(1) RADIO SFWA OFFICIAL VIDEO. Henry Lien has released the video of Radio SFWA as performed on stage at the Nebula Banquet in May.
Lien, who wrote the song as a recruiting anthem for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, sang as Emperor Stardust backed by the brilliantly-choreographed Eunuchs of the Forbidden City doing SFWA spellouts and other routines. They received a well-deserved standing-O at the end.
Click CC (Closed Captioning) to view the lyrics.
Click Settings to watch it in 1080 HD.
Emperor Stardust
- Henry Lien (Nebula Nominee, SFWA Member)
The Eunuchs of the Forbidden City
- Liz Argall (SFWA Member)
- Tina Connolly (Norton Nominee, SFWA Member)
- Alyx Dellamonica (SFWA Member)
- Patrice Fitzgerald (SFWA Member)
- Fonda Lee (Norton Nominee, SFWA Member)
- Reggie Lutz (Future SFWA Member)
- Kelly Robson (Nebula Nominee, SFWA Member)
(2) MIDWESTERN MIGHTINESS. “Marvel reveals New Great Lakes Avengers Series” – Nerdist has the story.
They’re not Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They’re not even the West Coast Avengers. At one point, they received a cease-and-desist order to prevent them from using the Avengers name. But their tenacity could not be stopped and their inherent silliness endeared them to readers all around the world. And that is precisely why Marvel is announcing today, exclusively on Nerdist, that they are bringing back the Great Lakes Avengers in an all-new monthly ongoing comic book series….
Let’s begin with the obvious question: why is now the right time to revive the Great Lakes Avengers?
“Now is the time for Great Lakes Avengers to return, one, because I simply want to do it,” [editor Tom] Brevoort joked. “They need to give me perks to keep doing the comics that people like and that sell really well,” he added with a laugh.
(3) SALTIRE. At another spot on the map, BBC reports a “Scottish superhero challenge to Marvel and DC Comics”.
Glaswegian [John] Ferguson, who set up Diamondsteel Comics with his Lancashire-born wife Clare, said other elements of Scotland’s past and folklore also feature.
He said: “The Stone of Destiny, the Blue Stanes, the Loch Ness Monster and the Caledonian Fae traditions all have a significant place in the Saltire universe.
“Saltire’s origin is built from myth and legend so a comparison might be Marvel’s Thor although perhaps a bit darker and grittier. He does have an iconic visual appeal similar to the famous American superheroes.”
A year in the making, Saltire: Legend Eternal, the first comic book in a new series of the comics has been “meticulously inked, coloured and lettered” to compete with the high standards set by Marvel and DC Comics, said Ferguson.
(4) WHO NEEDS A DEGREE? Recently, David Tennant and Steven Moffat each received honorary degrees from different schools in Scotland.
Dr Who star David Tennant has travelled back in time to his old acting school to pick up an honorary degree.
The Broadchurch actor has been awarded an honorary drama doctorate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
The 46-year-old was recognised during a ceremony in Glasgow.
Tennant studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire between 1988 and 1991, then known as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, before enjoying success on stage and screen.
He said: “I’m honoured and rather humbled to be here – it’s all quite overwhelming but lovely to be back. It evokes some very vivid memories.
“It was a very important time for me. I don’t think I would have survived without my time here – for me it was essential. Three years of getting to practice in a safe environment.
“I was quite young, quite green, and I did a lot of growing up here and learned an enormous amount. They were very formative years that I look back on very fondly.”
Dr Who writer Steven Moffat also received an honorary degree from the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley.
(5) TRUDEAU. In Yanan Wang’s story for the Washington Post, “How Canada’s prime minister became a superhero”, about Justin Trudeau’s appearance in the Marvel comic Civil War II: Choosing Sides she explains that writer Chip Zdarsky (who writes as “Steve Murray”) put Justin Trudeau in the comic book because his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, made an earlier appearance with the Alpha Flight team (who are Canadian superheroes) in the 1980s.
