Editor’s Appeal: Is “Pixel Scroll” a good title for these daily posts? If so, I still think there needs to be some adornment and variety to keep it fresh. Can anybody think of a scheme to generate a brand of subtitles? (The “Pixel Scroll” title could be changed to something else to facilitate a winning idea.)
(1) George R.R. Martin is coming to Sasquan after all and has declared he is taking back the Hugo Losers Party from the boring souls who have sanitized it and disguised it as the “Post-Hugo Nominees Reception.” GRRM and Gardner Dozois held the first one in 1976 and it immediately became de rigueur.
Gardner and I ran another one at Suncon in 1977, and yet another at Iguanacon in 1978 (I lost my first novel Hugo that year). I don’t think there was one in 1979, but don’t know for sure… that year worldcon was in England, and I didn’t have the money to go. But the Hugo Losers party came back big in 1980, at Noreascon II. That blurry picture up above? That’s me, entering the Hugo Losers Party with two Hugos in my hands. Such hubris cannot go unpunished. Nor did it. Please note the man lurking behind me. That’s Gardner, smiling innocently. A few moment later, when my back was turned, he produced a can of whipped cream and sprayed it all over my head. Sic Semper Victorius.
So George says:
Fuck 1999. Let’s party like it’s 1976.
(2) Those looking to practice their party skills should show up for Prolog(ue), the relaxacon being held in Seattle the weekend before the Worldcon (August 14-16). Ulrika O’Brien has posted a progress report at the link. The international array of Persons of Interest coming to the con includes TAFF winner Nina Horvath and —
Charles Stross – Hugo- and Locus-Award winning author of the Laundry Files series, the Merchant Princes series, and too many stand-alone novels and short stories to mention, will be reading from his latest Laundry Files book, The Annihilation Score (released July 7) and possibly unreleased upcoming stories. You Heard It Here First.
(3) “Portlander Ursula K. Le Guin is Breathing Fire to Save American Literature” in Portland Monthly begins, “At 85, she may be Portland’s greatest writer. She may also be the fiercest.”
Foremost among her concerns these days, it seems, is what Le Guin considers a worrisome literary shift whereby writers—squeezed to make a living in a world that attaches less and less financial value to their profession—view themselves more as brands and “content producers” than artists. “I see so many writers getting pushed around by the sales department, the PR people, and being led to believe that that’s what they do,” she told me. “That’s a terrible waste.”
Artistic resignation in the name of pragmatism—“letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write,” as she put it in her National Book Awards speech—elicits Le Guin’s especial disapproval precisely because she herself spent an entire career bucking what others thought she should write. Yet even now that her own science fiction has been lofted into the modern literary canon, praised by no less an elitist than Yale’s Harold Bloom, Le Guin remains more interested in keeping the good fight going than in declaring victory. “We’ve come a real long way,” she admitted, “and in fact I think essentially these genre walls are down. But you would not believe how contemptuously reviewers and other people still just dismiss sci-fi. There’s still so much ignorance, and that bugs me.”
(4) GoodReads has blogged their choices for “10 of the Best Narrator and Audiobook Pairings of All Time” which includes numerous SF/F entries:
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS Written by Kurt Vonnegut Narrated by John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons, Being John Malkovich)
READY PLAYER ONE Written by Ernest Cline Narrated by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stand by Me)
THE HANDMAID’S TALE Written by Margaret Atwood Narrated by Claire Danes (My So-Called Life, Homeland)
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS Written by Lemony Snicket Narrated by Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, It)
FAHRENHEIT 451 Written by Ray Bradbury Narrated by Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption, Mystic River)
(5) Robert J. Sawyer admits he is skeptical about newer writers crowdfunding their novels.
So, I’m still struggling with this. I’ve supported some Kickstarters for projects that clearly are not commercially viable that I’d like to see done. But early books in a writer’s career? Those have rarely been commercially viable for anyone, and have always represented a substantial degree of risk and commitment on the part of the author.
(6) Bradbury, the Building makes for good reading, too, on LA Curbed.
