Pixel Scroll 7/26/16 I Am The Very Pixel Of A Modern Scrolling General

(1) WONDER WOMAN FOREVER. At the San Diego Comic-Con the Postal Service announced “Wonder Woman’s 75th Anniversary to be Celebrated on Forever Stamps”. The first-day-of-issue dedication ceremony will take place October 7 at New York Comic-Con.

wonder woman stamps

This new issuance showcases four different stamp designs on a sheet of 20 stamps depicting Wonder Woman during four eras of comic book history:  Golden Age (1941–55), Silver Age (1956–72), Bronze Age (1973–86) and Modern Age (1987–present).

On the first row of stamps Wonder Woman of the Modern Age wields a hammer with a power and determination befitting her roots in the heroic world of Greek mythology.

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The Bronze Age Wonder Woman’s bold stance empowers the second row of stamps. With her fist held high and bulletproof bracelets gleaming, the Amazon princess leads the charge against injustice.

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The third row of stamps depicts Wonder Woman during the Silver Age. Although she possesses great strength and speed, the world’s favorite superheroine prefers compassion to the use of brute force. With her golden lasso of truth close at hand, she compels honesty from her foes.

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In the last row of stamps, Wonder Woman from the Golden Age bursts onto the scene as originally envisioned by creator William Moulton Marston.

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Art director Greg Breeding of Charlottesville, VA, designed the stamp pane.

(2) SIGNATURE TRAITS. Max Florschutz continues his “Being A Better Writer” series of posts with “Giving Characters a Leitmotif”.

….Now, to some of you long-time readers, this may sound somewhat familiar. After all, we’ve spoken before of ways to show a reader character through dialogue choice or body language. Here and now, however, I’m sort of pulling all of this together into a single, overarching idea: What leitmotif have you given your character? What element of their personality, attribute of their view of the world, are you going to weave into their parts (or perhaps point of view) in order to let the reader know exactly who they’re following even before you give them a name?

No joke. With strong enough characterization to a character’s perspective, it’s entirely possible to write a piece that, without ever mentioning a character’s name, is identifiable wholly as that character’s own. Through use of specific dialogue ticks, phrasing, complexity of language, or even things like catch phrases, general attitudes, or body language, you can inform a reader exactly who your character is.

Better yet, such an action will, if varied (we’ll talk about that in a moment) bring the character to life. Because let’s be honest here: We all have a “leitmotif.” Each of us has very recognizable traits that allow others to see who we are quite quickly(an old friend of mine once—no joke—identified me in the dark, only from my silhouette, on the explained logic of “no one else walks with that much casual swagger” … and come to think of it, that’s happened more than once).

Likewise, as you sit down to create—and then write—a character, what “leitmotifs” are you going to give them? What verbal cues, what methods of thought, or what reactions will they have. Will they be fight or flight? Will they be brusque to those they don’t know? Courteous? Do they think of themselves in first or second person when thinking?

Now, I know this all sounds like character design and development stuff—and it is! But what I’m bringing to the front here is not just the act of deciding all this stuff, but of picking the ones that you’ll weave into everything about the character….

(3) BOIL ‘TIL DONE. The New York Times invites you to “Meet Luca, the Ancestor of All Living Things”. At least, that’s the theory.

….Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is estimated to have lived some four billion years ago, when Earth was a mere 560 million years old….

….Genes that do the same thing in a human and a mouse are generally related by common descent from an ancestral gene in the first mammal. So by comparing their sequence of DNA letters, genes can be arranged in evolutionary family trees, a property that enabled Dr. Martin and his colleagues to assign the six million genes to a much smaller number of gene families. Of these, only 355 met their criteria for having probably originated in Luca, the joint ancestor of bacteria and archaea.

Genes are adapted to an organism’s environment. So Dr. Martin hoped that by pinpointing the genes likely to have been present in Luca, he would also get a glimpse of where and how Luca lived. “I was flabbergasted at the result, I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The 355 genes pointed quite precisely to an organism that lived in the conditions found in deep sea vents, the gassy, metal-laden, intensely hot plumes caused by seawater interacting with magma erupting through the ocean floor.

…Dr. Sutherland, working from basic principles of chemistry, has found that ultraviolet light from the sun is an essential energy source to get the right reactions underway, and therefore that land-based pools, not the ocean, are the most likely environment in which life began.