She also unleashes this quote from Peter C. Newman, a prominent Canadian business journalist:
“If God had meant for us to be heroic, he wouldn’t have made us Canadians. This is the only country on Earth whose citizens dream of being Clark Kent, instead of Superman.” To regard themselves as heroes would be “boastful,” Newman observed, which Canadians were decidedly not.
(6) CONTROVERSY. “In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi”, a New York Times article, covers a lot of ground about a book whose reception is all over the spectrum.
In Ben H. Winters’s chilling new thriller, “Underground Airlines,” a bounty hunter named Victor tracks fugitives for the United States Marshals Service. But his mission, like his past, is complicated: The people he’s chasing are escaped slaves. Their main crime is rejecting a life of forced servitude. And Victor himself was once one of them.
From the moment he started writing it, Mr. Winters knew that “Underground Airlines” was creatively and professionally risky. The novel tackles the thorny subject of racial injustice in America. It takes place in a contemporary United States where the Civil War never happened, and slavery remains legal in four states, and it’s narrated by a former slave who has paid a steep moral price for his freedom.
“I had reservations every day, up to the present day, because the subject is so fraught, and rightfully so,” Mr. Winters said. “It isn’t as if this is ancient history in this country.”
Mr. Winters, 40, has pulled off high-wire acts before. As one of the early literary mash-up artists, he churned out zany best sellers like “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” and “Android Karenina.” His best-selling trilogy, “The Last Policeman,” is a genre-defying blend of crime writing and science fiction, starring a stoic police officer trying to solve crimes as the world braces for a catastrophic asteroid collision….
“He’s taking a direct whack at one of the main critical things that’s happening in this country right now,” said Lev Grossman, a book critic and author of the fantasy series “The Magicians.” “This is a white writer going after questions of what it’s like to be black in America. It’s a fearless thing to do.”
(7) WORLDCON IN MEMORIAM LIST. Steven H Silver announced that the deadline for getting names onto the In Memoriam list for the MidAmeriCon II program book is Friday, July 8. Names currently under consideration can be found at http://www.midamericon2.org/home/general-information/memoriam-page/. Suggestions for additional names can be made there as well. Any names suggested after July 8 will make it into the Hugo scroll, but not the program book.
(8) TODAY IN SILLY HISTORY
- July 5, 1935 — Hormel Foods introduced the canned meat product SPAM.
(9) DID YOU PAY ATTENTION? Den of Geek put the Back to the Future movies under a microscope and came up with “The Back to the Future Trilogy: 88 Things You Might Have Missed”. The most I can say is that I hadn’t missed all of them. Take number one, for example:
- The Doc’s clocks (I)
As the first film opens and we pan across Doc Brown’s incredible assortment of clocks – all previously synchronized to be exactly 25 minutes slow – the eagle-eyed may notice that one of the clocks features a man hanging from its hands. It’s actually silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, dangling from a clock in perhaps his most famous turn in 1923’s Safety Last. Aside from being a cool little nod to a past movie, it also prefigures the later scene in which Doc hangs from the Hill Valley clock in near-identical fashion.
(10) FUTURE WARFARE. Jeb Kinnison will be on the “Weaponized AI and Future Warfare” panel at LibertyCon, and is preparing by organizing his thoughts in a series of highly detailed blog posts.
In Part I of Weaponized AI: My Experience in AI, Kinnison shares details of his professional background in technology, which informs the rest of his discussion.
- Weaponized AI: Near Future Warfare (Pt. II)
Autonomous control of deadly weaponry is controversial, though no different in principle than cruise missiles or smart bombs, which while launched at human command make decisions on-the-fly about exactly where and whether to explode. The Phalanx CIWS automated air defense system (see photo above) identifies and fires on enemy missiles automatically to defend Navy ships at a speed far beyond human abilities. Such systems are uncontroversial since no civilian human lives are likely to be at risk.
