(1) BY PIXEL AND PAPER. The Dublin in 2019 Worldcon bid tells what its publications policy will be for PR’s and the Souvenir Book.
So what should we do about our progress reports?
I note that for some people this is an access issue, and therefore, we will be having hard copies available for anyone who selects them as an access issue. To be clear, Progress Reports are complimentary and we’d like to send them to anyone who needs them for an access issue. Just tick the box please.
We will be sending them out electronically of course if you allow us to.
I noted that some people still liked them, as a historical document or just because they enjoy reading hard copy, and that is very cool, and the Dublin 2019 team will be making sure that anyone who wants a hard copy progress report can get one. There will be a charge of €10 Ten Euro for this.
I hope all of you are OK with this decision and support us in it.
This does not affect our plans for our Souvenir book which we plan to offer in hard copy to all members, full and supporting, and which we are happy to mail to anyone who doesn’t pick it up at con.
(2) HELP PABLO GO THE DISTANCE. Leigh Ann Hildebrand has launched a Generosity.com appeal to send Pablo Vasquez to Helsinki for Worldcon 75. The goal is $1,100. Here’s the pitch:
Bringing NASFiC to San Juan, Puerto Rico was great thing — and one of the prime movers behind that successful bid and con has been Pablo Vazquez. I was really looking forward to congratulating Pablo at the con in Helsinki and to hearing all about that NASFiC.
And then Pablo told me he wouldn’t be joining fans in Helsinki this year.
Money’s tight for Pablo; he’s been prioritizing travel and preparations for this historic and awesome NASFiC. Now he finds himself short of funds for his last travel expenses. He’s got accommodations and a membership covered, but his fixed-cost airfare and incidental expenses are beyond his means this summer.
This is where my fellow fans come in. Help me get Pablo to Helsinki! Here’s what he needs:
$600 for the air fare (it’s a fixed cost, ’cause he knows a guy.)
$500 for food, travel incidentals, walkin’ around money and buying a round. That may seem like a lot, but food in Finland is not cheap, and there’s no con suite this year, so he can’t live on Doritos and free sodas. 🙂
(3) SFF FILM FESTIVAL. Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in partnership with SIFF is now accepting entries for the 2018 Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival (SFFSFF).
The festival will accept animated or live-action submissions of original science fiction or fantasy stories (examples: futuristic stories, space adventure, technological speculation, social experiments, utopia and dystopia, sword and sorcery, folklore, urban fantasy, magic, and mythic adventure).
A nationally recognized panel of distinguished film, television, literature, and science fiction industry professionals, peers, and film critics will review qualifying submissions to determine the winners of the Grand Prize, Second Place, Third Place, and the Douglas Trumbull Award for Best Visual Effects. Festival films will also be eligible for the Audience Favorite award.
In order to qualify, submitted films must have been completed after December 31, 2012, and must not exceed 15 minutes. Films that exceed 15 minutes may still be considered for festival inclusion but will not be eligible for awards.
See the link for guidelines, deadlines and fees.
(5) WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING? Adam-Troy Castro sighed on Facebook:
Over the past few years I have encountered Harry Potter fans who were abusive bullies, Star Trek fans who were against diversity, and now Doctor Who fans who were close-minded and unkind.
It’s like none of them were paying any attention at all.
I am looking forward to the emergence of Batman fans who are in favor of crime.
Since the targets of Castro’s comment might miss the point, Matthew M. Foster restated the message more explicitly:
The second is that people don’t see theme. SF is about space ships and explosions. Fantasy is about swords. The actual thing trying to be conveyed is missed far more often than not. The light was brought to this in a “funny” way to our little lit community by Brad and the Pups a few years back when Star Trek was pointed out to be first and foremost, about adventure and action–about combat in space. From the same group, there was a great deal of discussion in which they confused the theme with something incidental to the story because the incidental thing was not part of their normal life. So, if a story happened to have someone gay in it, then the story must be about sexual preference. If the story had a Black lead, then the theme must be about race. These are people that are big fans of science fiction, and they couldn’t see the themes.
(6) MAD PENIUS CLUB. And right on time, here’s Dave Freer’s death-kiss for the Thirteenth Doctor.
The trouble with this is it’s a judgement call, and especially inside the various bubbles (New York Publishing, Hollywood, and in the UK the Beeb’s little Guardian-and-Birkenstock club) they’re often so distant and unconnected with audiences outside their bubble that they assume they think like them and will respond like them. Which is why they have flops like the Ghostbusters remake, because they assumed the audience for the movie was just dying for a feminist version, with lots of man-kicking. Dr Who is trying much the same thing with a female Doctor. It could work because that audience is already pretty much restricted to inside their bubble. Still, with a new writer, and female lead after 12 male ones… She’ll have to be a good actress, and he’ll have to be a better writer. I expect we’ll see a long sequence of designated victim minorities cast in the role in future, until the show dies. I doubt we’ll ever see another white hetero male, but maybe that’s just me being cynical.