“We didn’t set out with a preferred scenario; we deduced the scenario from the chemistry,” he said, chiding Dr. Martin for not having done any chemical simulations to support the deep sea vent scenario.

Dr. Martin’s portrait of Luca “is all very interesting, but it has nothing to do with the actual origin of life,” Dr. Sutherland said.

(4) PRINCESS CHARMING. Roby and Kreider have turned to Kickstarter to get their next project out of the starting gate – Princess Charming: for a Few Princesses More.

Josh Roby has been writing professionally for more than a decade (and writing unprofessionally for a long time before that), and has worked as an editor for curriculum development and a number of early reader titles. Nowadays, most of Josh’s time is spent as a home maker and raising two darling children.

Anna Kreider is a writer, game designer, and illustrator who spends a lot of time blogging about depictions of women in pop culture. She is also attempting to raise a toddler, despite the toddler’s best efforts to the contrary.

Here’s what they’re doing —

Princess Charming

We started the Princess Charming book series to make children’s books that feature active, competent princess characters who do more than wait around to get rescued. We’ve already published six books across three different reading levels, but we’re far from done.

Publishing the first six books was a great experience, and we’re ready to bring out the second batch, starting with Princess Rowan Charming.

Only one thing slows down our Rowan — her friend, Prince Sundara, who insists on coming along. Something about Rowan having only one hand and that he has to protect her. But he only gets in the way! Somehow Rowan has to make the boy understand that he’s not cut out for adventuring… before he gets hurt.

And In the Wings…

If we fund all of Princess Rowan’s titles, we’ve got two more princesses lined up and ready to go: Princess Chandra and Princess Nayeli are both penciled in for three books, which we will unlock as stretch goals.

With a week to go, the appeal has raised $1,875 of its $3,000 goal.

(5) SEVEN DEAD GODS. Westercon 67 alumnus Valynne Maetani has hit it big. Publishers Weekly has the story – “Two YA Authors Tweet Mutual Interests into Six-Figure Deal”.

What began as a casual Twitter conversation between two long-time friends who for years talked about writing a book together – Valynne Maetani and Courtney Alameda – has become a hot property that recently was sold to HarperCollins in a two-book, six-figure deal after an auction earlier this year in which four major publishers participated. The final contract was signed in June.

Seven Dead Gods, the YA novel co-written by Maetani and Alameda, who have both been represented by John Cusick (now with Folio Literary Management/Folio Jr.) since 2012, is scheduled to publish in winter 2018. While Cusick described Seven Dead Gods as a combination of “An Ember in the Ashes and Daughter of Smoke and Bone meets Akira Kurosawa,” Alexandra Cooper, the HarperCollins editor who acquired it, used more cinematic terms: “Mean Girls meets Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”

According to the two co-authors, it’s simply the inevitable culmination of their mutual passion for horror, anime, comic book culture, and Kurosawa’s classic Japanese epic movies. In Seven Dead Gods, which is set in modern-day Japan, 17-year-old Kira, who is the victim of bullying at her school, finds solace working in her grandfather’s Shinto shrine. After realizing that she can see and commune with demons, Kira – with her younger sister in tow – partners with seven “death gods,” or “Shinigami” in Japanese, to save Kyoto from destruction.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • July 26, 1969 — First Moon rock samples analyzed.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born July 26, 1894 –Aldous Huxley
  • Born July 26, 1928 — Stanley Kubrick

(8) MONUMENT TO A HUGO BALLOT. Lurkertype finished voting for the Hugos and Retro-Hugos and celebrated by using the Pulp-O-Mizer mentioned in yesterday’s Scroll to make this faux pulp cover.

(9) WILL JRRT FOLLOW GRRM ON HBO? That’s what iDigital Times would like to see: “’The Silmarillion’ TV Series: HBO Should Adapt ‘The Silmarillion’ After ‘Game of Thrones’”.

The Silmarillion would be an incredible successor to Game of Thrones on HBO, not least because the two would be so different. The Silmarillion is firmly set in the epic vein, in the realm of the mythic; Game of Thrones is a story of kings and princes, but has always been down to earth, even in its new epic fantasy phase. The battles in The Silmarillion are more elemental; these are wars between Elves and dragons, Balrogs, giant spiders and endless hordes of orcs, and sometimes the gods themselves intervene. But the story itself is incredibly interesting—it has the depth and complexity to carry a series, even one that’s more directly fantastical than Game of Thrones.