DARPA is actively researching Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). Such systems might be like Neal Asher’s (identity) reader guns, fixed or slow-moving sentries equipped to recognize unauthorized presences and cut them to pieces with automatic weapons fire. More mobile platforms might cruise the skies and attack any recognized enemy at will, robotically scouring terrain of enemy forces:…
Many of the readers of Mil SF have had experience in the military themselves, which makes platoon-level fighting stories especially involving for them. The interpersonal aspects are critical for emotional investment in the story — so a tale featuring a skinny, bespectacled systems operators fighting each other by running AI battle mechs from a remote location doesn’t satisfy. Space marines a la Starship Troopers are the model for much Mil SF — in these stories new technology extends and reinforces mobile infantry without greatly changing troop dynamics, leaving room for stories of individual combat, valorous rescue of fellow soldiers in trouble, spur-of-the-moment risks taken and battles won by clever tactics. Thousands of books on this model have been written, and they still sell well, even when they lack any rationale for sending valuable human beings down to fight bugs when the technology for remote or AI control appears to be present in their world.
One interesting escape route for Mil SF writers is seen in Michael Z Williamson’s A Long Time Until Now, where the surrounding frame is not space travel but time travel — a troop from today’s Afghanistan war find themselves transported back to paleolithic central Asia with other similarly-displaced military personnel from other eras and has to survive and build with limited knowledge of their environment.
(11) KRUSHING IT. At secritkrush, Chance Morrison has launched a review series about Hugo-nominated short fiction. Still looking for one that Morrison liked…
Novella it a tough length. Most of the time Novellas feel like they are either bloated short stories which could benefit from an edit or a story which really ought to be expanded into a novel to do it justice. Binti is one of the latter….
Why, given this setup, was the book not a comedy, even a dark one because I really cannot take it seriously but it is really not funny?
One day Google (the search engine) develops consciousness and decides that it doesn’t want to be evil, unlike Google the company….
Writing stories under 1000 words is exceedingly difficult. Writing one of the five best (allegedly) SF short stories of the year in less than a thousand words? Highly unlikely.
Data and River Tam/Jessica Jones together at last! They fight crime commit crimes….
(12) ON THE TRAIL. Lisa Goldstein feels a little more warmly about “’And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead’” – at least room temperature.
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander is the only novelette on the Hugo ballot that was not also on the Rabid Puppies’ slate. To get that far, against all the Puppies voting in lockstep, means that it’s probably a very popular story. I liked it as well, but I had some reservations. Which puts me in a minority, so you should definitely read it and make up your own mind. Hey, I don’t claim to be infallible here.
(13) WORLDCON ANNOUNCES FILM FESTIVAL. The 2016 Worldcon will host the MidAmeriCon II International Film Festival.
The Festival will showcase the best film shorts, features and documentaries from around the world, spanning the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic genres. Many film makers will also be in attendance and taking part in Q&A sessions to provide a unique behind the scenes perspective on their work.
The MidAmeriCon II International Film Festival is being led by Nat Saenz, whose extensive track record in the field includes the Tri-City Independent/Fan Film Festival (www.trifi.org) as well as events at the 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 World Science Fiction Conventions. Nat continues to bring a truly global perspective to his audience, with the 2016 programme including films from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Spain, Greece, France, Italy, and the UK, as well as the USA and Canada.
The Film Festival will run through all five days of the convention, starting at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, August 17 and concluding at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 21. All films are open to full and day attending convention members (subject to relevant age restrictions in line with film classifications). All screenings will take place at the Kansas City Convention Center.
A full screening schedule can be found at www.midamericon2.org/home/whats-happening/programming/film-festival/.
[Thanks to Henry Lien, Steven H Silver, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dawn Incognito.]
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I must admit to having a soft spot for the original “Allamagoosa.” Sixty years later, after working my entire adult life around to the military and its bureaucracy, it still rings true.
. . . good grief. First?
Thing. Pixel!
Preparing to vote, I realize I started the Bollander story when it was first published because I liked the illustration but never finished it since I found it dull. Now I have to finish the damn thing. I hope it gets more interesting.
