(0) What’s Daniel Dern’s title a reference to? Some commercials that aired before many of you were born.
(1) COLONIZE OR QUARANTINE? Pilita Clark, the Financial Times environment correspondent, complains “Elon Musk’s inter-planetary fantasy spells danger for Mars”. (This link goes straight to a paywall, but via Google I found a way around.)
What is troubling is that he (Musk) seems to think of Mars mush as early European explorers viewed Africa and the Americas, as places to be colonised regardless of the consequences.
Mars is in a pristine state and experts say it should stay that way if we are to find proof of past or present life there. Plonking a city of 1m humans on it would wreak havoc with such efforts, according to veteran space scientists such as Andrew Coates of University College London, whois working on the ExoMars rover due to launch in 2020.
Prof Coates says the big global dust storm on Mars could carry specks of terrestrial matter across the planet that scientists could mistake for evidence of Martian life. He also worries about Mr Musk’s breezy attitude to the brutally cold weather on Mars, where temperatures average minus 63C.
(2) THE BREW THAT MADE KENTUCKY FAMOUS. We’ve mentioned Wil Wheaton’s beer before. Here’s this year’s edition of “Drew Curtis / Wil Wheaton / Greg Koch Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout“.
COLLABORATORS
Drew Curtis, Fark.com Creator & Patent Troll Killer
Wil Wheaton, Actor & Web Celeb
Greg Koch, CEO & Co-founder, Stone Brewing
It’s been four years since this otherworldly stout burst out of our collective proverbial chests. Four years since the primally viscous first release ooze-snaked across the galaxy. This specialty imperial stout draws its huge flavor from wheat (that’s Wil, natch), pecans and bourbon barrels (two homages to Drew’s home of Kentucky) and Greg’s lifelong quest for pushing the limits of “why the hell not?” to make bigger, bolder beers. The result is a mind-blowing amalgamation of intense yet smooth flavors, perfect for a warm summer evening, a cozy winter’s night or the approaching destruction of the entire human race (be it externally or internally inflicted).
For this year’s bottle art, we were thrilled to entrust the task to heralded comic book writer and artist Walt Simonson. He was gracious enough to work with us in exchange for our donation to The Hero Initiative, a charity organization that provides retirement funds for golden-age comic book artists.
(3) MARVEL’S LIVESTREAM FROM SDCC. Marvel Entertainment will air the action from their booth at Comic-Con starting Thursday, July 20.
Hosted by TWHIP! The Big Marvel Show’s Ryan Penagos and Lorraine Cink, and Marvel Gaming host Jessica Brohard, viewers will be able to watch booth events with their favorite Marvel comic, television and movie talent, hear panel recaps from special guests, and learn about all the fun surprises happening on the convention floor, from exclusive merchandise to special signings. Join in on the fun by visiting www.marvel.com/SDCC2017 or Marvel’s YouTube channel.
- Thursday, July 20: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Friday, July 21: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Saturday, July 22: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET
- Sunday, July 23: 11:00 a.m. PT/1:00 p.m. ET – 3:00 p.m. PT/6:00 p.m. ET
(4) FROG FURY. The New York Times covers the brawl: “Kermit the Frog Performer and Disney Spar Over an Ugly ‘Muppet’ Firing”.
“This is my life’s work,” said Mr. Whitmire, 58, who lives in the Atlanta area. “The only thing I’ve done my whole adult life, and it’s just been taken away from me. I just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t resolve this.”
Disney, which acquired the Muppets in 2004 from the Jim Henson Company, painted a wholly different picture, portraying Mr. Whitmire as hostile to co-workers and overly difficult in contract negotiations. Members of the Henson family said they supported the dismissal as well.
… Henson’s family, which still runs the Jim Henson Company, chose Mr. Whitmire to replace Henson as Kermit in 1990 after Henson unexpectedly died of pneumonia at the age of 53. Some of those same family members say they supported the decision to replace Mr. Whitmire, though they are no longer involved with the Muppets.
“He played brinkmanship very aggressively in contract negotiations,” Lisa Henson, president of the Jim Henson Company, and Jim Henson’s daughter, said in a telephone interview.
Ms. Henson said Mr. Whitmire was adamantly opposed to having an understudy for his role, which presented problems when it came to what she called “B-level performances, such as a ribbon-cutting.” She said he was unwilling to appear on some of these occasions but also refused to develop an understudy and that he “blackballed young performers” by refusing to appear on the show with them.
Brian Henson, the company’s chairman and Jim Henson’s son, said that while Mr. Whitmire’s Kermit was “sometimes excellent, and always pretty good,” things changed when he was off set.
“He’d send emails and letters attacking everyone, attacking the writing and attacking the director,” he said.
Whitmire, meanwhile, has continued to characterize himself as indispensable in posts at Muppet Pundit, such as — “The Muppet Performers are not Interchangeable”.
