Six stories, a French rant and a video adorn today’s Scroll.
(1) “Cap’n, it’s a Class M planet.”
“Any lifeform readings?”
Described in media reports as an “earthlike planet” is the Kepler space mission’s first discovery of a world smaller than Neptune in the middle of its star’s habitable zone.
Also called the Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone is the region around a star where a planet’s surface is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water—and thus life as we know it—to exist.
(2) Atlas Obscura has posted its “Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips”. I’ll bet there are some fan fund reports crying out for the same treatment.
The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.
(3) Thunderbirds fans are very enthusiastic about the plan to combine old-fashioned “Supermarionation” with audio lifted from three original 21-minute mini-albums released in the 1960s (each was a 7″ single, but played at 33-1/3 rpm). The Kickstarter appeal to fund production, with a goal of $115,789, has already gathered $206,325 in pledges from over 2,000 contributors. The original goal would have paid for one – the current total should pay for all three.
[Director] Stephen La Rivière says: “We have shot new sequences with the puppets using the old-fashioned techniques. Whilst many of the methods used seem a little archaic and time-consuming by today’s standards, we thought that it would be very special to do a one-off project bringing Thunderbirds back to life 1960s style. Sadly, many of the original voice cast have passed away since 1965. However, thanks to the original audio footage we’ve rediscovered, we have new, authentic stories that have never been adapted for screen.”
(4) Being a critic is a higher calling for Jonathan McCalmont than most sf bloggers who spend a lot of energy churning other people’s advertising in return for pageviews. (Pay no attention to the man behind the file…) McCalmont inquires “What Price, Your Critical Agency?” on Ruthless Culture.
These days, few cultural ecosystems operate independently of commercial interests. The ability to artificially engineer an interest bubble means that commercial interests will always have some control over the agenda of an enthusiast press. Reviewers will request DVD screeners and ARCs of books they have been encouraged to look forward to and editors will always be happy to slipstream a wave of hype by providing content that satisfies the readership’s artificially-engineered interest in a particular subject. Money and effort devoted to creating buzz translates into traffic and so anyone who is interested in getting more traffic will always go out of their way to chase the hype.
While traffic is a significant carrot to offer in return for collaborating with commercial interests, review copies are another great way of controlling the agenda. At an institutional level, it is difficult to run a reviews department without review copies you can pass on to your reviewers and so the output of a reviews department will always be dependent upon the nature of the screeners and ARCs provided. At an individual level, a commitment to operate any kind of reviews platform means an open-ended commitment to media consumption and while you may very well be willing to pay for the media you choose to consume, the volume of reviews required to build an audience realistically means deep pockets, a relationship with publicists, or a willingness to obtain review materials for free by either borrowing or stealing.
One of my favourite recent discoveries has been S.C. Flynn’s Scy-Fy, a blog that features no fewer than 100 different interviews with book bloggers, magazine editors, podcasters and something he somewhat alarmingly refers to as ‘booktubers’. One thing that struck me about these interviews is that despite many of them warning about the dangers of writing only about new books and how setting your own critical agenda is the best way to stay productive and stave off burnout, most of the interviewees operate platforms that lavish their attention on new releases. In other words, they know that allowing commercial forces to influence their critical output is dangerous and yet they continue to let it happen.
(5) But at the very tip of the cultural pyramid is the blogosphere’s most highly evolved parasite, with an enviable track record of breaking stories before the studios’ own PR staffs ever hear about them. Alex Pappademas on Grantland tells how El Mayimbe creates those leaks.
