “a well-earned reputation as Australia’s, if not the world’s, raunchiest party.”
(19) FAN FASHION. The Dublin in 2019 bidders think you would look great in their logo shirt. Half-off sale!
(20 TOON FASHION. Why Cartoon Characters Wear Gloves is a video from Vox which goes back to 1900 to answer this question.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Greg Hullender, Chip Hitchcock, and Mark-kitteh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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@Paul Weimer: I have probably analysed the Wonder Woman film far too much, and in so doing I realised something about the superhero origin stories.
An origin story is a function of a story, but it’s not a story in and of itself. The reason why Spiderman’s origin story feels much more relatable than the ones of Batman or Superman (and thus has been retold so often) is that Spiderman’s origin story is a coming of age story.
But Diana’s origin story in Wonder Woman is also a coming of age story, and it beats the pants of the Spiderman’s origin story in the lessons it teaches her and in the way it teaches them.
(Which makes me worry about what future Wonder Woman films are going to look like; a coming of age story doesn’t lend itself to sequels.)
Paul Weimer: re Priest: I definitely think of him as very much in the literary end of the SF pool.
I don’t mean that I consider his books SF-Lit. I consider them “SF Lite”. I’m mystified that he is called a “science fiction” author, because there was so little science of any kind in the books of his that I read, that I consider them fantasy.
Likewise with the two David Mitchell books I have read, and he’s also a Sharke darling.
Which is why I find the Sharkes prattling on about “real SF” more than a little hilarious.
(14) And Ninefox Gambit; Cross-posting with the article:
—
I’ve been blown away by some of YHLee’s previous stories, but my reaction to Ninefox was very similar to Kincaid’s.
Particularly, I was annoyed and frustrated by the sense that the whole book was treading water until the big finale. I felt that pretty much right from the start, it was self-evident that (( Wrqnb unq uvqqra zbgvirf naq jnfa’g penml ng nyy )), and the whole book was just kind of hanging around until it’s time to find out the whole story. (Which made me doubly frustrated to learn that the *next* book ((qba’g rira unir Wrqnb naq Purevf nf CBI punenpgref.)). It’s as though the grand big thing everything’s meant to be about isn’t capable of actually sustaining this story. Instead, it’s just kind of dangled as bait.)
Regarding (7), the vagueness of the whole calendrical magic and heresy: I’d phrase it a little differently. The concept was very clear to me, and it’s pretty cool: It’s taking the inverted belief of Pratchett’s “Small Gods,” where believing in gods and symbols is what gives them their power, and ruthlessly weaponizing it: building a social system that supports *your* symbols and props up *your* power. (The classic White Wolf RPG “Mage: The Ascension” has a somewhat similar premise…)
My problem wasn’t that I don’t know how it works; I’m OK with some stuff being hand-wavey. My problem was that it was so *nonspecific*. For all the focus on calendrical systems, there was hardly any mention at all of what “magic” powers the Hexarchate’s calendar might give them. Does it shield them from weapons? Make them breathe underwater? Keep them drugged and loyal? Reincarnate them if they die? Who knows?
We have absolutely no clue what type or magnitude of effect is possible under these rules, which leaves all the “big” effects feeling really arbitrary. “Oh, I guess they can maybe have a huge shield. In this one place. And nowhere else. For some reason.” “Oh, I guess they have magic effects that do lots of gruesome damage, because that’s what’s happening now. OK.”
So, yeah, “How does it work” doesn’t bother me; but failing to answer “What are its immediate implications and capabilities” really soured me a lot.
@Msb: Putting on my Gary Farber hat:
“It’s still Le Guin. Not LeGuin, or Leguin or…”
Taking off the Gary Farber hat: a lot of us manage to leave out the space, and I don’t think Ursula checks all that often….
@Paul Weimer (10): That would be the new OL…which IMO sucked the joy out of the title, and that effort to take an anthology show and morph it into something resembling a serial show was one of the, urr, suckers…
@Steve Yeah. Since it was on Cable and rarely had access to Cable TV, I only saw it sporadically, especially when I was traveling and the hotel happened to have it on TV…
@JJ
Sorry I wasn’t clear. In general, although not an absolute scale, literary SF tends toward much less core genre elements, or science, or it puts them far less centrally.