The point is that there is so much vital and significant knowledge that was gained by the dwindling few of us who consistently stood next to Jim. From his characters to his methods and philosophies, it’s stuff you can never fully intuit from watching the Muppets. I know that to be true because I, too, was a completely obsessive Muppet fan with preconceived notions of my own that had to be unlearned when Jim hired me in 1978.
I approach The Muppets as a lineage tradition. For the inside knowledge-base steeped in its origins to survive and be passed down, there has to be a line of transmission, or you had to be there. For the Post-Jim performers to really understand enough about the Muppets to carry on the lineage they need to continue to be around the core performers Jim mentored as long as any of those people are willing and able to share.
None of this is a value judgement of any individual, it is a pointing out of the value of historical perspective so long as that perspective is used progressively. Having had the opportunity to spend the last 27 years cultivating knowledge of Jim along with feeling his presence through Kermit, I find myself at a place where evolving Jim’s vision has begun coming from a deep empathetic connection to him.
So, I see my most important task as providing a taste of the atmosphere created by Jim Henson to those Post-Jim core performers who will never otherwise come by it. My hope was to install it directly into their hearts and minds so that they could, in turn, be inspired to do the same for the next generation of performers instead of the characters becoming stale copies of their former selves. But, as I look around at what is presently transpiring it’s clear to me that the job is far from done.
(5) NO SH*T! Eliot Peper of Harvard Business Review tells “Why Business Leaders Need to Read More Science Fiction”.
At the end of the 19th century, New York City stank. One hundred fifty thousand horses ferried people and goods through the streets of Manhattan, producing 45,000 tons — tons! — of manure a month. It piled up on streets and in vacant lots, and in 1898 urban planners convened from around the world to brainstorm solutions to the impending crisis. They failed to come up with any, unable to imagine horseless transportation.
Fourteen years later, cars outnumbered horses in New York, and visions of manure dystopia were forgotten.
If 19th-century urban planners had had access to big data, machine learning techniques, and modern management theory, these tools would not have helped them. They simply would have confirmed their existing concerns. Extrapolating from past trends is useful but limiting in a world of accelerating technological change.
Science fiction can help. Maybe you associate it with spaceships and aliens, but science fiction offers more than escapism. By presenting plausible alternative realities, science fiction stories empower us to confront not just what we think but also how we think and why we think it. They reveal how fragile the status quo is, and how malleable the future can be…..
Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions. Assumptions locked top 19th-century minds into believing that cities were doomed to drown in horse manure. Assumptions toppled Kodak despite the fact that its engineers built the first digital camera in 1975. Assumptions are a luxury true leaders can’t afford.
(6) FOR SOME VALUES OF OVERDUE. John Ostrander reminisces about a career spent pushing deadlines in “The Digital Dog Ate My Homework. Honest.”
In my earliest days as a pro writer, I did everything on typewriter (first manual and then electric; rumors that I chiseled them on stone tablets are just mean). I didn’t have a computer until later and, even when I did, some companies (including DC) were not equipped to receive them electronically. So that meant printing them up on my dot-matrix printer and then rushing them off to FedEx for overnight delivery.
Unless you called in your package by a certain time, usually much earlier than you had the work done, you had to take the package to the nearest FedEx office. If you didn’t hit the office by closing time (usually around 6 PM), you had to make the Midnight Run to the main FedEx office out by the largest airport around. More than once, Kim was the driver while I finished collating the pages, stuffing them in the envelope, and addressing the delivery slip. Let me tell you, Speed Racer had nothing on Kim. She’d run stoplights and take stop signs as suggestions to be ignored. Often, we’d meet other local freelancers also making the death defying Midnight Run. It almost got to be a club.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 18, 1986 – Aliens burst into theaters.
- July 18, 2001 – Jurassic Park III opened.
- July 18, 2008 — The Dark Knight, the fifth film in the big-screen Batman series, opens in theaters around the United States.
(8) EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE. At Fantasy Literature, Bill Capossere and Tadiana Jones each review Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. Capossere begins:
Informative, witty, vivid, often compelling, sometimes juvenile, knowledgeable, clear, and written throughout with verve and panache via what feels like a wholly singular voice, Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us (2017) is what every non-fiction book should aspire to. It’s been a while since I’ve so enjoyed a work of non-fiction so thoroughly and consistently.
Kean divides his exploration of air into three large sections, the first dealing with the origin of our current atmosphere, one of many our planet (if not humanity) has seen….
Jones is just as enthusiastic:
Kean has a vivid and engaging style of writing, with a wry sense of humor, which elevates Caesar’s Last Breath far above most pop science books. Gas molecules are described as feral, oxygen as a madman, our moon as an albatross (as compared to the gnats that circle most other mooned planets), and gravity as “that eternal meddler” that won’t abide two planets in the same neighborhood. I learned about the Big Thwack (when a hypothetical planet called Theia smashed into our earth, vaporizing itself and eventually reforming into our moon), the Oxygen Catastrophe of 2,000,000,000 BC, and the mushroom cloud-shaped cakes baked during the heady days of the late 1940s when nuclear blasts didn’t really seem all that dangerous.