Could it happen? It’s not impossible. The Tolkien family still holds the film rights to The Silmarillion, and Christopher Tolkien has made it very clear that Peter Jackson isn’t getting those rights, not after the debacle of The Hobbit movies. But that doesn’t mean no one is getting them. HBO has shown itself a relatively careful steward of such properties, and it’s willing to invest in the money and talent to do such shows right.

(10) WHAT WILL DARTH SAY? After Tor Books announced its latest round of promotions, Elizabeth Bear voiced the joke that immediately came to some people’s minds —

(11) NEEDS A CLUE. Spacefaring Kitten is “No-Awarding Editors and Avengers”.

I don’t think that any of the novel editors does a bad job (ok, maybe one of them). This is strictly a protest vote against the insane category. How can anybody who is not an industry insider come to any conclusion about who is better than someone else in turning mediocre books into great ones? I have no clue.

So when you have no clue, why cast a vote that in principal can obstruct others who don’t feel that way from giving an award?

(12) ONE TRICK. Was there any question about this being the end times?

“Zombie Dog – The Barking Dead Messenger Pet”

zombie dog

(13) MASHUP. Brian Kesinger came up with a good one —

(14) PIONEER OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. Sir Julius Vogel, for whom New Zealand’s national sf award is named, was remembered at a special memorial service in London at the beginning of the month, though not for reasons to do with his fantasy writing, which was never mentioned.

Vogel had a visionary imagination. He wrote about air cruisers, driven by engines much like jet engines, the inventor of which was a young Jewish woman, niece of the spymaster. He envisages large irrigation schemes in the South Island, electricity as the prime source of domestic light and heat, hydro-electricity as a major source of power.

In political developments, he foresaw a global federation of financial interests that maintained world peace, taxation as the great divisive issue threatening to break up the empire, and the resolution of the issue of Irish Home Rule.

There is no limit to Vogel’s seemingly far-fetched ideas.

The Southland Times, reviewing Vogel’s book, said: “In Anno Domini 2000, it is easy to detect the hand of a beginner. The plot, if plot it can be called, is not very ingenious, the dialogue is not very brilliant and the characterisation is decidedly poor. The whole story is moreover ridiculously improbable.”

What is interesting is that Vogel, who was reminded of his Jewish identity throughout his life, whom his political opponents described as the “wandering Jew”, whose newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, was referred to as “that despicable literary dish clout”, “the Jew’s Harp”, created a positive image of Jewishness in one of the leading characters of his work of fantasy.

(15) A HUMMER. I must have missed this one the first time it came around in 2006.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Dave Doering, JJ, and James Davis Nicoll for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]

105 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/26/16 I Am The Very Pixel Of A Modern Scrolling General

  1. I do believe I detect the work of Harry Peter (yes, really), the original Wonder Woman artist, then Sekowsky/Giordano, and maybe Garcia-Lopez. I don’t know who drew the new one, but we wore onions on our belts.

    Dialogue “ticks” should be “tics,” in my opinion.

  2. JJ: And time to appertain yourself a massive beverage of your choice. Four saves for the price of one!

  3. (9) WILL JRRT FOLLOW GRRM ON HBO? – Hope it’s good. Still not gonna read it (last time I tried got halfway through I think. Then I fell asleep)

    (11) NEEDS A CLUE – In all fairness, I’m doing the same for BE-Longbecause I think it’s a bad category that should be removed, or at least substantially changed. For the first time I think I’m making an informed decision for BE-Short form, but I don’t think that will ever be the case for Long form.

    I will say that I think Best Publisher is…not a great idea, but I haven’t really followed that discussion.

  4. I hope I can find Wonder Woman stamps (my post office sells out of almost everything on day of issue). Those are so pretty! And shiny!

    My Hugo ballot is finished. I read everything in its entirety except for The Aeronaut’s Windlass (eight deadly words), Mark Aramini’s examination of Gene Wolfe’s fiction (the subject, the approach and the prose all failed to grab me) and the second half of Brian Niemeier’s novel (it was fine, but I’d read enough to know where he fell in the list of finalists and I didn’t like it enough to read to the end).

    I didn’t vote for Best Fancast and was generally disappointed in the two Artist categories, but the only category where I ranked everything below No Award was Best Related.

    I think I’ll take a break from SFF now.

  5. A quick search with Google Images turns up the Modern Age WW image pretty easily: the artist is Cliff Chiang.

    It’s a pity they didn’t get a George Perez drawing in there somewhere: he really defined the character for the modern world. Of course, one of Perez’s covers has previously been on a stamp.