The timeless, fantastic Bradbury Building at Broadway and Third Street is a much-beloved Downtown Los Angeles landmark, most widely known for its significant appearances in movies including Blade Runner, (500) Days of Summer, and Marlowe, starring the late James Garner. But before it was a popular film set, it was the idea of a gold-mining magnate who really wanted to put his name on a building. His vision led him to turn down a prominent architect and mysteriously commission a totally untrained one instead, and that not-quite-architect, George H. Wyman, turned to ghosts and literature to pull it off. Avery Trufelman, producer of the design and architecture podcast 99 Percent Invisible, talked to Esotouric operators Kim Cooper and Richard Schave about the eerie history of what 99 PI calls “arguably the biggest architectural movie star of Los Angeles.”
As the story goes, Lewis Bradbury, a gold-mining millionaire, decided he wanted to build and put his name on a building, so in 1892 he commissioned prominent architect Sumner P. Hunt, who alone and with partners would design the Southwest Museum, the Ebell Club, the Automobile Club in University Park, and loads of private homes for wealthy clients throughout the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Hunt prepared some plans for the proposed building, but when Bradbury visited the office to check them out, he wasn’t taken with any of them. Here’s where things get weird…..
It’s said that Wyman’s inspiration for the building’s design was directly inspired by a novel, Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, a popular science fiction novel about a utopian society that was published in 1888. A passage from that book describes this incredible building in the future (which, in those days, was 2000): “a vast hall full of light received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome.
(7) Pluto appears to have glaciers of nitrogen ice, judging by the latest pictures from the New Horizons probe.
….But the mission team cautions that it has received only 4-5% of the data gathered during 14 July’s historic flyby of the dwarf planet, and any interpretations must carry caveats.
“Pluto has a very complicated story to tell; Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work we need to do to understand this very complicated place,” explained Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator.
In a briefing at the US space agency’s HQ in Washington DC, he and colleagues then outlined a number of new analyses based on the limited data-set in their possession.
These included the observation that Pluto has a much more rarified atmosphere than previously predicted by the models. …
(8) Don’t miss out — here’s info about how to submit yourself for casting calls for the next three Star Wars movies.
The Walt Disney Studios and Lucasfilm in association with Kasdan Pictures and Genre Films will begin production on “Star Wars: Episode VIII” on January 16, 2016. Casting is now officially underway for new lead roles and supporting roles. Filming will take place at the Pinewood Studios in London, England among another undisclosed locations in the United Kingfom. Casting director information is posted below. Experienced film crew members can now submit resumes to the production office email below. All actors, extras, and film crew members must be legally eligible to work in the entertainment industry in the United Kingdom….
(9) Speaking of available work, Vox Day posted a Tor job announcement today – they’re looking for a publicist. See how helpful he is? Not just trying to create openings at Tor, but willing to fill them too!
(10) I enjoyed Spacefaring Kitten’s spin on this nominee –
Just watched a superfun toy commercial which is also a #HugoAwards finalist. http://t.co/tqZz7fL4IA
— Spacefaring Kitten (@SpacefaringK) July 24, 2015
(11) Sarah Lotz, in a Guardian book blog post titled “The Hugo awards will be losers if politics takes the prize”, has this to say —
It raises the question: who should nominate works for awards anyway? A select jury (a la the Man Booker or Clarke) or the fans who actually buy the books? Clearly there should be enough room – and integrity – for both. Yet this year’s Clarke award shortlist was almost universally praised, while, in contrast, the Hugo nominations were met with derision and incredulity (for example, so-called “rabid puppy” Vox Day, who has called women’s rights “a disease to be eradicated”, is up for two awards). You might say that this is democracy at work – the fans have spoken! – and that would be all well and good, but, tellingly, two authors recommended by the Sad Puppies have already pulled their work from the nominations, saying that they want their writing to be judged on merit and not on their assumed political affiliations. It goes without saying that all books, whatever their authors’ political stance, should be judged on whether they’re any good or not; but with some factions suggesting fans vote “No Award” on categories that they believe have been hijacked, and the Puppies urging their stormtroopers to stick to their guns, the whole thing has slipped into farce. And this is a great pity.
(12) Here’s a dissenting theory.
https://twitter.com/JimRoseVSOP/status/624658232745684992
(13) And now you need a laugh.
A Italian western parody, of Sergio Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD and the UGLY…but with Star Wars characters. With respect to Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable and entirely iconic film score.
[Thanks to JJ, Paul Weimer, SF Signal and John King Tarpinian for some of these links.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Nigel, what is it with you? Here are the messages you are sending with EPH:
1. If you want, you can field a slate for the Hugo Awards.
2. If you do, you can get 1 or 2 novels on the ballot.
3. If you do, you can get 3 or 4 things on the ballot in most other categories.
If that’s what you want, go for it.