(7) HEADWRITER CANON. Prospect’s James Cooray Smith declares: “Uncomfortable with a female Doctor Who? It’s time to admit your real motives”.
…Steven Moffat, Doctor Who’s Executive Producer from 2010 to 2017, used to make a habit, when asked if there was ever going to be a female Doctor, of throwing the question back to the audience. He’d ask for a show of hands as to who did and didn’t like the idea. Even half a decade ago, those audiences would be roughly balanced into pros and antis—although, as he noted, the proportion of “likes” was exponentially increasing every time he passed the question back.
In the last few years, the idea has gone from almost universally disliked to “Why hasn’t this happened already?”
Laying the canonical foundations
Moffat has played no small part in that himself. The first lines of dialogue given to Matt Smith’s Doctor, the first lines of Moffat’s era, see the newly regenerated Doctor, who cannot see his own face, wondering if he’s now female. A year later in “The Doctor’s Wife,” produced by Moffat and written by Neil Gaiman, the Doctor comments of a dead Time Lord friend The Corsair, “He didn’t feel himself unless he had a tattoo. Or herself, a couple of times”.
Three years after that, Moffat cast Michelle Gomez as ‘Missy’, the Doctor’s oldest friend and arch enemy, a character previously only played by male actors and usually referred to as the Master. A year after that—just to make sure that no one regarded Missy as an exception that proves the rule—Moffat had Ken Bones’ recurring Time Lord character The General regenerate into T’Nia Miller, changing sex and ethnicity simultaneously. Other Time Lords in the series treated this as momentarily distracting but thoroughly routine.
It now seems daft to say that such groundwork needed to be done: after all, the character of the doctor is an alien who merely looks human. But the series itself had never hinted that the idea was possible before 2010. Now, any viewer who has seen an episode with Missy in knows the Doctor’s own people can, and do, change sex. No one can pretend the idea isn’t part of the series, no matter how much they may want to. Moffat’s careful layering over years shows up any objections to the series having a female lead for what they are.
(8) NEVERTHELESS. Alison Scott has a shirt she would love to sell you. I bought one for my daughter. (U.K. orders here; U.S. orders here.)
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 17, 1955 — Disneyland Park opened in Anaheim, California
- July 17, 1967 — Contact with Surveyor 4 lost 2.5 minutes before Moon touchdown.
- July 17, 1987 — Robocop, released on this day
- July 17, 1988 – Debut of the sci-fi telefilm Out of Time…starring Bill Maher…yes that Bill Maher.
- July 17, 1992 — Honey, I Blew Up The Kid in theaters.
(10) COMIC SECTION. Andrew Porter noticed Zippy the Pinhead mentioned d Emshwiller.
(11) READING PLEASURE. Look for the SF pulps! Photos of old newsstands.
(12) ADAM WEST REMEMBERED. “Family Guy pays tribute to Adam West with nine-minute highlight reel” – from Entertainment Weekly.
As famous as he was for playing Batman — and he was very famous for that — Adam West was also known to another generation of fans for his wacky work on Family Guy. The late actor, who popped up and scored in more than 100 episodes as Mayor Adam West, left a colorful, indelible imprint on the animated Fox comedy — as well as on its producers and fans.
(13) WORLDCON PROGRAM. Worldcon 75 put its draft program schedule online today.
There are three ways to view the programme schedule DRAFT:
- View the programme schedule in KonOpas in your browser.
- Download the free Grenadine Event Guide app (for Android and iPhone) from https://vvy4n.app.goo.gl/5r2l. To access the Worldcon 75 programme in the app, please use the code WCON75.
- View the programme schedule in Grenadine in your browser.
(14) HAUNTED HELSINKI. Adrienne Foster has arranged a “Ghost walking tour of Helsinki” for the convenience of Worldcon 75 members. It will be an English-speaking tour at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 August 2017.
Once again, those interested in reserving a spot on the tour need to be a member of Meetup.com and join Bay Area Ghost Hunters. Joining is free on both counts, but the fee for the ghost walk is to cover the cost of the tour operator. Yes, it was deliberate putting the “prere…gistration” fee in U.S. dollars and the “at-the-door” cost in euros.
As the 75th World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon 75) rolls around again, it gives me another opportunity to arrange a ghost walk of its host city, Helsinki. Yes, that’s in Finland. Ghost walks are one of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling and it’s always a lot more fun to do them with like-minded companions. To make it even more attractive to the many members who don’t speak Finnish, the tour operator has an English-speaking tour available.
Although this has been timed for the convenience of Worldcon 75 members, all BAGH members are welcome to participate. If anyone just happens to have coinciding travel plans to Helsinki, please join us.
In addition to ghost stories, guests on these tours learn a lot about the history of the locale, particularly some of its macabre past. It even starts at a hotel that is a converted prison.
(15) MINGLE LIKE TINGLE. Is this going to be an “I am Spartacus” kind of thing?