(9) INSIDE BASEBALL. Jennifer Brozek shared “10 Things I Learned While I Was A Director-At-Large for SFWA” at the SFWA Blog.
6: Authors, even your favorite author, are only human.
Everyone has either heard the story, or experienced it themselves: “I used to love reading AuthorX, but then I met them and discovered they are terrible. I can’t read their work anymore.” Sometimes it is hard to discover your idols are human with human wants, needs, foibles, opinions, habits, and flaws. When you work on SFWA’s Board of Directors, you usually see all the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Sometimes, you work with an author/editor on a SFWA project and it doesn’t go as smoothly as you like. Sometimes, it appears as if an author once admired has nothing but scorn for the work you are doing and no desire to help out—just kvetch and complain. Sometimes, authors come to the Board at their worst—financial or medical difficulties, personal conflicts that threaten to spiral out of control, issues with editors, agents, or publishers. They don’t have their “public face” on. They are human. They make mistakes. They can be hurt. They put their pants on one leg at a time.
This is one of those learning lessons that really surprised me. I’m not sure why. I just know it did.
(10) STARFINDER’S APPENDIX N. Paizo is producing a new science fantasy RPG named Starfinder, and they’ve released an image of the “Inspirational Media” pages from the game. It’s a wide list of old and new SF, not just books but also comics, movies, and games.
In the comment thread one of the developers remarks, “That said, I am excited to see fans talking about the things that moved them that we didn’t include. Those suggestions, and the conversations they start, are to me the greatest legacy of all these inspirational media appendices.”
Few appendices have made as big a splash in gaming history as Gary Gygax’s Appendix N. (I thought Cosmo’s appendix bursting at Gen Con that one year might have it beat, but he reminded me that was technically a gallbladder removal, so it’s OUT OF THE RUNNING!) That formative list of novels hit in 1979, in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. In it, Gygax laid out some of the works that had made the largest impact on him in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, from Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard to Jack Vance and Andre Norton. In doing so, he created a reading list for an entire generation of gamers and fantasy fans, and had a tremendous impact on the genre as a whole.
When we created the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook in 2009, we gleefully took the opportunity to publish our own version of Appendix N, keen to introduce fans to our new favorites like Clive Barker and China Miéville, along with grand masters like C. L. Moore. Yet it was ultimately still a fairly small list—just a single column of text—and cribbed heavily from Gygax, focusing solely on novels.
When I first sat down to paginate the Starfinder Core Rulebook, I knew that space was going to be at a premium. I had, by some estimates, 800+ pages of content to cram into something even smaller than Pathfinder’s 576 pages. Yet I also knew that just one page of inspirational media wasn’t going to be enough. In order to make a game like Starfinder, we had to stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants, both childhood heroes and our friends and peers. We couldn’t in good faith restrict ourselves to just literature, either. How could you have Starfinder without Star Wars and Alien? Without Shadowrun and Warhammer 40,000? Without Starcraft and Mass Effect? It just wouldn’t be the same.
(11) BIG EARS. BBC News video: “Telescopes to reach nine billion light years away”.
South Africa has started to set up radio telescopes far more powerful than any current ones in use around the world, in its pioneering search for extra terrestrial activity.
(12) WATER HAZARD. In Washington, D.C. a security robot drowns in a fountain mishap. “We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”
A security robot in Washington DC suffered a watery demise after falling into a fountain by an office building.
The stricken robot, made by Knightscope, was spotted by passers-by whose photos of the aftermath quickly went viral on social media.
(13) RETURN TO TONE. Ian Leslie’s post “Unfight Club” on Medium contends there is a way to have discussions on Twitter without devolving into flame wars, virtue signalling, etc. etc. If only.
- Beware the moral surge. The moral surge is the rush of pleasure you get?—?the dopamine hit?—?when you assert your moral integrity in public. A certain kind of columnist lives for it; much of social media is driven by it. Virtue signalling is its outer manifestation, but I’m talking about an inner mechanism. We’re all subject to it, and that’s not a bad thing in itself?—?it makes sense that we should feel good for ‘doing the right thing’ in the eyes of our group. But when you ingest too much of this drug, or get dependent on it, you end up giving your own bad behaviour a pass. When you’re addicted to the moral surge, personal abuse begins to seem like nothing when measured against high principles. ‘Anything I say to or about that person, however nasty or dehumanising, is justified, because they voted for austerity, which murders people,’ (the more apocalyptic your public language, the purer the hit). Letting your tribe see you condemn others feels good?—?so good that it degrades your own moral machinery. Viciousness becomes a virtue. Don’t let this happen to you: recognise your susceptibility to the moral surge, and be wary of it.