I find it very disappointing that the attempts of the Sharke group to bring real literary criticism to appraise the Clarke nominees gets them dismissed as pretentious assholes.
You have mistaken pretentious assholery for real literary criticism.
My views are about as far from the Puppies as it is possible to be, but I have not been impressed by most of recent Hugo winners because so many have been light-weight crowd-pleasers
The Pups whined about how the Hugos were wrong because they were too literary. You are now here complaining that the Hugos are wrong because they aren’t literary enough. You’re more like them than you think, just in mirror-image form.
JJ: It is so easy and glib to dismiss Priest as “SF-Lite”. Maybe you mean that he doesn’t produce high-tech far-future fiction, but I would argue that he gave us one of very few original SF concepts in “Inverted World”, and highly original takes on time travel (“A Dream of Wessex”), alternate realities (“The Separation”), matter transmission (The Prestige), as well as questions of identity and personal interpretations of the world in most of his work.
Maybe his style and obsessions just do not cross the Atlantic well, but surely the film of “The Prestige” made some impact.
Aaron: I thought that I was making a serious point, not putting myself up for insults. Your remarks are worthy of the Puppies.
I’m out of here. Don’t bother to reply.
(16) The priest who must praise himself often finds that he has a congregation of one.
I thought that I was making a serious point, not putting myself up for insults.
Well, maybe not coming off like a pretentious asshole would have been a good place to start.
Allan Lloyd: Maybe his style and obsessions just do not cross the Atlantic well
I don’t think that his nationality has anything to do with it. I’ve read and massively enjoyed lots of UK Authors: Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, just off the top of my head.
I think it’s because I found The Gradual and The Adjacent to be cases of “here, I’ll tease you with the hope that this is actually going to be science fiction, then wander off to fantasyland with no explanation, and then just completely lose the plot altogether”.
Allan Lloyd: but surely the film of “The Prestige” made some impact
Why yes, yes it did. The movie finished, and I thought “what a fucking cheat”. Yet another case of “here, I’ll tease you with the hope that this is actually going to be science fiction, then wander off to fantasyland”. Which is why I’ve never bothered reading the book.
I am…amused I guess is the best word, at the assertion that Yoon has obviously read too much Banks. I honestly have no idea how much Banks he’s read, but I’ve become really…intrigued by how often readers or reviewers assert very confidently that X was an influence on an author, or they were obviously imitating Y. In my own personal experience, such assumptions are unlikely to be anywhere near accurate unless the reviewer in question has an extremely similar reading history to the author.
Everyone has their own preferences, and (as Judge John Hodgeman has repeatedly ruled) you like what you like. One of the things I love about SFF is how much variety there is–if you want mindless blowing-up of planets you can have it. If you want more thinky explosions you can get those too. Romance? Murder mystery? Sure, we got it! You’re into super “literary” stuff with just enough speculative element to notice? Right over here! Maybe you want all of those things just on different days, right? No problem, we’ve got it. Honestly I think that the observation that SFF is a mode, rather than a genre is spot-on.
That said, I think there are folks who are happy to grab onto that observation because then they can like what they like without getting dirtied by that “genre” label. I think most of the “literary” side of writing and reading does fine using and accepting sfnal elements, it’s increasingly obvious they’re perfectly comfortable with it, which is awesome. But SFF is what it is–it’s fruitless and kind of silly to try to distance yourself from genre while claiming you’re the real upholder of the true SFF which is LITERARY not that stinking genre stuff, which can never be truly good unless it forswears all the vulgar, trashy bits. And it’s not good enough that you get to read and write the kind of SF you prefer–no, you need to sneer at the “wrong” sort so that there’s no risk of anyone thinking you might be one of THOSE readers or writers. (And as has already been observed, this is very much like a mirror image of another set of “critics.”)