With my new t-shirt, I am now prepared for Worldcon. #vital #worldcon75 pic.twitter.com/x5CM8oWdyl
— Jenn Lyons (@jennlyonsauthor) July 17, 2017
(16) AUREALIS AWARDS. The 2017 Aurealis Awards are now open for nominations. Eligible works must be created by an Australian citizen, or permanent resident, and published for the first time this year.
(17) VENUS AND MARS. David D. Levine’s second novel, Arabella and the Battle of Venus, sequel to the Andre Norton Award winning Arabella of Mars, comes out this week.
The thrilling adventures of Arabella Ashby continue in Arabella and the Battle of Venus, the second book in Hugo-winning author David D. Levine’s swashbuckling sci-fi, alternate history series!
Arabella’s wedding plans to marry Captain Singh of the Honorable Mars Trading Company are interrupted when her fiancé is captured by the French and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on swampy Venus. Now, Arabella must find passage to an enemy-controlled planet in the middle of a war, bribe or fight her way past vicious guards, and rescue her Captain.
To do this she must enlist the help of the dashing privateer, Daniel Fox of the Touchstone and build her own clockwork navigational automaton in order to get to Venus before the dread French general, Joseph Fouché, the Executioner of Lyon.
Once on Venus, Arabella, Singh, and Fox soon discover that Napoleon has designed a secret weapon, one that could subjugate the entire solar system if they can’t discover a way to stop Fouché, and the entire French army, from completing their emperor’s mandate.
Levine will be doing a book tour:
- July 18, 2017: Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, Portland, Oregon.
- July 20, 2017: University Book Store, Seattle, Washington.
- July 22, 2017: Borderlands Books, San Francisco, California.
He is currently drafting the final book in the trilogy, currently titled Arabella and the Winds of Phobos but may end up being called Arabella the Traitor of Mars.
(18) NEWCOMERS TO THE HEARTH. Fireside Fiction is undergoing a change of management, with Brian J. White stepping down. Pablo Defendini is taking over as publisher and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry as managing editor. Julia Rios and Mikki Kendall are also joining the team.
White is leaving to focus on his work as a journalist.
As many of you know, I work at a newspaper. And that work has been consuming more and more of my time lately, with both the volume and the importance of the news rising in a way we’ve never experienced in this country. And it comes alongside a level of furious, violent antipathy toward the press that is somehow both wildly shocking and banally predictable.
Fireside has been the labor of love of my life, and it kills me to step away. But I am a journalist, first and always, and I need to focus my energy on the work we are doing. A lot of people have made fun of the earnestness of the Washington Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness slogan, but it is true, and I won’t let the light go out.
Mikki Kendall has been signed on as editor to lead the follow-up to last year’s #BlackSpecFic report, which White says will be out soon. [Hat tip to Earl Grey Loose-leaf Links #43.]
(19) THE COOLEST. Arthur C. Clarke would be proud, as the search for extra-terrestrial life turns to ice worlds.
Chris McKay has fallen out of love with Mars. The red, dusty, corroded world no longer holds the allure it once did.
“I was obsessed with life on Mars for many years,” confesses the Nasa planetary scientist, who has spent most of his career searching for signs of life on the red planet.
“It’s seduction at the highest level,” he says. “I’m abandoning my first love and going after this other one that’s shown me what I wanted to see.”
The new object of McKay’s affections is Enceladus, the ice-encrusted moon of Saturn. Investigated by the joint Nasa and European Space Agency (Esa) Cassini space probe, the moon is spewing out plumes of water from its south pole – most likely from a liquid ocean several kilometres beneath the surface. Cassini has found this water contains all the vital ingredients for life as we know it: carbon, nitrogen and a readily available source of energy in the form of hydrogen.
“I think this is it,” says McKay. “From an astrobiology point of view, this is the most interesting story.”
(20) SO BAD IT’S GOOD. Marshall Ryan Maresca extols the antique virtues of the 1980s movie: “ELECTRIC DREAMS: A Bad Movie I’ve Watched Many, Many, MANY Times”.
The Eighties got a lot of mileage out of the idea that computers were magic. I mean, the fundamental principle of Weird Science is that Wyatt has, like, a 386 with a 14.4 modem and a scanner, which he can connect to the Pentagon and make a goddamn genie with it. Most Hollywood movies today still let computers be magical, but not to the same degree. And few movies go as full out crazy with the idea as Electric Dreams.
For those not in the know, Electric Dreams is a relatively small, simple movie, in which an architect named Miles (he might be an engineer—something to do with buildings) lives in the downstairs part of a duplex, below gorgeous cellist Virginia Madsen. And he gets himself a computer so he can design an earthquake brick. So far, all normal.
It turns into a love triangle with Wyatt and a sentient PC as rivals.
(21) THE LATTER DAY LAFFERTY. Adri’s Book Reviews praises “Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty”.