  6. Oooh, I’ve never been a Featured Pixel Scroll thingy before!

    (1) Gotta buy some of those stamps.

    (3) NERD FIGHT!

    (8) I’d like to thank the Pulp-O-Mizer, and also the Spacefaring Kittens blog (But not the entry in 11, cuz I was already done), and Aaron’s blog. And the humans who do them. And File 770, which you won’t be surprised to hear did very well on my ballot.

    Best Related had everything under No Award for me, too. There were at least 20 other things that I could think of off the top of my head that were better-written than any of those.

    (9) Zzzzz. Compare the number of people who read LOTR and the number who read Silmarillion.

    (13) Yes!

    (Still not a tag, tho)

  7. (9) Can’t see it happening while the current custodians of the Tolkien estate have any say.

    If say they were to adapt it, I expect it’d be a lot like religious/creation myths which is how it reads to me. I’m a big fan, but I think anyone trying to adapt “The Silmarillion” for the screen (big or small) has a lot of work ahead of them.

  8. Vanishingly unlikely that the estate will approve a tits n gore version of the Silmarillion. And it isn’t really a story with a strong throughline. It’s made up of distinct episodes, and characters don’t persist. It’s like saying the history of the world would make a great tv show because so many dramatic things happen – they do, but they happen to different people! And while you could maybe imagine some sort of Rah! Rah! Progress of Humanity! tv drama, the Silmarillion is a story of decline.

  9. Yeah, I doubt the estate is going to approve The Silmarillion, which works better as a story bible than an ur-text, anyway. And the “decline of the world” aspect to the book IS a downer.

    Random note: Today is Kate Elliott’s birthday. Go and buy a book of hers!

  10. There have been a few anthology series recently (Fargo, American Horror Story) so I suppose they could go down that route with the Silmarillion but I agree it seems a hard sell.

  11. Ray on July 27, 2016 at 1:16 am said:

    Vanishingly unlikely that the estate will approve a tits n gore version of the Silmarillion. And it isn’t really a story with a strong throughline. It’s made up of distinct episodes, and characters don’t persist. It’s like saying the history of the world would make a great tv show because so many dramatic things happen – they do, but they happen to different people! And while you could maybe imagine some sort of Rah! Rah! Progress of Humanity! tv drama, the Silmarillion is a story of decline.

    I think it could be done but you’d essentially have to have new central characters each season with a few persistent background characters (i.e. the Noldor in each season and specific humans change each season). Beren and Luthien has a mini-series in it. Turin Turambar has more than enough to it fill a season.

  12. Finished my own reviewing of all things Hugo yesterday, too. Is it my imagination, or has it been a lot more work this year than it was last?… Oh, yes, Retro Hugos, had to read and comment on all that, too.

    (The Retros were more fun than the current year’s crop, for possibly guessable reasons.)

  13. I’m pretty sure the artist on the Silver Age WW stamp is Ross Andru. Sekowsky’s work was sketchier, even when Giordano inked him.

    I’d guess the reason that the Perez WW was left out was because of the division of eras — his WW is definitely Modern (ie post-Bronze) and they wanted to put the most recent version on that one.

    The JLGL Bronze Age version is probably a pinup piece, maybe from WW 300, since he didn’t draw the character that often and it looks like an unusual inker for him (maybe Brian Bolland?).

    That’s all I can guess without resorting to Google.

  14. OK, I went and Googled it. I was right about the Silver Age one not being Sekowsky, but it was Irv Novick, not Ross Andru. The Bronze Age one is (ironically) from the very last issue of her original series; it’s by JLGL, inked by himself, and it was the cover.

  15. I think we ought to replace the Best Editor, Long Form award category with what I’d call a “catch-all” category.

    It would have to be refined with more specificity (suggestions welcome), but the basic idea is to give voters the opportunity to nominate A: things not normally nominated/things for which there has never been a category and B: recognition of special events/happenings/the unique and usually unsung contributions of individuals/companies.

    You might see an author whose works individually have never won/been nominated, but whose lifetime of works has contributed to the field; you might see someone who has quietly been making genre-related plush toys, or something more academic, like one of the people who contribute to things like Long Lists or bibliographies or web resources; a work that is no longer eligible for a regular category but that has become, over the years, a major thing; a convention that does something unique, or a person who, for a variety of reasons, is deserving of recognition;

    Such a wide ranging remit would suffer from the same issues as short story (numerous entries receiving a small number of votes), but if 3SV goes into effect, that might turn out to be a bonus: everyone will have 15 such things to take a “second vote” on (either by rejecting or not).