Loving Fifth Season.
I would totally read a book titled Emperor Stardust and the Eunuchs of the Forbidden City. Someone get on that, ok?
Fifth! Now to go read the post.
Worth it for the GLA!
Contribiting editor of the day and True Fifth? Yay!
I think this calls for a celebratory re- re- re-reading of “Allamagoosa”.
Firstly, as it’s the end of Ramadhan, Happy Eid-al-Fitr and/or Eid Mubarak and/or Selamat Hari Raya to everyone!
(2) MIDWESTERN MIGHTINESS. – Heh. Last I read, these guys were still the Lightning Rods…good to see them back in form. I guess
(5) TRUDEAU. – Still not interested in Civil War II: Civil Harder. Especially since it looks like Captain Marvel gets to carry the idiot ball this time around.
ETA: #1 – Wait, so do people actually vocalise SFWA as Siff-Wa, or is that just for the song?
@ snowcrash
I’ve always vocalized it more as “suff-wah” (with a schwa in the first syllable), which is probably equivalent to what you’re describing. (Haven’t watched the video yet.) I hear a lot of people vocalize it and don’t recall hearing any significantly different pronunciations.
2) I had no idea that this was based on a real comic!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSpEQ1p-WI&w=560&h=315%5D
6) The reaction to that in certain quarters is going to be… Interesting.
ETA: Okay, YouTube embedding apparently doesn’t work here. But at least it gives a clickable link. If you like that one, check out “Ring Capacity” in the sidebar.
(1) RADIO SFWA OFFICIAL VIDEO
I’m not going to fall for that earworm. Again.
Fifth! of July.
Clicky.
Oh, that is a good observation about it. I’m really struggling with that one. Oddly I left it sort of impressed by Polansky as a writer and yet deeply unimpressed with the story. Rather like a good carpenter has been asked to make some kind of dysfunctional furniture – like a really uncomfortable chair with cleverly carved joints that stick out at awkward angles and one leg that has been precisely constructed to be slightly shorter than the others.
1) Apparently, I have been pronouncing SFWA all wrong all these years.
4) David Tennant was born on April 18, 1971, i.e. he’s only 45 years old. How I know this? Because we happen to share a birthday, only that Tennant is exactly two years older than me.
BTW, I share a birthday with both a Doctor (Tennant) and a Master (Eric Roberts in that 1996 TV movie), which IMO is pretty cool.
11/12) I liked “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of the Dead” a whole lot and even nominated it. But it looks like quite a few people disagree with me.
It occurs to me that there’s a big science hole in Seveneves (aside from the obvious one!):
Minor spoilers ahead. I don’t think it’s worth ROT-13, but someone who wants to go in cold might want to skip to the next post.
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on page 31, the Neil DeGrasse Tyson expy tells us:
“[The meteorite trails] will merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it.” (emphasis mine)
The ISS is only four hundred kilometers up, by Stephenson’s own figures. The Earth is a pretty big chunk of its field of view. Again by Stephenson’s own statement, it ought to get baked like a cake in an oven.
Someone spoil me: does this get dealt with, in between page 165 and when the Hard Rain actually happens? Or does Stephenson just forget that radiative heat transfer is a thing?
I really liked The Builders. I expected to hate it based on the commentary here, so surprise that I didn’t may partly explain my affection, but really I suspect it’s due to my abiding love for spaghetti westerns and The Magnificent Seven. Also, I liked the games he played with structure.
eta for @David Goldfarb, no it doesn’t and yes, he apparently does.
Would you settle for Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain? Because A. Lee Martinez has that one taken care of.
Heather Rose Jones: I’ve always heard it pronounced Seff-Wah.
I suppose there could be regional, or generational, explanations for various pronunciations — similiar to the way old-timers who joined in the Forties call the local club LASFS “Lass-fass” and newer members like me who call it “Loss-fuss.”