(14) THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY. Martin Wisse calls The New Weird “The last whites only literary movement in science fiction”.
As said, diversity when looked at from that white, middle class male perspective tends to focus on who’s being written about more than on who’s doing the writing. Not that this isn’t important in its own right, but it will still reflect the same limited perspective and no matter how well intentioned, often reducing anybody who isn’t (white, male, middle class) to the exotic. Diversity from this perspective is always from the outside looking in, making it easy to fall into stereotypes, cultural appropriation, orientalism and othering. You get things like making mutants as a metaphor for the Civil Rights struggle and thinking that’s enough, or writing alternate history in which America is conveniently empty when the Europeans land. This sort of diversity is only possible if your audience and peers are the same as you, or you can at least pretend they are.
The New Weird happened at arguably the last time that you could still hold up this pretence without immediadely being contradicted by the very same people you’re denying the existence of. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook didn’t exist yet, blogging was in its infancy and existing fannish and science fiction online spaces were still dominated by, well, white middle class men. What made Racefail not just possible but inevitable was that between the New Weird and Racefail the internet became not just mainstream but ubiquitous as both access and ease of access increased; it’s no coincidence that much of Racefail took place on Livejournal, one of the earliest social media sites and one that had long been home to sf fandom. Tools or sites like Twitter or Tumblr have only made it easier for everybody to let their voice be heard, harder to ignore people when they address you directly. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but the upshot is that science fiction can no longer pretend to be just white, middle class or male.
(15) LICENSE REVOKED. John C. Wright says “Dr. Who Is Not”.
The replacement of male with female is meant to erase femininity. In point of fact, and no matter what anyone thinks or wishes, readers and viewers have a different emotional relationship to female characters as male. This does not mean, obviously, that females cannot be protagonists or cannot be leaders. It means mothers cannot be fathers and queens cannot be kings.
It means if you want a female Norse warrior goddess, go get Lady Sif or Valkyrie, and leave Thor alone. It means if you want female Time Lady from Gallifrey, go make a spin off show starring Romana or Susan or The Rani, and leave The Doctor alone.
I have been a fan of Dr Who since age seven, when Tom Baker was the Doctor. I have tolerated years of public service announcements in favor of sexual deviance that pepper the show. But this is too much to tolerate.
The BBC has finally done what The Master, the Daleks and the Cybermen have failed to do. They killed off the Doctor.
Dr. Who is dead to me.
(16) ON HIS GAME. So can John shout BINGO! yet?
https://twitter.com/SHardingRoberts/status/886648567351447552
(17) PRO TIPS. Now I’m wondering what anyone would be asking David about File 770 at his site. Maybe, “Why doesn’t Mike pay for material”?
The Submission Grinder/Diabolical Plots are not the same thing as File770. Do not send us questions for File770, because we are not them.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
The Submission Grinder/Diabolical Plots are ALSO not same thing as Submittable. Do not send us questions for them, because we are not them.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
In general, maybe read the name of the site whose contact form you are sending to before hitting Send. This will save everyone time.
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
This is not a comprehensive list of things Diabolical Plots isn't. A few more: shrubbery, dinosaur, tardigrade, Dr. Who, dentist, pharmacist
— Diabolical Plots: Ignyte Award Winner! (@diabolicalplots) July 18, 2017
(18) TWEETS OF FAME. To satisfy your appetite for something that has nothing whatever to do with science fiction, we present this link to Bored Panda’s “The 10+ Most Hilarious Parenting Tweets Of The Year So Far”. Here’s #2 on their list —
Me: Harry Potter can use magic to fix his glasses.
6-year-old: Why doesn't he use magic to fix his eyes?
Me: *questions everything I know*
— James Breakwell, Exploding Unicorn (@XplodingUnicorn) March 10, 2017
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “A Single Life” is an animated short nominated for an Oscar in 2014 by Job, Joris, and Marieke which asks what happened if you had a 45 RPM record that enabled you to travel through time?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Francis Hamit, Chip Hitchcock, and Nancy Sauer for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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(15) A few days ago, Camestros posted on this topic. I left a comment there that I think describes my thoughts on the matter fairly well, so I’ll reproduce it here:
[Begin]
It’s been interesting to see the reactions to this announcement. Most of what I’ve seen has been positive, though that’s probably because I don’t frequent the places where I’d see the more noxious stuff. The negative reactions that I’ve seen have mostly come via retweets and memes. The people with whom I voluntarily associate have all been ecstatic about it, insofar as they’ve displayed any public reactions at all–not all of my friends care about Who one way or the other.
For my part, I stopped watching New Who after Capaldi’s first season. I’d had a rocky relationship with the series for a while, and it finally dawned on me that I was watching it because I felt I had to rather than because I wanted to–which was a shame, in a way, since I recall enjoying Capaldi’s performance. I try not to be the type to shout to the heavens when I stop watching a given show, so I just quietly parted ways with it and moved on to other things. I catch bits of news here and there, and I read the occasional episode review, so it’s not as though I’ve disowned the series–it just stopped working for me as a regular viewer.