El Mayimbe’s real name is Umberto Gonzalez, born 41 years ago in Queens, New York, of Dominican and Colombian descent, and as a self-proclaimed “fanboy journalist” and “ace scooper,” he lives for moments like these. If a studio’s measuring an actor for an iconic leotard or cowl or enchanted helm or loincloth, if a director signs up to reboot a trilogy based on an action figure, Gonzalez wants to be the first to know, and the first to trumpet that information on the Internet, via a fistful of social-media accounts and a new website called Heroic Hollywood, which went live in June. In an era when the movie business sometimes appears to be rebooting itself as a machine that cranks out nothing but superhero movies, Gonzalez is far from the only reporter whose beat includes stories like these, but no one follows it as closely or as aggressively. Gonzalez broke that Brandon Routh would play Superman, that Heath Ledger would play the Joker. He knew that Bradley Cooper would be supplying the voice of Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy, he says, before Cooper’s own publicist did.
(7) You don’t need to know French to catch the drift of this Telerama article about the Puppies, titled “Hugo Awards : le plus grand prix de SF menacé par des groupes d’extrême droite.”
Fervent défenseur des armes à feu
Cette année, le débat est autre. Un groupe de fans extrêmement conservateurs, les sad puppies (« chiots tristes »), dirigés par un fervent défenseur des armes à feu, Larry Correia, s’était déjà fait attaquer pour ses choix. En 2014, il avait mis de l’eau dans son vin, proposant aussi sur ses listes des auteurs progressistes. Trop, au goût de certains de ses membres, qui ont formé un groupe dissident, les rabid puppies (« chiots enragés »), l’ont débordé sur sa droite et ont réussi, en faisant voter en masse leurs soutiens, à faire inclure dans toutes les listes de nominés la plupart de leurs candidats. Démarche parfaitement en accord avec les règles du prix. Mais les livres ainsi proposés deviennent les fers de lance d’une percée idéologique forte. Et le prix est aujourd’hui au bord de l’implosion.
[Thanks to Steve Green and John King Tarpinian for some of these links.]
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I’m going to have to go for a tie in the last bracket: we’ve got one of the foundations of the field against one of its best mature expressions. Cannot resolve.
I vote LeGuin: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Apart from that not being Science Fiction. So instead The Word for World Is Forest.
I vote that Shelley and LeGuin should marry, and produce lots of Shelley-LeGuinlings.
I like Frankenstein, but I love The Left Hand of Darkness.
Le Guin.
Which raises the question: Variations on hi-tech reproduction is common in SF – uterine replicators, genetic screening, various sort of artifical insemination and so on. But all examples I remember still involves male and female “parents”. (Ethan of Athos, for example, centers on a male-only planet’s dependency on ovaries.)
Are there any significant works that make a point of allowing same-gender biological parents?
Le Guin, for a wider range of great works.
Just don’t ask me again in five minutes.
McCalmont’s article is fairly grumpy, but in the fuller version he has some interesting things to say about reviewing and blogging out of a sense of community, which has obvious parallels to F770 right now.
He also laments the fall of RSS use, which I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere. I find it odd as I’m still cheerfully using my old Google reader collection in feedly, and now have a number of F770 commenters added to it. What do people use to follow blogs, webcomics etc if not RSS? Social media?
> “Are there any significant works that make a point of allowing same-gender biological parents?”
This is not uncommon in “all woman world” stories. Sticking only to significant works: When It Changed, The Female Man, and Ammonite all have societies in which two women can combine genetic material to become parents. I could also name a bunch of somewhat more minor works, like the Caelano series.
(There are other works which have women becoming parents by parthenogenesis or cloning, like Herland, A Door Into Ocean, Motherlines, or Houston Houston Do You Read, but that’s not same as what you were asking.)
In terms of stories where two men become biological parents, I’ve seen this but can’t readily recall titles. (And although there are some “all male world” novels or stories I can think of, reproduction doesn’t work that way in the ones I can recall off the top of my head.)
And for works where simply any couple with any combination of genders can produce a child with their own DNA, again I know I’ve seen that come up a couple of times, but names of books or stories aren’t immediately leaping to mind. Although gender is simply readily alterable in, for example, the Culture novels, which might be considered to be a form of that.