@David Goldfarb
Yes, Stephenson forgets that radiative heat transfer is a thing, except when he wants to use it to cash a plot coupon. Someone else already pointed out the utter stupidity of not getting the ISS into a higher orbit before the Hard Rain–but if that had happened, half the book could have been dispensed with.
Today’s Meredith Moment:
Filer Lisa Goldstein’s Summer King, Winter Fool is on sale for $1.99 for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple.
(1) I’ve always heard it as “siff-wah”. Or “siff-wuh”. Anyway, from both members and non, older and younger, and one past president. Sometimes with schwa for both vowels. But not “seff”. Now I guess we all have to sing it and do the gestures?
(11) KRUSHING IT.
I will always have a special regard for secritcrush, thanks to her review of “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, which so eloquently captured my exact feelings about that story.
Yeah, siff-wah or siff-wuh is what I’ve always heard, here in the “siff” bay area. 🙂
The Great Lakes Avengers may not be the “world’s greatest superheroes”, but they do include Squirrel Girl, the superhero who has never been defeated, despite going up against some of Marvel’s toughest villains, including Dr. Doom, Galactus, and Thanos. (Although there’s some ambiguity about the last two.)
Anna Kendrick is apparently agitating to get the role of Squirrel Girl in the MCU. (Personally, I think she might be a little old for the role, but enthusiasm may count for something too.)
11) I liked “Binti”… and “Cat Pictures, Please”… and even the Bolander story. I suppose I just took different things away from those stories than Chance Morrison. I don’t think any one of them’s a perfect story, but I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a perfect story… everything has its flaws; they may grate on some people and slide by others.
Camestros:
Ah, so you’ve seen my secondary school DT project then!
11) I liked Cat Pictures Please, but then I like cat pictures. (And Snek4President. #MakeAmericaSnekAgain. TW Snakes. Very cute snakes, but snakes, if that’s a problem for you.)
Binti struck me as nice but slight. As with Penric’s Demon I guess there’s an appeal right now about people solving problems by being polite, but I prefer a bit more oomph. Enjoying Slow Bullets. Need to find the Sanderson and at least some of Traitor’s Balde in before the end of the month.
@Mike Glyer: Yes, the correct pronunciation is ‘SEFF-wah’ because it is.
Just finished of Binti. A bit too much magic stuff happens in it for me. If there is magic, I prefer it isn’t called technology.
Re: Cat Pictures Please. I got to see Naomi unveil her Locus Award when I was on a panel with her at Convergence. My poor cell phone picture of her with the award, however, did not quite please her…
“The Great Lakes Avengers may not be the “world’s greatest superheroes”, but they do include Squirrel Girl, the superhero who has never been defeated, despite going up against some of Marvel’s toughest villains, including Dr. Doom, Galactus, and Thanos. (Although there’s some ambiguity about the last two.)”
The Squirrel Girl ‘schtick,’ ie the never having been defeated phenomenon, is one of the main reasons I always believed that Doreen Green would be forever limited to guest appearances and cameos. One of the things that make any character worth reading about, (or watching if that is the consumer’s thing), is that they have to struggle in some way. They must overcome failure at times. Otherwise, it just becomes sort of a static, blow-by-blow accounting of their endless string of victories. In fact, one of the ways that many who are dismissive of comic books choose to denigrate them is to cite this supposed lack of depth and broadly claim that all comic books are this way.
Of course, that isn’t true. Poorly written comics are this way, just as poorly written books and poorly written movies and poorly written television episodes are this way. Easy success is typically boring, which makes the case of Doreen Green especially interesting. The audience seems to have embraced the Squirrel Girl schtick in ways that they would never have embraced it if another hero, say Iron Man or Captain America, would have embarked on a similar string of easy victories.
Of course, Squirrel Girl is mostly played for humor, even in the midst of carrying her own monthly title, but humor doesn’t generally necessitate flat, boring characters who have no real growth in front of them, because they have no real struggle behind them. I suppose, in some ways, that Squirrel Girl can be viewed as the superhero for people who don’t really like the superhero story. They sort of view Squirrel Girl as a humorous parody of everything they perceive the superhero story to be, without having to experience what superhero stories actually are or why people like them.