    In general, I think we need a regular category that allows the voters to correct past over-sites, provide additional recognition and/or expand the territory covered by the award.

  16. About done with reading.

    What, I find myself wondering, is the point of the Campbell Award for New Writer? To congratulate someone for being very successful? To encourage someone who is finding their feet?

    Discounting the pure puppy, we seem to have Andy Weir, who needs no encouragement, but who’s book I enjoyed, Peirce Brown, who is obviously very popular with his target market and bored me, and Sebastien de Castell, who wrote a book I enjoyed, but thought suffered from a massive honking deus ex machina ending, and with three or is it four books out is obviously doing quite nicely thank you. And then there’s Alyssia Wong, who writes well, but in a sub genre I don’t really care for.

    If encouraging to find their feet then oviously Ms Wong deserves it most. Kind of torn.

  17. (9) WILL JRRT FOLLOW GRRM ON HBO? By golly, an actual clickbait-y subhed, here on File 770!

    (10) WHAT WILL DARTH SAY? So hilarious.

  18. (1) USPS.com sells stamps by mail, for those needing WW stamps. Partnered with the Post Office for delivery 😉

    (11) I also no award BELF – I can’t see how on earth a fan can make an informed vote in that category and it should be abolished. It’s just a popularity contest.

  19. (15) I thought it would be a riff on the 6000-SUX commercial from the original Robocop, but then it want in a totally unexpected direction. Oh, the feelz!

  20. @Cheryl S

    I read everything in its entirety except for […] Mark Aramini’s examination of Gene Wolfe’s fiction (the subject, the approach and the prose all failed to grab me)

    I think I made it as far as “Foreword by John C. Wright” in that one.

  21. Steve Wright

    The Retros were more fun than the current year’s crop, for possibly guessable reasons.

    This was my first year reading Retro nominees, and it was an interesting experience, but ultimately I found the writing almost universally far clunkier than I’d like. In fact, I was reminded of some of last year’s puppy nominees—”The Triple Sun” by Rajnar Vajra faithfully follows the formula of the Leigh Brackett stories (An earthling, a martian, and a venusian walk into a bar…).

    I did not care much for the Heinlein short story, but enjoyed his Novelettes. “The Roads Must Roll” is an interesting commentary on car-based society, and “Blowups Happen” has a remarkable amount of detail on nuclear fission for a pre-Hiroshima work (Though his estimates on available amounts of Uranium are ridiculous, and his reactor design, luckily, not anywhere close to what ended up being implemented). In the version I read, it was interesting to see his 1979 afterword, where Heinlein had gone from nuclear panic all the way to utter nonchalance about the risks involved).

    An amusing aspect I noticed was how highly psychology was respected as a science in 1940…

  22. In my defense, Giordano’s weak inking tends to make artists look like the same , but it’s also true I never paid enough attention to Novick’s style to see if he had one.

  23. @microtherion: it’s a common assumption in many stories of the period that “soft” sciences like psychology will become “hard” ones in the future, with inarguably demonstrable proofs and provably reliable methods. You see this idea a lot in Heinlein (the “moral philosophy” classes in Starship Troopers are at least implied to be hard science too), and it crops up in van Vogt, in Asimov (recall the scene in Second Foundation where they’re working out people’s brain wave patterns with a slide rule?), and – over the other side of the Atlantic and the political spectrum – in H.G. Wells and The Shape of Things to Come. I think it was part of a vaguely “technocratic” mindset of the time – the belief that everything would be all right if you left things to the qualified professionals.

  24. @Steve Wright: one might also mention, from the timeline to The Past Through Tomorrow, the item “Rigor of epistemology”.

  25. I’m halfway through The Fifth Season. It’s very strong, a contender. I’m glad I gave it a second try. Aeronaut’s Windlass however failed to interest me. The Fifth Season didn’t really grab me until about 80-100 pages in; I didn’t get anywhere near that far into the Butcher work.

    Sorry not to know this, but can someone please explain what “eight deadly words” means?