If more examples come to me, I’ll mention them.
Mark: What do people use to follow blogs, webcomics etc if not RSS?
I use this. It’s quite easy: click gearbox, select “Add RSS Feed”, paste URL of blog to follow. Rearrange gadget and feed boxes by dragging and dropping; customize boxes for number of entries and “headline only” vs “headline + summary”. Includes a Facebook gadget and a Twitter gadget, plus about anything else you could want.
@Cubist
Don’t you realise how difficult it is to restrain hysterical laughter at work?
[nods solemnly] My work here is done.
Bracket(t): The Left Hand of Darkness.
I loved all of Earthsea, too, even Tehanu. I can see the issues (gur jubyr oebxra=zntvpny puvyq guvat vf pbzcyvpngrq) but I still loved it.
Shelley-LeGuinlings, yes, please!
While the slating is 1) what is a real danger to the Hugos and 2) why many of the Hugo voters are so angry, the politics is what motivated the rank-and-file* Puppies and continues to motivate them to this day, so in that regard I don’t think the Telerama article is too far off the mark. (Of course my french is the shaky result of three years of high school french compounded by long neglect so I may be missing nuances that are important to the meaning.)
And of course, if EPH means that only one or two non slate candidates make the Hugo ballot for the short fiction categories instead of three or four as is modeled to occur in the categories that attract more votes that is still a lot better than what we have now, isn’t it?
——————-
* Granted it’s looking more and more like the Puppy leadership was motivated by nepotism and personal gain, but it seems to me that the bulk of Puppies were led around by their political resentments.
In the BattleTech universe, the Clans (the descendents of an army that exiled itself after a civil war) are ruled by the “Trueborn”, who are the product of a eugenics program. They’re gestated in “iron wombs”, with matrilineal and patrilineal DNA provided from two other Trueborn, who aren’t necessarily male or female.
Victory!! When we somewhere in a previous post listed our favourite short storys, I couldn’t remember the name correctly. But as File770 has forced me to order old books I used to love, I received it yesterday and found the short story.
It was “The Victim from Space” by Robert Scheckley. Found in the collection The People Trap. Really love that collection. Would have been on my top 32 if I made a bracket-list.
This is a really, really hard choice. I’m going to have to go with Left Hand of Darkness, *only* because I’ve re-read it, and I only found it necessary to read Frankenstein once.
I can safely say I never expected Battletech fluff to referenced in this comment thread.
”
This is just horrible. While I do think that Brian has a habit of lying and misrepresenting, myself having called him dishonest several times, it is one thing to point this out when it is happening and a totally different thing to attack a person as a “lying sack of shit”. I find this utterly intolerable.
I have let this pass a few times before when it has only been a line here or there, but to write lyrics just to attack a person and demonize him? No.
Just no.
Cat,
What we have now is two groups of fans who both made some mistakes, and then found themselves the targets of “sheer, frothing, irrational vitriol.”
In the future scenario you just envisioned, in which the “other side” has been goaded into hacking the awards and occupying most of the ballot perennially, while “true fans” manage to get only one or two non-slated items in most categories, the Hugos would be dead in the water.
Hampus: thanks.
Brian has for me, relatively recently, crossed the line from “might just be an persistent contrarian” to blatant troll, by which I mean that no reasonable person could hold the views he professes while taking (or more usually failing to take) the actions he does. While I generally try not to resort to gratuitous profanity myself, and would prefer it if people generally didn’t, I can see why they have.
In the future scenario you just envisioned, in which the “other side” has been goaded into hacking the awards and occupying most of the ballot perennially,
That you think the Puppies will only continue to do their ballot-packing slate if “goaded into” doing so reveals just how incredibly stupid or incredibly disingenuous you are. Which is it? Are you a complete idiot, or are you just lying again?
The Other Wind was a solution looking for a problem. If LeGuin wanted to have a debate with Russ she should have done it somewhere else.