I thought I made what is with me pretty clear. I would like you to elaborate on your ‘talk to them’ alternative to EPH. If your points 1 to 3 above are a true and accurate assessment of the outcome of EPH, then ‘talk to them’ should provide a viable better outcome. If you cannot explain how that is going to work, I can’t see how you can oppose EPH, given that your worst case outcome is still an improvement on what occurred this year, and even this year’s outcome was mitigated by disqualification ad withdrawals.
I agree with Hampus.
Thanks to everybody who recommended Jo Walton’s The Just City. I bought it on Torsday and am loving it.
What is it with you, Brian? Going on with the present system as is will produce slates where the Puppies (or whoever defeats them in mortal combat) will take everything. We can’t count on them to make all the same mistakes next year as they did this year, and we won’t get so many novels from their slate kicked off for ineligibility, or withdrawn by authors who don’t wish to be slated.
I mean, I know that you are a character created for one sole purpose in this drama, but you’re really more of a short story character: at present, you just don’t have the development of character to sustain suspension of disbelief for the length of a novel, let alone a saga.
Stevie: Sorry, I must have missed it. If you were wondering about other books in the Expanse series, I’m happy to recommend them all – they get better as they go. 🙂
It just occurred to me that the Pups have at least one more year of unopposed slating (and much more if certain people get their way) which means they have Hugo noms to hand out to works and people that would in no way be able to earn them on merit.
However, if someone has been promised a Hugo nomination in exchange for consistent work to keep the nominations slate-able, one hopes they got it in writing. The Pups do not strike me as particularly trustworthy.
Msb, the follow up to The Just City came out recently: The Philosopher Kings.
http://www.amazon.com/Philosopher-Kings-Novel-Jo-Walton/dp/0765332671/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1437829563&sr=8-3&keywords=Jo+Walton
(Let us see if links will work for me!)
It isn’t a functional solution.
It is a perfectly functional solution so long as you aren’t dishonestly trying to claim something that isn’t perfect isn’t an improvement. But since you are opposed to doing anything that might actually reduce the impact of slates, you’ve resorted to lying again.
NelC
And therein lies the problem; Brian Z and his ilk are unable to comprehend that not everyone believes that it’s a zero sum game. George RR Martin has written about this aspect of puppidum’s belief system; fandom is happy to see a broad array of different works, indeed nominated both Larrie and Brad for honours, yet Larrie and Brad want to drive out writers they don’t like, and are pissed off because they couldn’t do it fairly.
So they lied and cheated, and the Internet fell on their heads, and now they’re even more pissed off because being exposed as people who lie and cheat means that honourable people who have been happy to read their work don’t like being associated with people who lie and cheat, and look elsewhere.
Of course, there are very large numbers of people who read SF/F but are not members of fandom, so the numbers looking elsewhere aren’t huge, but those people in the much wider market also tend not to care for people who lie and cheat, which is probably why puppidum isn’t at all happy that respected newspapers are reporting fairly on the facts.
After all, once it gets into respected newspapers the numbers of people learning about puppidum’s Great Leaders increases very greatly, and Brad and Larrie, who invited Theodore Beale to join them, are now clearly associated with someone who preaches hate speech on an almost daily basis.
This may be fine in the US, but Europe knows what happens when people like Beale embark upon their campaigns to incite racial hatred, and we don’t want it happening again. Brian Z can, and on past performance will, bleat on and on and on about how talking to people will persuade them to be nice, but Brian Z makes no attempt to persuade Beale, or Larry, or Brad, that preaching and inciting hate speech is not a good thing. All in all, Brian Z’s presence here has convinced me that there is no alternative to EPH; these are not people interested in fair representation, and they will carry on stuffing ballots until the rules preclude it, whilst lying about it…
Brian: those are your (faulty) arguments against EPH. Argue for your chosen solution and why it will provide a better outcome than EPH.
While you’re at it tell us why we can’t use both a social solution (as I think you’ll find we are anyway) AND EPH at the same time.
In the Best Related category I managed to read “The Hot Equations” which wasn’t actually awful. It’s a sad comment on the current non-EPH system that this makes it a standout among the slate nominees not just in its own category but overall. It’s still only borderline regular Hugo quality and I will still be placing it below No Award because that’s how I’m doing my good-citizen bit to discourage gaming the nomination process. I also kind of skimmed Why Science Is Never Settled but meh. Not particularly entertaining.