Honestly I’m about done with folks who dismiss entire subgenres as being too vulgarly genre. And I’m done with people complaining that the Clarke was meant to legitimize their anxieties about whether SFF was sufficiently literary and when the obviously genre stuff gets involved it’s failed them. I’m done with the idea that the stuff science fiction readers like isn’t the realest and bestest science fiction, which is what I see in the snide dismissal of Hugo noms, and in Mr Priest’s assertion a few years ago that lots of neologisms in a novel might make science fiction readers happy, but it was hardly the sort of thing one would expect in a novel shortlisted for the Clarke. Which is, unless my recollection is sorely impaired, an award for science fiction novels.
Everyone gets to like what they like, as I said, and it’s wonderful when people talk about why, and discuss books and stories, but I am increasingly tired of people telling me what’s real SF and what isn’t, especially when their categories are clearly based on what they liked and didn’t, and the supposedly objective reasons why are all pasted on after the fact to justify their taste–another work that breaks the same “rules” or has the same nits to pick is somehow perfectly fine because…oh, look, a squirrel!
And folks are of course perfectly entitled to display their anxieties about SFF being considered Proper Literature by…whoever it is people worry may be thinking dismissive thoughts about dirty genre work. They’re entitled to display them at length if they so choose. Just like I’m entitled to not take any of their criticism or their ideas about what science fiction should be terribly seriously.
15) One genre connection for Milana Vayntrub: Paul Feig’s ill-fated sitcom “Other Space”.
Meredith notes concerning Lucy Lui: Her episodes of Elementary have all been pretty good.. Indeed she’s a fine actor in that series which I cannot say of Relic Hunter which I can concisely sum up as Indiana Jones with tits.
@Karl-Johan Norén
18) Cos-play overlaps pretty heavily into burlesque and kink communities, and as it has grown and gotten more popular, those overlaps have gotten significantly larger and more mainstream. Furries, on the other hand, are more of an insular community that has connections to both traditional fandom and kink communities, but far less overlap at the core, at least in terms of the acceptance of public demonstrations of their interests.
@Ann Leckie
Totally agree
@Doris V. Sutherland
Is this a text conversion artefact, or did DF completely managed to miss that Saddam Hussein was the leader of Iraq, not Iran, while doing his research?
(16) Mostly sound advice. I can work around problematic and/or heavy handed political issues if the characters, plot, and world building are engaging. Although he can back off of Stephen King any time now. He can’t write The Best Book Ever ™ every time. Even a sub-par King book can be pretty enjoyable.
(11) As professor Reynolds would suggest, incorporating lion fish into the cuisine near the waters where they are invading would be a good way to keep their numbers low. And they are reportedly tasty, too!
@Standback
My take on Ninefox Gambit’s magic was quite similar to yours. A better “if you believe enough it will happen” magic system was created by Michael R. Fletcher in his Beyond Redemption and Mirror’s Truth books. IMHO, of course!
I did like some aspects of applying geometry to battle formations. However, it read to me like offensive and defensive power were determined by putting the soldiers in the right position with little consideration to their weapons or proficiency in using them. I took issue with other aspects of the book, but your thoughts on the magic system are pretty spot on.
Regards,
Dann
1) Lots of good stuff on that list, but I agree with everybody who said that the European comics tradition is completely missing. There is one Moebius comic on the list – The Incal – but nothing else. No TinTin, no Blake and Mortimer, no Asterix, no Lucky Luke, no Suske en Wiske, no Valerian and Laureline, no Yoko Tsuno, no Franka, no Michel Vaillant, no Modesty Blaise, no Smurfs, no Dan Dare, no Judge Dredd, no Lieutenant Blueberry, no Comanche, no Natasha, etc…
@Allan: I’m in agreement with you. Though I don’t love the inherent shade in the concept of a shadow jury, I’m really pleased to see a variety of reviewer delving deep into a small selection of books. I prefer to see a bunch of opinions; even if some of those opinions are pretentious (pr most; some selection bias here is unsurprising 😛 ) it’s still a meaty discussion to hold — and it’s a strong focus for others to react to.