As in any good mystery, it soon becomes clear that there are shady things lurking in the past of each and every crew member, as well as the traditional untrustworthy AI. Six Wakes builds its narrative through an omniscient third person narrator which switches between character viewpoints, as well as flashbacks to the crews’ lives in the lead up to being selected for the ship. Each crew member knows the others have volunteered for the mission because they are convicted criminals who will be pardoned upon arrival, but they have been told their crimes must remain confidential. From the ship’s doctor who was one of the original people cloned when the technology began, to the AI tech who has been on the verge of a breakdown since waking, to the shady machinations of the captain and the security officer, Six Wakes uses a small cast to great effect, with the world of the clones coming across as claustrophobic and restrictive even in background chapters set on Earth, thanks to both the Codicls as well as the inequalities and power struggles that arise from a society of functionally immortal beings. Six Wakes’ characters aren’t likeable in a traditional sense but I found them generally sympathetic, and the backgrounds go a long way towards making that balance work.
(22) A BOY AND HIS HORSE. The British Museum blog asks “The Dothraki and the Scythians: a game of clones?”
The Dothraki in Game of Thrones are represented as feared and ferocious warriors. Jorah Mormont describes their culture as one that values power and follows strength above all, and there is no greater way to demonstrate power and strength according to the Dothraki than through war. Like their fictional counterparts, the Scythians were pretty terrifying in battle. The Greek historian Herodotus writes that Scythians drank the blood of the men they killed and kept their scalps as trophies and skulls as drinking cups. While we should probably take Herodotus with a pinch of salt, by all accounts they were pretty brutal! The Dothraki also like decapitating their defeated enemies – guards known as the jaqqa rhan, or mercy men, use heavy axes to do this.
The Scythians and the Dothraki fight on horseback and are excellent archers. They both use curved (or composite) bows to maximise the range and the damage of their arrows. As Jorah Mormont says of the Dothraki, ‘they are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours.’
(23) THE NEXT STAGE. The Verge has learned that “The Twilight Zone is being adapted into a stage play” in London.
The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s landmark sci-fi anthology series about technological paranoia, creeping dread in 1960s America, and monsters and weirdos of all sorts, will be adapted as a stage play, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed this morning.
The play will debut in a limited run at London’s Almeida Theatre this December, with a script from Anne Washburn. Washburn’s best-known play is her 2012 Off-Broadway work Mr. Burns, which is about a traveling theater troupe in post-apocalyptic America that performs episodes of The Simpsons from memory. The play will be directed by Olivier-winner Richard Jones, who is best known for the 1990 London run of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, as well as the short-lived 1997 Titanic musical on Broadway, and has also directed several operas and Shakespeare productions.
(24) LIADEN UPDATE. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s 81st joint project — Due Diligence (Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Book 24) – was released July 10. The pair was also recently profiled by Maine’s statewide newspaper the Portland Press Herald — “Welcome to the universe of Maine writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller”.
For Maine writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, all it took to launch a brand-new universe was a single sentence.
The opening line for what would become “Agent of Change,” the inaugural volume of their Liaden Universe space opera series, was “The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.”
It’s not quite “Call me Ishmael,” but something about typing those 10 words back in 1984 made Lee say to her husband, “I have a novel here.” And there was sufficient inspiration on the page for Miller to say, “I’m sorry, but I think you have a series.”
Both were right. Reached by phone at their Maine coon cat-friendly home in Winslow, surrounded by oil paintings, prints, book cover and other science fiction and fantasy artwork, Miller remembered, “We sat down that night and fleshed out the basic idea for the first seven books.” Four years later, in 1988, their collaborative debut was published in paperback by DelRey.
Since then, Lee, 64, and Miller, 66, have published 20 Liaden Universe novels and nearly five dozen related short stories. Baen Books published their latest hardcover novel, “The Gathering Edge,” in May.
.And they’ll be Guests of Honor at ConFluence from August 4-6.
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.
I have not until just now ever heard of Enid Blyton, which I'm led to understand is sort of like not having heard of Dr. Seuss.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) July 17, 2017
(26) PLASTIC IS NOT FANTASTIC. Jewish Business News has the story behind the commercial: “Mayim Bialik and Hodor From ‘Game of Thrones’ In New SodaStream’s Funny Viral Video”.
Following Jewish celebrity Scarlett Johansson’s campaign for the Israeli beverage company SodaStream, the Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik is the new face proudly representing the company new campaign in a Viral Video.
Features Mayim Bialik as an anthropologist, recalling her first encounter with the Homo-schlepien played by Kristian Nairn known as Hodor from “Game of Thrones.” The story reflects the devastating effect of single-use plastic bottles on Humanity. A habit that is hazardous to Earth and no longer exist in the future.
In this funny story, the Museum of UnNatural History features encounters between Mayim and the last tribe of plastic dependent species, the Homo-schlepien.
The shooting of the campaign was brought forward while Bialik had to rest her vocal chords for one month due to a medical advice. “This campaign has a powerful message and one that needed to be told before I went on vocal rest,” said Mayim Bialik.