I finished the Samurai short story and was unimpressed. I haven’t played the video game it is based on, and in the absence of that insider connection kept being dragged off the story by the obvious questions (and a less obvious one that might only occur to someone who grew up in earthquake country as I did–Japan is earthquake country too, I might add.) There was no emotional connection to the character that would get me past the points where my willing suspension of disbelief said “ow!” and let go.
I tried to read the Tank Marmot story and got really disgusted when it became apparent that beautiful women are an obvious perk of rank for the real human beings. It certainly didn’t help that I had read Damage just beforehand, since it’s basically everything that the TM story is trying and failing to be.
Weirdly, in my own home dimension, multiple European countries have been plagued by rising ethnic-national movements over the last decade, ranging from the “merely racist” (UKIP) to the outright neo-fascist (Golden Dawn; Hungary’s ruling party). And these parties have inspired the mainstream conservative parties to parrot shadow-syndrome versions of nativist rhetoric. But I suppose if we take the alternate worlds hypothesis seriously, we shouldn’t expect that to be the case in every Europe.
I signed up with Gravatar, so
Test one two three…anything but that.
EDIT: It worked!! Mike, feel free to delete for OTness.
Stevie:
Sorry, I was offline earlier (those pesky time zones!). Let’s put it this way: I’d been reading The Expanse series from the library as they came out, but I just recently bought them all for ease of re-reading.
I don’t agree with Bruce Baugh that they get uniformly better as they go — I really don’t care too much for Abaddon’s Gate — but they definitely, heh, expand. And re-reading reveals a lot of thematic coherence.
My feeling about the upcoming TV series is “warily hopeful”. The biggest problem is that they aren’t able to show the physical differences between natives of different gravities (waaaay too expensive), which means viewers won’t get the racism on a gut level.
I also found “The Hot Equations” not awful, but not terribly interesting and at the time I was pretty sure that some things in it were wrong – I do chemical thermodynamics so I would have to look some stuff up to do a real assessment, and it just wasn’t that interesting.
Now “Why Science Is Never Settled” I found actively offensive. To me it read rather like one of Brian Z’s comments. And it was pretty much impossible for me overlook all the anti-climate change dogwhistles. Yeah, yeah – “he’s not really a climate change skeptic, he’s just concerned.” Thus my comparison to Brian Z. Now that I am reflecting on it, the similarity in overall tactics is pretty stunning.
“Letters from Gardner “- I honestly don’t remember anything from at this point other than being really puzzled about the title. I don’t remember it being actively bad, but it wasn’t actively good either. (I read it before that spectacular display in the comments here – wow.)
And I did my reading early enough that I did actually try to read “*#$dom from My Internet” – that is the one that tried to do brain damage. The added preface especially for the Hugo’s was one of the most spectacularly unprofessional things I have seen in a nominated work – until I actually started trying to read the actual nominated material. I was naive enough to read through chunks of it in a bewildered attempt to try and figure it out. Ugh.
I managed to find at least some things to be entertained by in the other categories (even if it was rather akin to jotting down the number of times a speaker says “um” or uses the term “paradigm shift”) but this category about killed me.
Jim
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with our system of Government I should explain that Parliament has 650 Members; UKIP has one MP, as does the Green Party. The Conservative party, which mimicked UKIP’s racist rhetoric in some parts of the country, has a Parliamentary majority of 12; this is not exactly a ringing endorsement by the electorate of its policies, and the electorate punished the Lib-Dems for entering into a coalition with the Conservatives rather than Labour.
There is certainly racism in this country; the odd thing about it is that it mostly exists in areas which are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly nominally Christian. The man convicted of inciting racial hatred just before the Neo-Nazi demonstration, all 20 of them, which I have previously written about, lives in Yeovil, Somerset; I haven’t a clue as to why he managed to work himself into a frenzy about our Jewish communities, given that Yeovil lacks a synagogue and is therefore unlikely to possess a Jewish community. The most probable explanation is that he is both ill-educated and under-achieving and therefore wants an explanation for his failure which doesn’t involve him having to do anything to improve his education and get off his rear end.
I am tempted to argue that the same forces are at work as outlined in the recent research on sexism in gaming; the guys who were bad at the game were deeply unpleasant to female players whilst the guys who were good at the game were nice.