Going into depth produces more interesting discussions, to my taste. I’m taking it as a given that the reviewers’ tastes are not my own, but going deep into detail, moving the discussions to specifics rather than generalities, and the simple fact of seeing a variety of takes on our niche’s annual highlights, is something I really appreciate even in those cases where I don’t agree with a single word.
I like Priest’s writing a lot – I can see my copy of Inverted World with the very faded spine from where I’m sitting now, and it occurs to me that I might have been a Priest fan for longer than one of the Sharke jurors has been alive….
Is he science fiction? Very possibly. His earlier work, certainly, included a lot of specifically SFnal tropes – virtual realities, branching time-lines, dystopian futures, psychic invisibility, all that sort of thing. But if purists cavil, especially at the later and more ambiguous stuff, I’m happy to call it the more general “speculative fiction”, because it’s certainly that. (I’m not sure you can disallow The Prestige as SF, though, not when it has a full-on matter transmitter lurking in the heart of the plot. [OK, so there’s a certain amount of fudging of the numbers when it comes to the power consumption of this device, but SF is full of number-fudging, always has been.])
But I like Priest’s stuff. It makes me think. Of course, I also liked A Closed and Common Orbit, and guess what? It was for more or less the same reason. I grant you, the two writers have very different approaches to the process of firing up my raddled old neurons, but the final result is much the same.
14) (adjacently)
It was always my impression that the Puppies’ use of “(too) literary” was a dogwhistle for girl cooties and/or brown people and/or LGBTQ people. (And perhaps especially Venn diagrams thereof.)
Perhaps incidental, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I do find useful (spoiler: it’s not much) about the “genre versus literary” debate. Predicated with the facts that 1) I don’t think these are mutually exclusive and 2) I don’t personally use “literary fiction” as a quality metric (MMV), I do wonder how to categorize, for example, science fiction that’s pretty clearly having a conversation with romanticism rather than the SF field’s tradition. (Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days is an example of this in my mind.) The anxieties may be different, or the set of approaches to dealing with them may be…
I do rather wish that “SF/not SF” wasn’t, like, a binary condition state; that interstitial or SF-adjacent works were allowed to be just that, without value judgments attached.
Paul Weimer on July 13, 2017 at 2:46 am said: As I have said on twitter, I’m not precisely sick of superhero origin stories–but I am sick of the same ones over and over.
Agreed. In particular, i was disappointed with Doctor Strange where we got a new superhero movie, hurray! Origin story lifted from Iron Man, boo!
(16) — The problem with 2012 and with Day After Tomorrow wasn’t that they were heavy-handed SJW-approved message-fic; it’s that they were terrible, terrible movies in pretty much every respect. (I’m still haunted to this day by the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal runs down the streets of Manhattan, desperately trying to outrun a cold front.)
Cora: Blame where it is due – the novel says “Iraq”. “Iran” is another text conversion artefact that I failed to catch.
(That’s what I get for typing posts on a mobile device…)
Standback:
My impression was that pretty much anything is possible, but it takes skill and dedication, and it might be disrupted by enemy action. Or basically “the author decides as he writes”.
Which seems to be the norm in most magic systems in SFF. (And yes, the calendar thingie is basically magic.) I don’t consider it a fault of The Fellowship of the Ring that we don’t know what Gandalf is capable of, or a fault of the first WoT-book that we don’t know exactly what Aes Sedai are capable of.
Seems like Stan Lee liked origin stories based on hubris, followed by nemesis, followed by genuine heroism — Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and the second version of Thor’s origin all follow that pattern.
Thing is, though the Iron Man film is reasonably close to the comic’s origin, the hubris element isn’t really in the earliest version of that. It might actually have been influenced by those other origins.
@Core: Any list of comics that omits Tintin and Asterix is severely deficient.
@Johan: Gandalf’s mysteriousness and aloofness are something entirely different. The reader doesn’t know what he’s capable of, and that’s part of what makes him wondrous. It’s also very clear that he isn’t just magicking everything better or worse when convenient.
Whereas Ninefox’s magic system is commonplace; it’s a linchpin of the military’s existence. But we don’t get any sense of it. What’s missing is some kind of baseline, a sense of scale and at least initial options that are considered “typical”. Harry Potter has mysterious magical unknowns too, but you also know what a twelve year old spellcaster learns in Potions class.