The problem with The Other Wind and Tehanu is I can’t expect my 7-12 yr old nieces and nephews to be able to read them as they read and enjoyed the first three.
I have let this pass a few times before when it has only been a line here or there, but to write lyrics just to attack a person and demonize him? No.
He has earned it, many times over. Even one more time just a few posts after you came to his defense. He seems unable to do anything other than lie.
Aaron,
If you don’t think that having three or four ballot slots in most of the short fiction, related work and fan categories perennially occupied by groups who attacked the awards would mean the Hugos are dead in the water, you are welcome to disagree with me, but that hardly makes me a liar for saying I think so.
I just asked if felice’s math is correct. If it is, that’s a cause for concern.
Yes, Brian, you’re deeply concerned.
Hampus,
I wondered if it was fair to put a short story collection up against a novel. We should have a bracket for collections.
Ray, you mean because I liked two of the sixteen slated works of fiction well enough to put them above No Award?
If you don’t think that having three or four ballot slots in most of the short fiction, related work and fan categories perennially occupied by groups who attacked the awards would mean the Hugos are dead in the water, you are welcome to disagree with me, but that hardly makes me a liar for saying I think so.
You’re a liar. Its that simple. There are precious few of your posts on this site (or any other that I have seen you show up on) that are not riddled with lies.
1. That’s not what the data showed, and you know it. The data showed that without EPH, slates dominate to a much greater degree than with EPH. Pretending that EPH will cause, rather than mitigate, a problem is simply disingenuous bullshit. So you’re lying about that.
2. You claimed passing something to prevent slating would “goad” the Puppies into slating every year. That’s like telling a woman who has been subject to domestic abuse that she “brought it on herself” and should not do that next time. The Puppies are going to slate no matter what the rest of the Hugo voting populace does. Pretending that passing a voting change will somehow change the decisions made by the Puppies to make them compelled to slate is simply a lie.
You’re a liar. Everyone knows it. You should stop with the wounded innocence schtick. It just makes you look like you are a liar and stupid.
no, because you keep posting here to tell us how concerned you are.
Brian Z. three or four slated works on a ballot is not optimal. However, it’s a hell of a lot better than ONLY slated works on a ballot, which is what we get without EPH. The perfect is the enemy of the good; I’d rather have some mitigation for slates than no mitigation at all.
You say you don’t want slates taking over ballots, AND you don’t want EPH. How, then, do you propose to keep slates from talking over ballots, given that Rabid Puppies seem to have no social link to SF-fandom-as-a-whole and thus cannot plausibly be shamed out of their behavior? Please be specific.
@Vasha well they mention that slates are legal but as you noted not that in itself is a controversy. They are also iffy on the history of the Sad Puppies. Its implied that Larry Correia is still running the sad Puppy Campaign. I not sure if its just sloppy writing but it comes across as if they believe that all 11 Castalia House nominations are for best novel.
Aaron, as you can tell by reading their blogs, some have been offended by what they termed (as I quoted) the “sheer, frothing, irrational vitriol,” not by a discussion about whether or not to amend the Hugo rules.
Cassy B — I think Brian wants us fans to come out of our warm, social fandom and join the Puppies in their lack of sociability. If we just give up our notions of inclusivity and become part of one of the Puppy troll armies, we can fight each other in our spiked, flame-thrower-equipped cars in the Australian Outback until the last survivor can claim all the prizes, the way all right-thinking individuals should behave.
I’m so going to wear that as a badge of honour.
Brian — Well, no doubt you can point to Cubist’s ditty as an example of how frothing and vitriolic we’ve always been here at File770. [sarcasm]Well done, Cubist![/sarcasm]
Brian Z.: as you can tell by reading their blogs, some have been offended by what they termed (as I quoted) the “sheer, frothing, irrational vitriol,” not by a discussion about whether or not to amend the Hugo rules.