6) I enjoyed the first of the Last Policeman trilogy. I never got around to picking up the sequels, but wasn’t a bad read. I don’t… think… thtat I’d consider a white dude “going after questions of what it’s like to be black in America” as a “fearless” thing to do.
There’s zero risk involved. The contingent that point out, rightly, that he shouldn’t be doing that, and that maybe he should let people speak for themselves, are going to be shouted down/harassed by the people who always show up when some whie dude does a dumb thing. “Why shouldn’t he write it? He’s an author. You’re just trying to censor him!”
Aside: I remember a boast in an early Squirrel Girl appearance where she claimed her name rhymed, though to the British ear it’s not clear what it would rhyme with. Would an American pronounce the name of rodent like “swirl”? Would all Americans do so?
This side of the pond “Squir-rell”.
“Would an American pronounce the name of rodent like “swirl”? Would all Americans do so?”
Typically, it would be a one syllable word that basically sounded like ‘skwerl.’
[checkboxes assemble!]
I can imagine young girls liking Squirrel Girl.
The talk of a movie. Another comic book, another franchise.
When will the super hero movie bubble pop?
Nonsense. Current Squirrel Girl, at any rate, is for anyone looking for an antidote to grimdark superhero fare where ‘struggle – and torture and huge megadeaths – builds character.’ (Dave Sim was parodying this view back in the eighties when he was still a reasonable but cranky person.) See also Patsy Walker: Hellcat, Howard The Duck and the late lamented She Hulk title. They’re fun and charming and witty and pretty darn lovable. There’s more to the toolbox of character building than smashing fists in people’s faces or having your face smashed with a fist, and it’s nice when superhero comics remember what they are. I mean, I love grimdark superheroes myself but they’re not the be-all and end-all and get a bit tedious after a while.
Marvel have a bunch of really good B-list titles at present. Not a huge fan of Squirrel Girl, but +1 on Patsy walker: aka Hellcat.
Another stand out, in a completely different direction is the current Vision title, featuring almost no superhero adventures, but an increasingly unstable looking ‘normal’ suburban life for the android Avenger, his wife, children and brand new robot dog.
And then there are interminable titles with Inhumans in the logo somewhere. Someone must care…
‘Nonsense. Current Squirrel Girl, at any rate, is for anyone looking for an antidote to grimdark superhero fare where ‘struggle – and torture and huge megadeaths – builds character.’ ‘
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not equating ‘struggle’ with torture, or gritted teeth, or your typical ridiculously over-the-top grotesque modern portrayal of the Joker in the typical Batman title written since The Killing Joke. I’m talking about struggle as in the possibility, (and occasional reality), of failure, which is generally the backbone of most well-conceived stories, whether they are in a comic book or not.
Doreen just isn’t a character if there is no possibility of failure in her life. She is a caricature of what some people perceive the superhero to be and the running joke that drives what success there is for the title is the notion that superheroes do not fail, which is partially supported by what they see in the Marvel movies, where Ultron lifts a city and threatens the world with an extinction level event, but everyone ‘knows’ there’s no real threat, because superhero stories just don’t end that way.
That’s why I’ve always been more of a fan of superhero stories that are smaller in scale and scope. There is a chance that Spider-Man won’t save Gwen Stacy. There is no chance that the Avengers won’t save the world from destruction. And when the stakes are smaller, the story becomes more personal. It means more for Spider-Man to save Gwen Stacy than it does for Spider-Man to save New York.
There’s no real angst in Squirrel Girl. The angst of Spider-Man started to get extremely absurd somewhere in 1990, when I stopped buying comic books (pretty much).