“It’s still Le Guin. Not LeGuin, or Leguin or…”
And software tends to want to index her under “G”. (Looking at you, Kobo. You did that with Le Carre, too.)
16) FFS. Even if this post weren’t poorly written, indeed even if I hadn’t read the other examples of this person’s writing posted in these comments, I would not ever take advice about what constitutes “quality” from someone who put those books covers out into the world. Not gonna happen.
Re: Literary-ness
Right now I’m about 2/3 of the way through reading the anthology of SF criticism that Rob Latham edited. It’s a pretty well-chosen blend of pieces from throughout the history of SF, going all the way back to Mary Shelley herself, written by practitioners (SF writers and editors), academics, and para-academics. The two things that are consistent throughout are 1) an anxiety about the genre’s boundaries and qualities, who gets to belong and who doesn’t, where it becomes painfully obvious that at literally no point in the history of SF have those boundaries or qualities ever been anything other than fuzzy and smudged and nebulous, and 2) a constant, grating argument between people who are happy that the boundaries are vague and shifting and can mesh with styles and techniques and values from other kinds of writing and those who desperately want them to become hard and clear. The utter contempt displayed by each side for the other that has gone on for basically a solid century was pretty eye-opening for me, especially because the legendary vituperation of the “literary” folks is 100% matched in both the quality and quantity of their venom by the clear-boundary hardliners literally right from day one. It’s so fucking depressing, and I too am so, so tired of it. I honestly just don’t care.
A few years ago, in my early 30s, I began to slowly reconnect with fandom after abandoning it in my late teens (literally because of this pointless bullshit argument–I got sick of being told I was the “wrong” kind of fan) by joining a Steampunk book club that gradually morphed into a general SFF book club. I met some great people, and read some great books, and they convinced me to get more involved. One of the best compliments I’ve ever received came from one of them. She said: “I can never tell beforehand whether or not you’re going to like a book.” *Morgan Freeman voice* Because August loves wondrous variety. */Morgan Freeman voice*
12) Hah. Not a chance.
13) I wish they’d shrunk the cards, too, then they could have used “pink it and shrink it” somewhere (it’s a crappy practice, but I just love that phrase).
The Shadow Clarke take on Chambers had just about convinced this particular lurker that I’m just not going to agree with them about anything… but then I read Kincaid on Ninefox Gambit. Though the magic system is the main thing that kept me reading to the end, so I can’t quite agree with his point #7.
Re: the Hexarchate and its military doctrine: V unira’g dhvgr svtherq bhg jurgure gur Xry’f qrcraqrapr ba gur “begubqbk” pnyraqne sbe zbfg bs gurve pbzong rssrpgvirarff vf n cneg bs gur jbeyqohvyqvat be n synj va vg. V guvax gurer’f fbzr pbzovangvba bs 1) gur Urknepungr’f zvyvgnel vf qrfvtarq sbe rvgure qrsrafvir jnef be pvivy jnef/eroryyvbaf gung qba’g vaibyir rabhtu pnyraqevpny urerfl gb znggre; 2) gur “zvyvgnel” vf cevznevyl nabgure fbhepr bs ivpgvzf sbe gur uhzna fnpevsvprf gung xrrc gur Urknepungr ehaavat; naq 3) V’z bireguvaxvat gur tevzqnex.
Perhaps it will turn out that Rod Serling was just an assumed name of the grown up Anthony Fremont who has been creating these television episodes for our enjoyment.
I enjoyed Closed and Common Orbit more than Long Way. Largely, I think, because the smaller cast enabled a tighter involvement with characters’ thoughts, emotions and growth. But there was also a certain predictability in those character arcs, which makes me put the book into a “Good” category rather than “Great”.
I have always thought that the attempt to draw lines between Hard and Soft SF and Genre SF and Literary SF is ridiculous and futile.
As August points out, there is no way that boundary can be drawn with any definitiveness or consistency.