Well, if they didn’t want people to be upset with them, the Puppies shouldn’t have behaved like assholes. As a corollary to what someone else has pointed out, this is like saying that a domestic abuser is offended by having people upset with them because they’re a domestic abuser. Why should anyone care if they’re offended? They’ve brought it on themselves.
The problem with inveterate liars is that in the end people will not trust anything they say; the tale of the boy who cried wolf is an old reflection of this fact.
With Brian Z it’s reached the point where if he told me the sun rises in the east I’d set my alarm clock early to check on it; I am being reproved for my failure to care about the feelings of a man who has alleged that I and every other English person is antisemitic, just as I am being reproved for failing to care about the feelings of a man who has alleged that the membership of Loncon, last year, committed criminal offences of conspiracy and fraud.
Neither of the people in question has adduced any evidence to support their claims; neither of the people in question has apologised for their libels. Of course, this doesn’t bother Brian Z because he’s perfectly happy to see this happening over and over and over again; I, on the other hand, am not.
But then I’m not an inveterate liar…
of course, EPH is a purely technical solution. It doesn’t target anyone, and isn’t powered by vitriol.
But Brian is deeply, deeply concerned that some people may be offended by it, and all he really wants is for people to get along. Such sadness!
Cassy B,
Claiming that they have no links to fandom is overstating your case.
Talking to them is still a more plausible solution than ending up choosing between only 1 or 2 non-slate works in most categories. (If felice was correct in that analysis.)
Another option – not the one I prefer – might be to list 10-15 works and invite people to at least have a look at excerpts if they don’t have time to read them all.
NelC: no, I didn’t mean that – that was a quote from MZW.
Brian was going to try this, but unfortunately he is too busy being concerned by EPH
🙁
How so?
For cryin’ out loud, Brian.
Because, if the slated nominees don’t turn out to be very good, and if there is not a good selection of other competitive nominees to choose from, then there would be very little point in going through the motions.
as a single lone commenter and reader…its more fun to read these posts when they are about books rather than the endless discussion with brianZ
Shambles: I’m sorry, I’ll stop replying to them individually.
@others, feel free to have at me and I might drop by later.
@Kyra, thanks again for the great bracket.
Oh I forgot LeGuin – The Left Hand of Darkness
Left Hand of Darkness. Because there’s no part of Frankenstein that has stayed with me like the journey over the Ice.
Brian Z.: Talking to them is still a more plausible solution than ending up choosing between only 1 or 2 non-slate works in most categories
If you believe it is so plausible, then — given your alleged concerns about slating — why haven’t you done it? Why expect those of us who do not believe it is plausible to do it for you?
some have been offended by what they termed (as I quoted) the “sheer, frothing, irrational vitriol,” not by a discussion about whether or not to amend the Hugo rules.
So why did you posit their “goading” as part of an objection to EPH? Of course, the reaction hasn’t been “sheer, frothing, irrational, vitriol” in the eyes of anyone but the core Puppies, who were going to be offended and upset no matter what the reaction had been. They’ve been offended since before Correia started SP1. All of the Puppy campaigns have been about starting off claiming to be offended and then trying to justify being offended. (Of course, the real reason is that the Puppies are practicing naked nepotism, but that doesn’t gin up a political voting bloc).
Whether the Puppies will be upset or not has nothing to do with whether EPH is a useful response. Raising it in this context is simply disingenuous. The Puppies are
almost certainly going to be offended no matter what anyone else does. For the Rabid Puppies, being offended is essentially the reason for their existence. Without that, they have nothing.
Talking to them is still a more plausible solution than ending up choosing between only 1 or 2 non-slate works in most categories.
So go talk to them and stop trying to lie about EPH and other issues related to the Hugo awards. Take your own advice for once. Discuss it with them. I’m sure they will be more than willing to listen to a lying crapsack like you. Go talk to them for the next six months and then report back as to how far you’ve gotten in convincing them that slating is a bad idea.