[Thanks to JJ, Bill, Steve Miller, David Levine, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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(15) MINGLE LIKE TINGLE. Is this going to be an “I am Spartacus” kind of thing?
I suspect yes.
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.
It seems unbelievable that Scalzi hadn’t heard of let alone read anything by Enid Blyton who I regard as the taproot of English children’s literature. But then when I examine (shamefaced) some of the gaps in my reading of canonical writers/works, maybe it’s not so uncommon.
@21: Six Wakes took me four days to finish; normally a book that size would take two, but I kept wanting to throw it at a wall. First the author takes a huge premise and hacks it down to a paranoid ~thriller, then she keeps blowing it up — a new power of the combination of cloning and memory-mapping every time the story starts to sag, with an especially unbelievable one near the end. I was reminded of Asimov’s saying he wrote SF mysteries to disprove the claim that SF mysteries had to be unfair because the detective could always pull out some super-gimmick to solve the crime; I thought Lafferty did just this, and repeatedly.
@25: I think this is not quite fair, especially to US readers; Blyton was very much of her time, enough so that I’m not surprised someone Scalzi’s age hasn’t heard of her. (Some writers can survive being time-specific — a librarian tells me they keep having to buy replacements for worn-out Bellairs novels despite their vaguely-musty 1950’s feel — but Blyton is further back and Very English.) I wonder how many kids find Blyton these days? Seuss OTOH is fed to them by their parents; I expect a lot of otherwise-nonreaders know his work.
The whole fuss over Who makes me wonder when certain Filers will talk about how they expect the new Doctor to show some signs of trauma at the change — cf the discussion over the grimdark Oz TV show last winter. Or are Time Lords so urbane as to be above trauma? Or is it so generally common (as hints have been dropped harder and harder recently) that they all expect it will happen sometime? (Certainly the noisy wankers are wrong about there being no female Time Lords; apparently they’ve forgotten Romana.)
(edit) Sacrificial pre-fifth; l’esprit d’escalier strikes again!
@Chip:
I’m delighted to hear that Bellairs is still being read. I loved “The House With a Clock in Its Walls” and the sequels back in the 1970s.
/BarneveltStalk!
I happened to find her when I was asked to read one of her books to my daughter. I didn’t know about her before that.
Ah, Electric Dreams. The movie where the secret to artificial intelligence is a spilled bottle of champagne.
I have a SodaStream unit – two, actually, because I got a good deal on a better model. It’s much more convenient (on shopping trips) than buying premade soda, and there is a lot less waste, but there are some tradeoffs. First, naturally you’re dealing with off-brand flavors, so you get “cola” instead of “Coke” or “Pepsi.” Next, it’s a little weird to think of plastic bottles as things that expire, but these do – and at $20 for a pair of one-liters, they’re not exactly cheap to replace. Also, something I see as a benefit but can be bad if you have allergies: even the non-diet flavors have some amount of sucralose, and thus fewer calories. Finally, you may have to plan ahead a bit, as you get the best results from ice-cold water. Making a batch straight from the tap isn’t a good option.
@6 Jesus God–can Freer lower the bar every time he speaks? Isn’t that whole crowd always talking about taking risks in writing and trying something new?
Just re-affirming that I really don’t want to be in a social situation where I’d have to pretend to be polite while he runs his mouth.
But then, my social circle has pretty much frozen out someone we’ve known for 40-odd years because he’s turned into this kind of jack-ass. Strangely, he was never like this until he started AA.
(5) WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING?
I don’t have to agree with the message or theme of a story to like it, but I do wonder about people who apparently didn’t even notice the message was even there.
It makes Chambers’ occasional tendency towards anvils rather understandable. No-one’s going to miss her messages.
(7) HEADWRITER CANON
I enjoyed that.
(17) VENUS AND MARS
Oh! Those sound fun. I’ll have to check them out.
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT
Blyton is still a pretty big deal in England. Some of her work has some truly cringeworthy racist, xenophobic and sexist attitudes, but the stories themselves have a fairly enduring appeal, even though there are far superior classic British children’s authors out there. Noddy, for instance, remains about as ubiquitous as Thomas the Tank Engine.
I never really thought about whether Blyton would be well-known elsewhere.
(8) Those come in purple, too! I know because I just ordered one.
Re: Arabella of Mars
Grr, foiled. No UK ebook. Hmph.
(25) Blyton was one of my father’s main weapons in his battle to make sure his kids absorbed English culture.
(21) THE LATTER DAY LAFFERTY.
I loved Six Wakes, too. I’ve only read 12 novels published in 2017 so far, but I will be very surprised if anything knocks this one off my Hugo nomination shortlist.
25) My niece read Blyton recently. She enjoyed it, but also commented “she sure is rude about americans, if she was still alive I would give her a piece of my mind”
Doctor who – We know there are some people who won’t watch the show with a female because they have said so. We know there are some who will start watching because of the female because they have said so. What we can’t tell from Twitter is what is the size of these two groups?