I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like — and I have found that both of those categories include works which range from Hard to Soft to Literary. While I prefer more science fiction, rather than less, in what I read, I have found myself quite satisfied with works which are light on SF if they are strong in other ways which hit my sweet spots — and I have massively enjoyed a lot of Fantasy that I would not originally have expected to love.
I pick books up if the synopsis appeals to me, or if enough other people whose opinions I respect have recommended it — and I have found myself surprised again and again at loving things I expected to hate and hating things I expected to love… which is why I still keep occasionally picking up books I expect to hate.
When I was growing up, my parents had a policy of requiring us kids to eat two bites of some new food if we didn’t think we’d like it and didn’t want to eat it — and if we didn’t enjoy those two bites, we didn’t have to eat any more of that food. I found a lot of foods that I loved that way. I think that’s why I’m willing to risk trying things even when I don’t expect to like them.
I think some things, like Priest’s books, suffer from the advance hype which actual reading of them cannot possibly live up to, thus causing me to be much more disappointed than if I had no expectations at all.
Speaking of defining science fiction, in Hard SF in 2016, we changed our definition of hard science fiction from “the science must be accurate enough that an educated layman does not have to suspend disbelief for it” to “details of the science/technology are key to the plot, and the story creates the impression that there is a scientific explanation for everything that happens.”
For “soft” science fiction, we dropped the “key to the plot” bit, but anything with a supernatural element either moved to “low fantasy” or else into the “mixed” category.
Although works on the borderline seem to generate a lot of argument, they’re pretty rare. I only classed 4% of short fiction from 2016 as mixed.
Ninefox Gambit is an interesting example of a high-fantasy story with futuristic technology. Normally, high-fantasy has a medieval level of technology or, at most, 18th-century level. But we’re starting to see more stories of that form.
Maybe it’s best thought of as “Space Opera with Magic.”
@Cecily Kane
I don’t think there are any issues until people start talking about awards. There are challenges to writing speculative fiction that don’t arise in mainstream literature, mostly involving explaining things about the world to the reader without boring him/her with infodumps. Even when a mainstream author has to deliver information (e.g. to explain the history of the gold rush), mainstream readers are more tolerant because they feel they’re learning something. The SFF writer, by contrast, is always at risk of losing readers who abruptly realize they’re reading a Wikipedia article about a time/place that doesn’t exist.
Freed from that burden, the mainstream author can devote more words to character and plot development.
So it’s unfair to allow mainstream stories to compete with SFF stories when it comes to awards. It also stands to reason that, for SFF awards, a story with a minimal (even though real and important) speculative element should be judged at a disadvantage to works that attempted to make more ambitious speculative elements work. Kind of like degree of difficulty in Olympic gymnastics. 🙂
I’m not sure why people get so emotional over it, though.
@Ann Leckie, if I did embroidery, I’d embroider that entire post and hang copies of it in places public and private.
The notion that ACaCO is lightweight misses the very real struggle and suffering of many of the characters. I didn’t love it the way I loved A Long Way, but I cared about those characters and appreciated the way Chambers didn’t put a foot wrong in the way she wrote them. What they did and why was consistent throughout.
@Cecily Kane: My “line” is authors who write science fiction and then deny the genre, as well as authors who appropriate science fiction because the subject they want to write about can only be properly addressed through an SFnal lens, and then deny that they are appropriating (usually in a manner that reveals they are on unfamiliar territory and obviously unfamiliar enough that they can’t even pervert the tropes effectively).
After that it’s only “I liked it” or “I didn’t” to varying degrees of excitement.
I think that was uncalled for.
Aaron, I think you went a bit overboard. Criticising something is not the same as being a puppy. The problem with the puppy is not that they dont like the Hugo winners -I didnt like the winners preceding three Body Problem- but the namecalling, the rhetoric, the harrassment, the slates… the shadow clarke jury did none of that. They only criticized what you like, so… using your own logic, you could be acting like a puppy yourself (from their perspective)
Its not about sides, its about decent behavior and you showed that lacking in your replies imho.
To elaborate: The shadow jury criticized books, the puppies criticized people. Thats a crucial difference.