  26. microtherion: I agree that novelettes is where Heinlein was strongest. I have a suspicion that he may take all three short fiction categories, though. And certainly it would be fun to see him winning Best Novella with a critique either of theocracy or of extreme libertarianism (though not together, as these were written before the marriage of those well-known parents, Ayn Rand and God).

  27. Steve Davidson: I’m not sure why the BELF award has to be replaced with anything. Two new awards are being devised right now, and I’m sure there will be more in future, so dropping a couple without compensation seems perfectly fair.

    The actual idea of a catch-all category has some attractions. (The WFA has something like this, doesn’t it? Though that’s juried, of course.) But I think the problem of diffuse votes would be a very real one – much more so that in Short Story, where at least there is a defined set of things to choose from. This would be the sort of case that EPH couldn’t deal with effectively – slates would have too much of a lead. And I’m not sure 3SV could deal with it either, if, as I suspect, only things that are actually abusive would be voted down – slaters should be able to find some nominees which are not abusive but fit their agenda.

    (All of which confirms my feeling that while slates are present and have significant support, they constitute a problem and stop the Hugos functioning effectively – in this case, as in some others, by limiting what categories we can have. It’s good to adopt plans which limit their power, but the problem is still present.)

  28. I wonder how many of the Retro Hugo finalists I can read before the deadline and whether I even want to try.

    @microtherion – I think I made it as far as “Foreword by John C. Wright” in that one.

    Heh. Yes, well, I read only the first paragraph of the foreword before moving on. I didn’t want Wright’s execrable prose to unfairly prejudice me, particularly since I was already pointedly ignoring Aramini’s publisher.

  29. @Steve Wright

    it’s a common assumption in many stories of the period that “soft” sciences like psychology will become “hard” ones in the future, with inarguably demonstrable proofs and provably reliable methods. You see this idea a lot in Heinlein (the “moral philosophy” classes in Starship Troopers are at least implied to be hard science too)

    Interesting… now that I’ve read his earlier material, I can see this idea. When I originally read Starship Troopers, I took the “moral philosophy” teacher expounding ideas as “science” as just a typical fascist trope, comparable to Hitler proclaiming his ideas as “iron laws of history” and such.

  30. @Andrew M

    And certainly it would be fun to see him winning Best Novella with a critique either of theocracy or of extreme libertarianism

    I was wondering, when I read Coventry, whether the initial character of the protagonist was consciously modeled after some of the less sympathetic specimens of self-proclaimed libertarians. The type certainly seemed familiar to me, and echoes of Coventry society appear in Bitcoin exchanges, The Silk Road, etc.

    Ultimately, though, it seemed to me that the non-Coventry part of the world was supposed to represent libertopia, while Coventry represented the failings of non-libertarian man.

  31. Steve Wright said:

    it’s a common assumption in many stories of the period that “soft” sciences like psychology will become “hard” ones in the future, with inarguably demonstrable proofs and provably reliable methods. You see this idea a lot in Heinlein (the “moral philosophy” classes in Starship Troopers are at least implied to be hard science too)

    Ironically, all the alleged psychological facts presented as hard science in Starship Troopers (not to mention most of the implied psychology presented in the setting) are outright wrong under modern psychology, and a fair amount of that research comes from a branch that arose right around the time Starship Troopers was published. (Situational psychology, starting with the Milgram experiements in 1961.)

  32. Petréa Mitchell
    It’s ironic, and sometimes fun. There’s certainly satisfaction in seeing the science got right, but I have enjoyed convincing constructs based on outmoded or mistaken scientific views. Alan Moore is maybe the best example of that, with his creation based on a particular (and likely wrong, but convincing when he tells it) solution to the historical mystery of Jack the Ripper. I am even more partial to the use he made of the planaria worm memory studies (a false positive) for the shattering and fully convincing reveal in the pivotal issue of Swamp Thing, where the title character earns his name. I suspect other examples are eluding me. Any in V For Vendetta? It’s harder to say with that, as all the characters are viewpoint characters, and anything they say is in character viewpoint.

    Science errors in Moore’s other DC work seem as immaterial as wondering about the Hulk’s pants, so I’m done.

  33. microtherion: The way I took it was that Coventry was meant to be a completely free zone, but what this in fact led to was the strongest taking control and setting up authoritarian governments. So I think it can be called a critique of extreme libertarianism, though the outer world is clearly very freedom-oriented.

    As I say, it would be fun, but I actually thought Magic Inc. was the best of the three Heinlein novellas, and I preferred the de Camp/Pratt anyway.

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