You can look at ratings later but what does it mean that Ghostbusters didn’t do well and Wonder Woman did great? Maybe that there are several things that affect success and that it’s impossible to isolate the female factor?
22) Is there anything the Scythians had in common with the Dothraki that the Mongols or a dozen other cultures didn’t have? Brutality is sadly not much of a distingusing characteristic.
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT.
This doesn’t seem that unusual to me. I’d never heard of Blyton until a couple of years ago. But then I never read many books by U.S. childrens’ authors, either, except for a few when I was babysitting for other peoples’ kids, or later, for my nieces and nephews.
Awake for no good reason. My service dog Dora told me to go to sleep a couple of hours ago. Nearly done listening to Arkwright.
(25) — I’ve heard Blyton’s name and am kind of vaguely aware of her, but I never 1992read anything of hers — I’m pretty sure she wasn’t on the shelf in the small Midwestern town’s public library when I was growing up. I did finally read Bellairs’ Face in the Frost a few years back.
(9) — The kid actually blew up in 1992, not 1982.
Huh. For some reason I thought Freer was a bigger source of Baen Books output than he actually is.
And the appertainment center is open!
On an unrelated note:
Strange Signals from the Nearby Red Dwarf Star Ross 128
It’s not aliens. It’s never aliens. Plus red dwarfs may be challenging primaries for life bearing worlds.
Which is why they have flops like the Ghostbusters remake
Which still made $230 million at the box office. Everyone seems desperate to declare the movie a flop, but it still seems to have had a substantial audience of people who did , in fact, want to see “a feminist version, with lots of man-kicking”.
bookworm1398 on July 17, 2017 at 8:50 pm said:
25) My niece read Blyton recently. She enjoyed it, but also commented “she sure is rude about americans, if she was still alive I would give her a piece of my mind”
American girls pop up in the upper forms from time to time.
They wear nylons and inappropriate make-up, if I remember correctly.
Initially they don’t care for sports or midnight feasts, but some of them come around eventually.
The rest are bad influences.
6)
I see that Dave Freer is still stuck in his puppy bubble and thinks that all “real people” (TM) think like him. Also why do puppies and puppy-adjacent folks claim that the 2016 Ghostbusters was a flop? It wasn’t a huge hit, sure, but it did managed to recap the production costs.
25)
I’m younger than Scalzi and have not just heard of Enid Blyton, but read her extensively as a kid. On the other hand, I am aware that Dr. Suess is an important figure in US childen’s literature, but I have never read anything by them.
The thing is that children’s literature was very regional before approx. the mid 1990s, so children’s books that were ubiquitous in one country might be completely unknown in the next. As a result, there are many extremely well known British and American children’s books I have never read, because they simply weren’t available when I was a kid. For example, I have never read Narnia, the Prydain Chronicles or A Wrinkle in Time. Meanwhile, there are German children’s books that most of you will never have heard about, even though they’re very popular over here.
There are exceptions, e.g. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Malory Towers and St. Clare books were widely available in Germany, albeit heavily edited and adapted to the German market (a friend of mine did her MA thesis on that), whereas Noddy is completely unknown.
Our local children’s library had a mess of Blyton, mostly Famous Fives and the “…of Adventure” series, which I preferred.
I was predisposed toward series books, because if I liked one I cold find out what happened next, so I plowed through them all, as I did with the Oz books, Danny Dunn, Lloyd Alexander, Mrs. Coverlet, Edward Eager and whatever else I could find.
And that way, when Michael Flanders, on one of the FLANDERS & SWANN records, referred to Donald Swann as “the Enid Blyton of light music,” I actually knew what he meant!
James Davis Nicoll: Huh. For some reason I thought Freer was a bigger source of Baen Books output than he actually is.
It’s all the irrational bloviating he’s done on MGC. By the time you get through reading it, your eyes have glazed over, your brain has turned to sludge, and you’ve forgotten what it was about — never mind whether it was opinion or fiction. You just know that you’ve read a lot more written by Freer than you ever had any desire to read. 🙄
Ghostbusters is called a flop because it is one. It did not even make back it’s production and marketing at the box office. That makes it a flop. Now with the front loaded toy deals and such it had and the disc and streaming money it will make a profit in the long run but not all that much of one. Producers do not fund movies to make a small profit in the long run.
It was supposed to be a tent pole summer movie to restart the franchise, at which it failed spectacularly. Now that does not make it a bad movie just an unsuccessful one.
WRT the new Doctor Who: I was giggling at one commenter on that thread who was huffing about “What if they made the Master female?” and several people pointed out that they HAD done so: Michelle Gomez as ‘Missy’ was widely acclaimed as brilliant in the role. She was a big deal across two seasons. So much for fanboys.