In future I will amend my comment to Western European; the stuff which came out after the fall of the USSR is pretty horrendous. The Hungarians have every right to elect any government they choose; human trafficking, on the other hand, is the negation of human rights, and whilst the numbers have diminished the trade still exists…
@ Beth
Thanks, I’m looking forward to it. The King’s Peace is still my favourite Walton book, but The Just City may change that …
Brian Z.: Here are the messages you are sending with EPH:
1. If you want, you can field a slate for the Hugo Awards.
2. If you do, you can get 1 or 2 novels on the ballot.
3. If you do, you can get 3 or 4 things on the ballot in most other categories.
Incorrect.
Here are the messages which are actually being sent to the Puppies by EPH:
1. The rest of us are well aware that we can’t stop you from continuing to field slates for the Hugo Awards, and you have made it clear that you have no intention of stopping.
2. However, if you do continue to field slates, you will no longer be able to monopolize the entire ballot.
3. Nevertheless, the purpose of EPH is not to shut out slate participants entirely, which would be an unjust result. Instead, slate nominators will still be able to get some things on the ballot, in proportion to the group size and participation in each category.
There. I Fixed That For You.
@Stevie:
The special pleading here is so transparent I don’t know what you think it accomplishes. Recall that this all started because you were flattering your home region at the expense of other people’s. For starters, we call that chauvinism. It’s annoying on its own terms, but it’s especially unpersuasive when you have to say things like Well, our ruling party aped the rhetoric of our racist party but they have a slim majority and never mind that they are the ruling party and were also the ruling party after the previous election but they totally don’t count, and hey we’ll also throw the Eastern and Southern Europeans off the island too and we haven’t even gotten to the fact that Western Europe’s managerial elite is using EU institutions and national politics to destroy European social democracy as quickly as it can get away with it.
When you start determined to reach your conclusion no matter what, “Yay us! Boo you!” then you end up straining yourself to get there.
I’d like to thank whoever recommended The Sandbaggers tv show a bunch of puppies threads ago. It’s fantastic.
Ok, so, deafening silence re books following ‘Leviathan Wakes’ leads me to look elsewhere for stuff to cheer myself up with.
Have you read Soon I Will Be Invincible?
Elisa said “I also found “The Hot Equations” not awful, but not terribly interesting and at the time I was pretty sure that some things in it were wrong”
I only made it through the first 1/3, and I am certain that lots of things in it were wrong. It read like something written by someone who understood the principles in his high school physics text, but with no practical experience or more in depth study to tell him when he was missing major concepts or making bad assumptions. Technical terms were used oddly, as if by someone who had no familiarity with them.
It would be nice to see an assessment from someone who has worked in space science, but really I can’t see why anyone would bother.
I hope it doesn’t win a Hugo simply because it was written well enough to pass the smell test for 50% of the voters.
@Mark Hopper:
Great! I think it was a few of us who plumped for Sandbaggers.
I found “The Hot Equations” dull. Part of it was down to being a fan of Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site for ages, and so having read most of the science at greater depth previously. Part of it was that there weren’t enough equations in it, and no worked examples. And I think part of it was that the writing just wasn’t very interesting. I may have spotted a mistake or two, but I don’t recall now.
Maybe it’s unfair of me to compare it with some of the great science essays by, say, Jerry Pournelle collected in his A Step Further Out (or is it “Farther Out”?), but damnit, if you’re in contention for Hugo, you have to bring your best game, and this wasn’t it.
@ Elisa
Huh. I’ll have to take a second, closer, look at Why Science Is Never Settled; I missed the climate change denial stuff. I have to admit I kind of skimmed after the first bit. The Puppy stuff is not holding my attention very well.
@Cat
The anti-AGW position isn’t explicit, but essentially you start with the author claiming on Baen’s Bar that the A in AGW is not settled (because the 97% are beholden to their funding and/or their institutional positions) and that it’s probably just solar cycles, and then he writes an article for Baen.com called “Why Science is Never Settled” with lots of examples of when scientists turned out to be wrong…you get the idea.
One of his examples of “when scientists were wrong” is the 1970s idea that we might be heading into a new ice age. What he leaves out is that that was never much more than speculation, not the broad consensus position AGW is today.