I do my best to live by the teachings of the Let People Enjoy Things school, and I usually succeed–it’s how I’d want my interests to be treated, after all. Heck, in recent years, I’ve even mellowed my attitude toward people who enjoy things like Twilight. I know that not everything will be to my taste, just as things that I like aren’t always to others’ tastes. In the case of Doctor Who, it’s something that used to be right up my alley but gradually became something that wasn’t.
And that’s okay.
I still have a great deal of affection for the franchise, particularly the classic series. I love the show’s premise, but like any show, there have been stories that I liked and stories that I didn’t like. Unlike some of the more vocal critics (to use a diplomatic term), I recognize that the stories I like are *still there*; I can go back to them whenever I want. And since we live in a time when current episodes (hopefully) aren’t in danger of being lost, I can come back to the show if I ever feel like giving it another chance.
I’m happy that people are happy, and I hope that Whittaker’s stories are worthy.
[End]
I learned ages ago that even my favorite stories (be they books, television shows, etc.) sometimes include choices that I’m not particularly keen on. I have no problem with the idea of a woman playing the Doctor (as if my approval or disapproval actually meant anything); I’d only worry about the show continuing to do the things that made me leave it in the first place. As I said in the above comment, though, I’m happy that people are happy. Even if Doctor Who eventually stopped working for me, it’s terrific that it’s still a favorite of others. I revel in their joy.
As for Wright allegedly forgetting how old he is, we mustn’t forget that while he is (in all modesty) the writerest writer in the history of human language, he’s still just a writer, and as has been documented…
15) Jadwiga of Poland, Tamar the Great of Georgia (who was crowned King because the Georgian language at the time literally did not have a word for Queen regnant) as was her daughter Rusudan, and who could forget Hatshepsut, King and Goddess?
Thor has been a frog, and an alien horse-dude, and, on two separate occasions, Storm from the X-Men during an issue of What If? when she was Queen and All-Mother of Asgard and also during Secret Wars, not to mention the What If? issue when Rogue accidentally permanently absorbed Thor’s powers, killing him, and was ultimately accepted by Odin as a daughter and the de jure Goddess of Thunder when she helped thwart an evil plot by Loki to use her to conquer Asgard. People still bitching about Thor being a woman doth protest too much.
I remember seeing Tom Baker in Doctor Who in 1978. It was a syndicated half hour show with Howard Da Silva doing the serial-like intro and conclusion voiceovers.(“What will happen to Sarah Jane?”) 17 would work.
Oddly, it was on after school and paired with Battle of the Planets via Sandy Franks Entertainment who also brought us Gamera. A lot of modern geekdom packed into one hour.
Is there a list somewhere, of all the people Rogue’s accidentally killed and absorbed their powers in What If? issues?
(They’re fantastic and I love ’em.)
@bookworm1398: Frog Fury. Sounds like he should have been fired years ago. So you believe Disney’s report? I don’t credit much from them — and if Whitmire was pushing too hard for other puppeteers to keep what he saw as standards, management should have been nudging him years ago. We know the Mouse is mostly about money; this could be anything, but it sounds like a lot of smoke around a salary dispute.
18) great question. Harry might not be able to do it himself, but during one of his trips to the doctor it could have been taken care of. @Paul Weimer points out there is at least one “healing” spell, but are there wizard doctors? Seems unlikely; otherwise there’d be no need for an infirmary at Hogwarts instead of “Hey Presto! Now get your skiving arse back to class.” If you wanted to get seriously into the possibility, I’d start with the difference between “restore previous state” and “change a ~birth defect to match some standard”. But the real reason is that the Plot demands glasses– and what the Plot wants, the Plot gets (cf Langford’s forwarding of coupon theory). SImilarly, the Plot demands a school infirmary, to keep up the correspondence with a long line of British boarding-school stories (e.g. Blyton, to drag in a thread from yesterday).
@Iain Coleman: “Beatles hairdo”? I never saw a show with him in it, but the pictures of that ugly mug always suggested Moe Howardto me. (I don’t know whether Brits would have seen that possibility at the time; the films may not have been imported, but a local TV station was running 5/week when I was young.)
I am not a Dr. Who fan, but I have quite specific memories of watching certain series. When I was about 8 years old in the mid-60s the local tv station showed a very early one involving the Daleks. For some reason they then stopped showing them, to my disappointment. A year or two later some relative gave me an illustrated British hardcover “Dr. Who Annual” tie-in book, which i read with interest. Then in the ’70s I watched several Tom Baker series. Fun stuff. I imagine I might enjoy it if I checked it out again. A female Doctor actually seems very reasonable to me. It seems ridiculous that anyone would be bugged by the idea.