And I agree with the badmouthing of ‘Ghostbusters 2016’. Yeah, not blockbuster, but not a flop. Many movies don’t make back their production costs; this one did. And I suspect it continues to sell on streaming and DVD sales.
I devoured Blyton’s “of Adventure” series as a child. It made my first trip to Britain sorta weird, since my knowledge of the country was based on Blyton, Monty Python, and Agatha Christie.
My $0.02 on the new Doctor: it’s in some part a ploy by the BBC to regenerate interest in the show after Moffatt’s reign as showrunner. I’m not familiar with the new actor, but I hope she gets better material to work with than Capaldi or Smith.
6) MAD PENIUS CLUB – Is that a fortunate typo or are you playing? Also, Freer is tiresomely predictable.
We had Enid Blyton books in the library, but I didn’t read them. What we didn’t have was anything by E. Nesbit, so I was an adult before I read anything by her.
I first heard of Enid Blyton when Alan Moore quoted her in the pages of V for Vendetta, twenty-five-odd years ago. I’m afraid that short quotes from The Magic Faraway Tree are all I’ve ever read of her work.
(2) No con suite? Like, not even during the day, in the center? o_O
Wow, people who’ve only been to KC and Helsinki are gonna lose their minds when they get to San Jose, what with con suites and room parties and reasonably priced hotels, booze, food, etc, the way Ghu intended it.
(5-7) BINGO! (see the https://twitter.com/SHardingRoberts, Jul. 16)
(15) I’ve got a ribbon that says that, in that font, from last year.
(17) Yes! Must buy NOW.
(21) Good book.
(24) Good series. I nominated it, but — sigh — not enough other people have as good taste. OTOH, with 23 chapbooks of shorts and 20 main novels, it’d be even more to come in fresh on than Vorkosigan! (though the chapbooks are optional)
(25) Yep.
I hope the new Doctor gets better writing than Capaldi did — too often a waste of his talent.
Oh, my goodness.
Cheryl S: MAD PENIUS CLUB – Is that a fortunate typo or are you playing?
Mike Glyer: Oh, my goodness.
That wasn’t deliberate??? I thought it was perfect! 😀
I had an aversion to Blyton as a child – I took an early dislike to her books. Like Brussel sprouts.
(25) British person here. I grew up reading Blyton because I got given my aunt’s old copies of her books. I never read Dr Suess but read a lot of other American series – Little house on the prairie, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, What Katie did. I would basically read whatever was on the local kids library till I managed to sneak into the grown up library and found the Fantasy / SF section there.
For my kids, I won’t be encouraging them to read Blyton at all (too racist and sexist). But we are all addicted to Dr Suess.
On the other Doctor, I’ve been depressed by how many left wing / liberal friends I have who have been loudly sharing reservations about a female Doctor – largely on the ground that it removes a non-violent role model for boys. I have given all the reasons why it’s not the case, but I now think outside active fandom there’s more resistance to change than I would have hoped.
Heh. By the time I got to the UK, I’d already been exposed to many more versions of the country in books, TV & movies. Even so, it was weird standing in London feeling like I’d been there before (even though it was my first time), simply because so many of the sights I’d seen before in media.
6) MAD PENIUS CLUB
*I* though it was deliberate. Stop me before I descend into bad puns: the penius mightier than the…
(6) MAD PENIUS CLUB.
IS NOTHING SACRED? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
The problem with the new Ghostbusters wasn’t that people didn’t want to see it. It was that it went a lot over budget.
(14) HAUNTED HELSINKI.
This one is for me.
What happened to #4?
(5) I never thought that people could truly be so… um… rephrasing in progress… I never thought people could miss the themes of these great shows so spectacularly. Or misinterpret the themes. Seems like some folks have blinders on with regards to their fiction. I guess it’s good to be reminded that not everyone sees the same story when they watch a show.
(8) If I still got t-shirts for myself, and had the cash, that would be on my list of shirts to get.
(14) Oooh, that would be fun. Does Helsinki have a lot of good ghost lore?
(15) This shirt would go well with my “I am not Phil Foglio” button.
(25) *gasp*
Seriously, though, I wouldn’t have recognized the name only a few years ago, but if you told me the stories, I would have recognized those right off.
A teacher in elementary school read “The Valley of Adventure” to us, and years later I read the entire series and realized why she picked that one and not the others. Let’s just say some of the attitudes haven’t aged well.
Ghostbusters 2016 :
According to wikipedia, total loss is between 25 and 75 millions $
So, I don’t think the flop part is negotiable. On the other hand, the “why has it flopped ?”…
(6) MAD PENIUS CLUB
As per, Dave doesn’t have the facts to back up his ideas. He says the BBC are unconnected with their audience, but they have close to a third of the UK viewership despite strong, increasing competition from commercial channels. (The UK has gone from 5 free-to-air channels to 75 over the last 15 years)
Their closest competition – the commercially funded ITV – lag noticeably behind in overall share, and presumably they have to connect with their audience to survive.