Speaking as one who lurks more than comments, I’m a hardy soul, but if these comment sections are going to be dominated daily by Brian the pinata and five or six of you looking for candy ad tedium, sorry, but I have better things to do than scroll past 2/3rds of these in hopes of finding something interesting.
I’d rather listen to Slim Whitman “singing” all the arias from The Marriage of Figaro than continually wade through the constant nonsense, when the sections are short enough that one boilerplate comment “this is why Brian is wrong/a troll/ boring unless he’s filking” will let anyone who’s been living in a cave since April understand what’s going on. All y’all need another hobby.
A version of a previous suggestion: Why not just make each day’s Pixel subhed the best suggestion for the previous day’s title? (Easier than retrofitting.)
Re: Why Science is Never Settled
I didn’t have any prior knowledge of this author so the climate skeptic stuff to me started out mostly subtle, built up and then I hit this sentence … “The highly public “ClimateGate” scandal has reportedly shown abuse of prepublication peer-review to publish some articles and block others” … which is framed in such a glaringly ahistorical and anti-factual fashion I pretty much wrote the author off right there.
And I have to confess that I wasn’t reading the stuff with too much attention either – I was grading student papers at the time and the Hugo’s material was supposed to be a nice break between batches of student essays. Instead the writing was generally worse than the worst of the essays I was working on. My brain started rebelling.
It doesn’t surprise me that there actually several mistakes in The Hot Equations either – it was barely holding my attention and stuff wasn’t ringing right to me (my physical thermo is rusty – I do geochemical thermo which is a different beast in day to day practice) but it just wasn’t interesting enough for me to want to dig out any of my books to refresh my memory.
More to the point, I wasn’t seeing the value of the essay – I seemed to be (from what I remember) to be down on a bunch of stuff without presenting examples of what would be better or more accurate. Like- is there really anyone out there reading SF who doesn’t know that AFAWK matter can’t go faster than light speed, nevermind giant space cruisers? It this really worth arguing about?
There some kind of fuzzy line out there where some things you just have to accept for stories to work – like warp speed – and other things that just end up sounding stupid – like announcing that the planets surface is -500 degrees Kelvin (which actually made me yell out loud, much to the displeasure everyone watching the show with me at the time). I know that the line is in different places for different people – but as far as I remember, most of the stuff the author was talking about was pretty firmly on the – I know it doesn’t really work like that but I am willing to play along side of the line.
I think this is one reason mileage varied so much with The Three Body Problem -for people who really liked it, it never crossed that fuzzy boundary, whereas for me it blew way, way past that boundary and well into -500 degrees Kelvin territory.
Robert Reynolds: People’s need to engage Brian leaves me feeling the same way, like I’m watching Gandalf and the Balrog fighting in an endless fall.
It’d be great if the people who have that vocation would write a single “master comment,” perhaps including a index of links to their rebuttal of various points, and just rubber stamp that in where needed.
I also suggested, seriously not satirically, that people set up a rotation. Person X is on Brian Duty today, Person Y tomorrow and so on. The first part of the Brian Z problem is Brian Z. But the rest of it is a half-dozen people all chiming in. I get the need to rebut nonsense for the sake of vulnerable lurkers. But that can be done once each time rather than seven.
Subtitle suggestion: A Pixel in Time
The bit that definitely goes beyond dog whistles or possible misunderstandings is when he mentions ‘Climategate’ he links to Lord Monckton account of it. Monckton is a flat out pseudo-scientist with associations with the ‘skydragon slayers’ end of AGW denial who have theories that mainstream AGW denialists claim are crackpot (i.e. people who are so deep in crackpottery that normal crackpots use them as a yard stick of crackpottedness). A credible source he is not. That Roberts would regard him as a credible source undermines Roberts’s own credibility on the topic of science.
The more times I’ve revisited that essay, the more my opinion of it has gone from OK-but-flawed to appallingly-bad.
Sounds fair.
I do miss the rotating roundup headlines. How about a format where the title always spells “P.S.”? So it could be “Pern Sightseeing” one day, “Portable Synchrotron” the next…
Otherwise, the mention of “Leviathan Wakes” momentarily made me think that John Wyndham had written a whole series about unseen invaders from the ocean deeps. But no, that was just me being confused. 🙂
It might scrape over the line. VD put it 1 so presumably whatever minions he has voting will vote 1 plus it probably will get some least-worst votes from non-puppies or best-MilSF-related work votes from puppies. Or then again, maybe something else will happen 🙂
Oi, thanks for mentioning poor old heartsick me in the scroll!