Stephen — everybody has blind spots; some just have bigger blind spots than others. I’m still waiting to see whether Silverberg will tell us there’s something “ineluctably masculine” about the Doctor or show us he’s learned something in the last 40 years….
@Paul Weimer:
The exact reason why I’m not interested in laser eye surgery.
(15) I can’t imagine the hissy fit JCW threw when he found out that Zeus was cast as a Swan once. O tempora! O mores! O interspecies abomination!
@me: a more direct link to a Moe Howard picture, with an uncharacteristically cheerful expression.
(4) Frog Fury: whether one believes Disney’s account or not, Whitmire’s account makes it pretty clear that he expected lifetime employment for this role. With that much entitlement, maybe he could find employment as a Pepe puppeteer in the times we find ourselves living in.
Oh, Tiresias in Greek Mythology was the prophet who had been transformed into a woman for 7 years. He got struck blind because he told Zeus and Hera afterwards that in his experience women enjoyed sex 9 times as much as men did.
Tiresias, the original SJW. Who knew?
If they’d had the internet back then, it might have only taken til the second week the series was on the air.
After all, and I blush to confess it, when 13-year-old Mike saw George Clayton Johnson’s first aired episode of Star Trek he was sure he could do better than that and started his own script outline.
@ Pyre Light: The anthology 221 Baker Streets has at least one story with a female Sherlock Holmes in it — and if you like that one, you can get a novella featuring the same character in Alt.Sherlock.Holmes.
@ Standback: If that article is supposed to be reaching Libertarians on their own terms, it’s failing dismally. Don’t read the comments.
@ Ghostbird: AFAICT, the people who use “virtue signalling” do so as a fancy synonym for “lying”. It’s basically the same thing as the people who say that atheists don’t really disbelieve in a Supreme Deity, they just deny the truth.
@ Paul: Well, of course not! Every woman’s dream is to be the sidekick (and romantic interest) for the dashing, handsome hero! That’s a woman’s natural place, and only those who have been brainwashed by SJW propaganda about equality even think about anything else. [/sarcasm]
@ Joe: Okay, so you’re an unreliable narrator and so is he. It’s not something I’d brag about if I were you.
My childhood memories are generally tagged with various identifying details which pin them down easily to within a year or so — what grade I was in (or the summer after which grade, or before I started school (which only covers about 3 years because memories before age 3, not so much)), or what popular music was playing, or what clothes I was wearing, or my parents’ car, etc. etc. etc. Now I may be toward one end of the curve in the direction of being able to time-bind, but I don’t think I’m any kind of a prodigy.
(4) FROG FURY
I think that’s all one needs to know on this topic.
Mike G: George Clayton Johnson’s MAN TRAP has all the feelings of an OUTER LIMITS episode. This kind of pattern and mystery and monster was pretty standard for the OUTER LIMITS.
And a few times I’ve mentioned it was the first episode aired, I’ve gotten comments about it not being the first one filmed. Kind of a “correct me when I’m right” mentality.
Honestly, I think the whole Thor debate is not quite the same. There are actually good arguments against the change that has nothing to do with the new Thor being female. The way Thor was stripped of the hammer and even his name hit a lot of fans the wrong way even if they like the female Thor.
Magewolf on July 19, 2017 at 10:35 am said:
That to me has more to do with trust that the current storyline will have a satisfying resolution, which can mean an overall dissatisfaction with the writers. Personally I like the idea that Thor can’t wield the hammer because he got mentally jacked up by Fury making him question if he’s worthy or not. Usually those arcs lead to the character questioning why they wield the power and what their purpose is and come back a stronger character from it. That Jane is fighting cancer while also trying to fight as Thor is kind of crazy.
(15) I can’t imagine the hissy fit JCW threw when he found out that Zeus was cast as a Swan once. O tempora! O mores! O interspecies abomination!
I can’t imagine what he will do when he discovers that not only did Loki change genders, Loki made the change into horse form as well, and then used his (her?) sexy wiles to entice a stallion away from its work and ended up pregnant with Sleipnir.
(12) The story about that security robot grows weirder and weirder.
https://twitter.com/originalgriz/status/887662467014434816
Funny, I always thought of “virtue signaling” as exactly the sort of thing JCW is doing here. “Look how much I hate them darn liberals/SJWs! Love me! Buy my books!” 🙂
@Hampus Eckerman
Sorta. In the comic, Thor gave up his name and title of God of Thunder’ to Jane Foster because he acknowledged that ‘Thor’ was more than just his name, but also a symbol and an ideal. I think it was them harkening back to the original Thor comics, where his spirit was possessed by Don Blake, who could become Thor as opposed to being him fully.
The whole ‘turned Thor into a woman’ manbaby rant is twisting up the actual story so they can claim prime victimhood.