Now, bashing the BBC is a perennial British sport, and they suffer from being expected to please everybody, but they’ve been highly competitive in prime-time slots for some time now – due to understanding that audience – and Who is used as a strong lead-in for Saturday nights so they wouldn’t mess with it unnecessarily.
(8) NEVERTHELESS
Sadly, I don’t think my daughter would get the “nevertheless” joke. She is very excited by the new Doctor though – she’s promised to watch the whole of the new series with me next year 🙂
(25) YOU WOULD BE RIGHT
My first reaction was huhwhatnow, but of course Blyton is very very British so there’s no reason she should have made it across the Atlantic with much influence.
25) Enid Blyton was a staple of children’s literature for a couple of generations of Britons… I read a lot of her stuff in my childhood, but even then (1960s) she was starting to look, well, a bit last-generation. It doesn’t help that her stories, while generally good in themselves, tend to be heavily loaded with (ahem) social assumptions of her time – i.e. racist, sexist and classist as hell.
She’s still a writer of historical significance – but not so much so that I’d necessarily expect someone younger than me, and American, to have heard of her.
6) Count me as another one who thought the “Penius Club” was deliberate…. I can’t help but feel that the “female Doctor” thing is just an instance of “writers doing something novel with a long-running character”, which is most often a good thing, story-telling-wise. And, as we all know, Freer and the Mad Geniuses are only concerned with telling good stories, and have no political agenda of any kind.
I thought Enid Blyton was the name of the 13th Doctor’s new companion.
6) MAD PENIUS CLUB.
[Thanks to JJ, Bill, Steve Miller, David Levine, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr. Inadvertent Hilarious Pun contributing editor of the day credit goes to Mike Glyer.]
@Guillaume
As you say, the “why” is important. It seems that the studio bet big on turning this into a money-spinning franchise – and so lost money due to excessive marketing spend when that gamble failed. That’s essentially on them, not on the film.
I think a better metric is what audiences thought of it. It comes in 21st for 2016 US box office. Looking at higher-budget non-kids movies for comparison, it places higher than similar revivals like The Legend of Tarzan (23) or Independence Day: Resurgence (27) but behind X-Men: Apocalypse (17) and Star Trek Beyond (16). My feeling is that that’s actually a pretty fair placing for a revival of a popular 80s movie that hadn’t had any significant media presence since the cartoons ended 20ish years before.
By the pixel of Grayscroll!
The power words that turns Prince(ss) Everyperson into Filer-Entity.
25)
I admit to having needed to google Enid Blyton. (but then I am American, too, and I have not read a lot of children’s books. I always wanted to read “older”. Its possible I read one of her books or it was read to me–I had a British grandmother who lived with us. So I may have been exposed to her work that way.
6) I thought it was deliberate too and it didn’t occur to me that it would not be until I started reading the comments.
The Famous File.
The Secret Scrolling.
The Magic Fileaway Tree.
The Pixelscroll of Adventure.
The Fifthing Chair.
The Five File-Scrollers And Dog.
The Naughtiest Girl @ Scroll.
Fifth File At Scrollory Towers
I had to consult to be reminded of the name of her school stories, and was informed that one St Clare book had an Irish character called Kitty Flaherty and her pet goat, McGinty.
6) Hehe I scrolled right on by that P the first time without noticing. On second read that is the only thing to love about the article, which as others point out is standard puppy unfounded claims and revisionist history.
I’ve been glad through a combination of factors to miss most blowback from Jodie Whittaker’s casting (and my immediate social media circles had none of it) but I’m more than a bit nervous about the weight of pressure to be mind blowing right out the block. Both of the previous doctors had their ups and downs for me and I thought Capaldi’s entire first season was a dud, so I hope Whittaker gets the same treatment from the huge segments of the audience willing to not hate her on principle.
(To clarify I’m also bouncing off the walls with excitement about FEMALE DOCTOR but nothing can be simple)
17) Like Meredith, I’m waiting for a UK publisher to pick this up and put out an ebook – hopefully winning the Norton will help in that regard.
21) Aww I’m in the scroll! Thank you!
25) I read both Enid Blyton and Dr Seuss as a kid – plenty of the former through old copies stashed in Grandparents’ attics although I doubt much of her work has ever been out of print in the UK. From memory, it was the Faraway Tree books and the Secret Seven that captured me most – tiny me wasn’t a fan of the odd gender roles in the Famous Five and wanted George to just be a girl character who likes boy stuff without needing to deny her gender on that basis alone… I would definitely also have been fine with Anne having a spine.
They are very rooted in a certain time on top of the British cultural stuff, so I doubt they’d be so much harder for an American kid vs a late 20th/21st century British one, but not everyone needs to have heard of everything of course 🙂
@Mark: when have the mad genii ever allowed a little thing like facts get in the way of a good rant?
Also: almost everything on ITV is awful. I am amazed that they’re the closest competitor. I was hoping it would be C4 (partially public-funded, I think). Or Dave. Everyone likes Dave.