@Standback: I think you nailed my issue with Ninefox – the rules of the universe were so vague I never felt like I had a grip on the possibilities or the reasons behind major actions. That made it difficult for me to enjoy.
@Ann Leckie: Amen. I like what I like, and certain critics I like to ignore.
@Cora: Lack of TinTin and Modesty Blaise are criminal, you’re correct. I didn’t realize on the first read-through how US centered it was, but I went back and realized that, yeah, it’s missing a lot of great European stuff. Heck, Judge Dredd, Asterix… We could make a secondary list of comics that ought to have been included, very easily. Such lists are always corrupted by the viewpoints and attitudes of the people polled for the list and those doing the compiling.
@Cheryl S: ACaCO hit me hard, because that disconnect between mind and body that Sidra faces is something I dealt with as well, and her constant battle to feel at home in herself was so spot-on that I literally cried for her at times. I didn’t think of it as light – for me it was a terribly dark book with hope at the end. If that’s not literary enough for some people, well, that’s their loss.
They only criticized what you like
Lloyd didn’t criticize anything that I like. He complained about the Hugos being given to books that were too light-weight. His criticism is just the mirror image of the Puppy criticisms. Whether I actually liked any of the recent Hugo-winners or not is an entirely irrelevant point.
@Greg:
I think that’s a very difficult argument to make persuasively. Start with this: What different readers appreciate as uniquely SF-nal varies tremendously from reader to reader. Some love the sense of “what might be scientifically possible”, others are looking to be immersed in an alien point of view; others feel it puts real-world issues at a manageable remove that makes them all the more poignant and vivid; others delight in logical loopholes in the Rules of Robotics.
If you want stories to compete on Most Plausible SF Premise or Best Heinleining, that could be awesome, but that’s necessarily approaching Cat Valente’s hyopthetical “Elements of Storytelling” award. Otherwise, you need to accept that you’re never going to be comparing apples to apples; different stories are brilliant in different ways, and different SF stories epitomize SF in different ways.
So I don’t think you can say that “softer” SF stories should be “handicapped.” My approach is entirely different: a story is excellent if you can explain what it does well, and justify that explanation. If that thing is something that isn’t a “typical” strength of SF? If that thing is something no other SF story has ever done? I don’t see any problem with that. No, sir.
And I criticized the Hugowinners before Three body problem as well. Does that make me a puppy? Is eveybody a puppy who doesnt agree on the Hugos? Are the Hugos beyond criticsm?
@Aaron
Mmm, for that to be the case, he’d need to complain about the authors being fascists or something. He’d definitely need to be making personal attacks on people. And ignoring requests to back up his claims.
When the Puppies argued that Hugos were going to works that were too literary/message-heavy to be any fun to read, that was a legitimate complaint. I think they were incorrect, and they never produced any evidence to support that complaint, but at least they were talking about stories, not people. When they kept repeating the claim and ignoring all requests for evidence, then they got annoying.
It’s definitely unfair to compare Lloyd or the Clarke shadow jury to the Puppies. At least at this point.
And I criticized the Hugowinners before Three body problm as well.
There is a difference between not loving a particular winner and making generalized hand-wavy claims about an award as a whole. Arguments that amount to “the Hugos didn’t award books I like so they are doing it wrong” are all more or less the same kind of argument that the Pups made.
Does that make me a puppy?
Please point to where I have said anyone is a Puppy other than a Puppy. I said Lloyd’s criticism that the Hugo-winners weren’t literary enough was the mirror image of the Pups. His argument structure is of a similar type, although the specific reason for his gripe is opposite theirs.
But why compare at all? If Im not mistaken the Nebula award was founded on the same feeling – that the Hugos are to mainstream.
The cool thing about SF is that there is a lot of things to like and to discuss. The Hugos are argubly the moste prestigious of the SF awards(at minimum one of the best) and its Ok to discuss those. Do the Hugos tend to go to lighter fare? If yes, is this a problem? I think it is possible to raise those question and answer them for yourself (and we are talking about reviews, not slating or something similiar) without being called asshole