I wrote up my thoughts on the next-Doctor thing, and it turned out as a gigantic screed which is far too long to post here… but not, I’m afraid, too long to post here. God have mercy on the soul of anyone who tries to read it, though.
@Steve Wright:
Excellent summary/screed. Well said.
@ Steve Wright
That’s terrific! Many thanks.
@Steve
Shared with the inexplicable number of followers I have on twitter. Thanks! 🙂
*gvpxl obk*
(ETA) Huh. It said it was 19th July, 6963 at 3:00 pm when I posted this. Time machine!
So, apparently HBO is planning to make a show set in an alternate History where the Confederacy won the Civil War, with GOT producers helming it.
https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/887776908351614976
Steve Wright, well said.
(The Time Machine is back! Without the Shoggoth. I hope. Anyway, this was posted from the year 0022, or, more properly, the Year of the Consulship of Agrippa and Galba.)
@ Paul: Goddammit. I am so sick and tired of KKK wet-dreams. Why don’t they go back to the fate of the Spanish Armada? (HH1/2K)
Or forward — let’s have a look at how American history might have played out if the Iran hostage rescue hadn’t failed. That seems to be much more interesting, at least to me, and it’s a definite fork point. Carter would have won again easily in 1980, and by 1984 Reagan would have been seen as too old to run (not to mention already showing visible symptoms of Alzheimer’s).
Xtifr on July 19, 2017 at 12:14 pm said:
I usually see virtue signalling as a term used to accuse someone of taking a position, typically one of empathy, and saying that person doesn’t really believe in it they are just trying to pander to another group. Which means that the person isn’t just pandering but also doing so under false pretenses.
It’s a fallacy used both to discredit what a person says but also suggesting they don’t really mean it and if they were honest would agree with you. Which internet troll culture is full of people saying stuff they don’t mean because they’re trying to get a reaction so they assume anyone saying something in sympathy or empathy must also just be saying stuff just trying for a different reaction. Which for an internet troll makes more sense than someone feeling empathy for anothwr they don’t even know.
Here in 1787, I am trying in vain to persuade the Founding Fathers of the need to put some kind of anti-Trump provision in the Constitution.
Or forward — let’s have a look at how American history might have played out if the Iran hostage rescue hadn’t failed.
@Lee. That reminds me of the Kim Stanley Robinson story “Remaking History”, where that’s the branch point.
And:
On those notes: The time machine is back and holy-sh*t I’m in 1977! Just enough time to get a plan together!
Given that slavery was slowly dying out even in the southern states and would have become economically unrealistic long before modern times, it’s a premise I can’t buy even with a vat of industrial-strength Willing Suspension of Disbelief (available by direct order from Acme or where lousy products are sold). Even accepting that, the CSA was so close to fracturing by the end of the war that it’s doubtful it would have lasted 30 years, much less into the 20th or 21st century.
Here in 2412, we’re too busy fending off the R.O.U.S. created in the toxic waste spill of 2067 to watch much television.
I, for one, am happy to no longer share a fandom with JCW. I’ve been watching Dr Who since I was 12 or 13 (around 1979/1980) and they were showing 2 episodes from 9-10am on Saturday mornings on WOR TV Ch. 9 in NYC. I started with the Tom Baker episodes that had the Howard Silva voiceovers done for the US market. I believe the first one I watched was episodes 3 and 4 of Underworld. I was instantly hooked.
I have no objection to a female Doctor. I look forward to seeing what Jodie Whittaker does with the role. I do wish they’d kept Pearl Mackie’s Bill on for more than one season, though.
My only regret is that I only got to wear my 12 Doctors shirt for a year until it became obsolete. My bigger regret is that Dr Who achieved peak popularity and availability right when I achieved peak disposable income.
While I like Broadchurch and Born & Bred, I have not been a huge fan of Chibnall’s work on various shows in the DR Who universe. For instance, I would be perfectly happy if the Torchwood episode “Cyberwoman” had never happened. It will be interesting to see what he does as show runner.
Many years ago, I directed a very physical and highly choreographed production of Antigone. For the Tiresias bit, I had the smallest woman in the chorus ride on the shoulders of the biggest man, with them speaking in unison while wearing a giant cloak. I got a lot of praise for demonstrating Tiresias’s gender duality in this way.
The funny thing is, I was completely ignorant of this part of Tiresias’s mythology. I just thought it would look cool.
@Cathy:
I wish my introduction to the show had gone that well. Instead, after hearing a few vague things about how good the show was, I tuned in to PBS one night and saw The Sontaran Experiment. I was… unimpressed, to put it kindly. It wasn’t until I got to college and met a fan with patience and a definitive library of episodes that I got properly introduced to the show, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
I still haven’t gone back to rewatch TSE, though. 😉
By the way, has anyone seen the Shoggoth?
It’s 9586 and boy, football isn’t played the way I remember it. It’s much more expansive & takes a lot longer. It’s like people have too much time on their hands.