Jim Henley and Mark Hopper,
If you enjoyed the Sandbaggers, have you tried Rucka’s Queen and Country comics? It’s very much a love letter to the series. Ed Brubaker’s Velvet might be of interest as well.
> “I get the need to rebut nonsense for the sake of vulnerable lurkers.”
If the vulnerable lurkers are anything like me, right now they are BORED TO TEARS by the whole conversation.
Anyway.
I’m rereading The Left Hand of Darkness now. For some reason, it’s been on my mind.
Stevie,
I see others have chimed in about the rest of the Expanse sequence. I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but maybe Charles Sheffield’s Cold As Ice and the Ganymede Club? Or Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy? And then there is McAuley’s The Quiet War series. Maybe something in that batch may interest and entertain you.
A recurring point of “Why science …” is that “consensus” is a meaningless term. To me that was an obvious climate denier dog whistle.
——–
Minor point about the titles: If pixel scrolls are meant as a long term feature, the year should be part of the title. Else there will be a “Pixel Scroll 7/24” next year too.
(And I personally get confused by the US date scheme with month first, but I guess that’s a point where it’s hard to please everyone.)
If it is Year/Month/Day then that sad part of me that wants order amongst the chaos is kept quite, indeed is made happy. Month/Day/Year? The simmering beast inside can’t cope and keeps tapping on the inside of my skull saying ‘that makes no sense – make them change it’.
Mike: thanks for running the Le Guin profile. That was quite good!
Jim
That was an amazing rant! My only quibble would be that the devolved Parliaments/Assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would strongly disagree with your claim about the Conservatives being the ruling party, on the grounds that it isn’t.
Bruce, James and Bravo
Thank you for the suggestions; I’m looking forward to checking them out.
Anyone want to make wager on which thing Americans will change first: going completely metric or re-ordering their written dates?
I’ve seen the discussion elsewhere, and I was surprised at the number of USians who were surprised that anyone in the English-speaking world would do it differently, because “we write it like we say it”. So any Americans I thought I’d heard saying “Fourth of July” were probably a hallucination caused by swamp gas refracting the light of Venus, or something, I guess.
M/D/Y is based on North American spoken convention, where one is more likely to say “June 25th” than “25th of June”. The latter is considered to sound exceedingly stilted. (says the person inclined to use words like ‘exceedingly stilted’ aloud). And since the year s only occasionally necessary to specify, it occupies the ‘afterthought’ position.
Looking about the house for classic sf to read via a husband who’s neither a fan of Zelazny or Tiptree, I ended up bypassing his copies of Clarke and Heinlein and Herbert and unearthing the Lathe of Heaven from my own TBR pile.
I’m re-reading The Dispossessed.
Ancillary Pixel
Sunday in the Pixel with George
The Moon is a Harsh Pixel
Pixilarity Sky
The Pixil and Curdie
Pixil for Hire (mustn’t ignore the puppies)
@NelC —
The Fourth of July is not just another random date in the year, and we don’t talk about it as if it were. I do understand that the reason for this is a complete mystery to anyone on the other side of the Atlantic, where no one has any major national patriotic holidays, but there you go.
Well the date thing goes beyond the US. Many digital watches I’ve owned have either the Month/day as defualt or even month/day as the only option. I have this nice looking square faced black Braun watch which unfortunately has the date display button in a spot where it often gets knocked, resulting in the watch showing the date unexpectedly rather than the time. So a quick glance at my watch shows 7 25 which is easy to mistake for 7:25 and which causes bleary eyed panic in the morning 🙁 – so I’ve retired that time piece cause I can’t cope!
Will the US go metric? Australia went metric in a big-bang sort of way in the late 60s. The UK has gone metric in dribs and drabs over decades and with occasional culture war outbreaks as a consequence (cf ‘metric martyrs’). The US sort of went stealth metric years ago (the customary units are defined in terms of metric units now) but to avoid the costs involved in running two systems, at some point a complete change would require federal legislation (I suppose – by virtue of regulating interstate commerce?) and that would fit far to easily into the big-government-overreach, world-government-takeover, creeping euro-socialism narrative and far to easy to resist on free-speech grounds. So overall I doubt the US will go more metric anytime soon.
Also metric is SF and feet and inches are fantasy.