@ Paul: You mean someone actually did that? Where can I find this story? Is it a short story, novella, or full novel?
@Lee
Well, the story is set decades and decades after the branch point, not quite your idea per se, and involves the remake of a movie that was made about the successful freeing of the hostages.
It’s a short story that’s in a number of Robinson’s collections, including the most recent “Best of Kim Stanley Robinson”
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Kim-Stanley-Robinson-ebook/dp/B0070YYOTW/
@Steve Wright: a fascinating collection of info; I wonder whether the BBC lacks the concept of a bible, or was just much more willing than US TV to “discover” and validate apocrypha when they had a serious hit on their hands. I certainly hadn’t been following enough to realize how many hints had been dropped that Time Lords may have the same attitude towards body type as Eight Worlds inhabitants; it’s nice to know the Pup class is not only expectably bigoted but demonstrably wrong.
Chip HItchcock:
I cannot follow this reasoning at all. It seems like you’re saying if there are no wizard doctors, therefore an infirmary with a nurse is obsolete and irrelevant in a castle that is notoriously far from everything but one small town? (rather than a logical source of first aid as such things are at places that have them, including modern day schools?)
And the healing spell was cast by a notoriously incompetent teacher, not by the competent nurse in the infirmary. And there are numerous references to St. Mungo’s, the hospital in London, especially to its wing for incurable curses, which strongly imply doctors — but doctors who, like muggle medical practitioners, have limits to how far they can do healing. Presumably, binding together the edges of a metal frame is as much simpler than fixing vision as welding is to laser eye surgery — or more so, since an 11 year old girl cannot generally weld.
Lee, ISFDB says that KSR’s story “Remaking History” is also available in several anthologies.
@ JJ: Thanks! When I looked at that link, I discovered that I have one of those anthologies, and was able to pull it out and re-read the story. I’m not surprised that I’d forgotten it, because (1) as Paul notes, it’s not really about the fork in the road, that’s just the background for a story about something else, and (2) the book was printed in 1989, and I didn’t start thinking about the hostage rescue as a major turning point until sometime in the 2000s.
As to the thing the story is about, it’s an argument over how valid the Great Man theory of history is, with one character saying that history is shaped by heroes and the other arguing that what makes them heroes is all the little coincidences that lead up to them being in the position to do their Heroic Thing. I find that I’m partly in agreement with both of them; yes, it’s often a matter of chance that a hero is in the right place at the right time — but then why, out of all the other people who are often in the same place, does one person act while others don’t? It seems obvious to me that some people are less likely to freeze than others, and/or more psychologically prepared than others, when confronted with an unexpected crisis.
I haven’t gone over to poor JCW’s blog to see how he explains how he knows why the BBC (or I suppose more accurately the producers and/or show runners) chose to change the Doctor’s gender. I’m guessing it’s because they were hoping to make his head explode, or something like it. If I could put up with his bloviating, I’m almost curious enough to see what examples of right reasons to change the Doctor’s gender he would find acceptable.
I don’t remember that many occasions where the Doctor meets for the first time after regeneration people who already knew the Doctor , but I’d like to see them use the exact same dialog from one or two of those past exchanges, and never have anyone refer to the Doctor’s gender through out the entire season. It wouldn’t bother me if they had stories where gender made a difference, but I suspect that some people would start complaining that they were being bludgeoned with terrible political correctness.
Regarding Doctor Who, the Jodie Whittaker announcement has gotten quite a bit of notice in the German media, even though Doctor Who has pretty much zero recognition in Germany (Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi episodes are airing on a small digital only channel) and vast swathes of the show have never aired here at all.
However, my local newspaper ran a short article together with a photo of Jodie Whittaker (and I suspect there are maybe five people in my hometown who’ve ever seen an episode of Doctor Who) and the cultural TV program kulturzeit showed parts of the BBC’s intro video for Jodie Whittaker in the context of a report about women in culture and society. So the fact that a role which has been played by male actors for 54 years is now played by a woman even attracts attention even among those who have no idea what Doctor Who is and who probably think it’s a medical drama.
@Nate Harada: How did I miss the “What If?” issue with Rogue?! That sounds awesome! (I’m a Rogue fan.)
@Standback: Well, Wikipedia has a page devoted to Alternative Versions of Rogue, which is kinda cool. 🙂
In the year 4461 (yay, time machine!), the Doctor is in his 1,429th regeneration and is now played by a real alien – and oh, the complaints about this back in 4459 were something to see! Or maybe the Doctor’s played by a shoggoth. ::shudder::
In my head-canon, the Doctor’s default appearance is that of a shoggoth, more or less. All these human guises are just because humans don’t react well to something with quite that many tentacles and eyeballs. 🙂
This came out around the time John C. Wright was 17:
https://www.comics.org/issue/34518/cover/4/
Maybe it scarred his psyche.