You know, this principle put me off characters like The Punisher and Elektra years ago. I just don’t get how you could possibly apply it to Squirrel Girl at all. Every page of her comic proves you wrong. She is bursting with personality – bright, sharp, lively, energetic, optimistic, a bit of a klutz, utterly good-natured, fair-minded, as thoroughly grounded as a character that talks to squirrels can be, and occasionally she goes off to fight Galactus. She has character to burn, and very little of it is built on or expressed through either struggle or the risk of failure. (There is some! Of both! Despite her name, there’s always a risk she’ll fail against the impossible odds this time! She probably won’t because it’s not that sort of comic! But she’ll, y’know, struggle to achieve the impossible and the improbable! It’s a heck of a lot of fun!)
Obits
Hmm. This one felt odd – somehow to me the narrative voice sounded far far older than the character was supposed to be – it felt like he was much older, parachuted into a web workplace, so it just didn’t ring true. I don’t mean write in txt speak but it seemed a little off. For me, it would have worked better for me as a period piece, with the perspective of time, maybe – you could have done it as a 60s small circulation magazine, looking back on the time from now, for example, and have it work better. I’m sure the story hook has been done before, and I was a little turned off by the fact that every women in the story was super-manipulative and/or totally bitchy, but those are relatively minor quibbles. Workmanlike but below no award for me.
Maybe the author will get better when he writes a few more books 😉 I could give him pointers…
Well, whadda you know–there’s a Youtube for that.:
‘You know, this principle put me off characters like The Punisher and Elektra years ago.’
It’s odd that you use Elektra as an example when Elektra has experienced some of the greatest personal failures that any person could ever experience, while Doreen has never been written to have experienced any failures at all. Elektra has made choices that have led to tremendous loss in her personal life – loss of her life, loss of the great love of her life, loss of her livelihood, loss of her fundamental sense of self. You may dismiss these things as ‘angst,’ but the reality is that, even if you consider the presentation of them in the various Elektra comic books to be overblown, this sort of fundamental conflict is necessary for storytelling that has the opportunity to be good or profound. That doesn’t mean the execution always is, but the foundation of a classically good story is there.
I understand your point that they are expressing her character in other ways than through struggle or risk of failure, but really, all you are describing is a list of personality traits. And you are defining her principally by what she isn’t, rather than by what she is. And the reason for that is simple.
When anyone asks anyone to describe a character in any sort of literary or media artifact, one of the chief ways in which the other person describes the characters is by recounting what the character has done, their achievements, and so forth.
Unfortunately, Doreen’s achievements are essentially meaningless because there was no struggle involved in the accomplishment. She suffered no setbacks in defeating Dr. Doom. She experienced no difficulties in defeating Galactus. She nullifies all threats in a matter of moments. So that leaves us with her personality traits, which admittedly are admirable. Doreen is an enjoyable caricature to read because of all of the things you say – she is optimistic, lively, good-natured, etc. However, despite those things, she is not a character. Or at best, she is an incomplete character.
Bottom line – no, Doreen never has to be a complete character. They can probably continue to experience some degree of commercial success writing the fundamentally empty amiable pleasantries they currently write about her and some people will continue to view her as an antidote for a style of writing they have grown weary of as you have. However, the bottom line is that unless she experiences something akin to a struggle in some aspect of her life at some point, she will never become round and the anecdotes written about her will remain essentially meaningless meanderings.
I consider SFWA to be a one-syllable word, pronounced as spelled.
@Darren – as an ex-UKian, that’s different from how the UK pronounce it. We have two syllables.
Is the second 5th of July today or July 10th or July 25 (2nd 5th)? These new calendars confuse me.
Finished Seveneves. I did enjoy it, warts and all, but it’ll probably be on the lower ranges of my ballot (given that I’d already rank it below Uprooted and Ancillary). Next up: Fifth Season, whose opening sentence (“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.”) was strangely resonant with Seveneves.
Edited to add: I kind of pronounce “squirrel” as a one-and-a-half syllable word, and it can drop to a single syllable if I’m speaking quickly.
RE: FIfth Season,
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in second person before. It’s an interesting experience.
The first (non-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure) book I remember reading in second person was Will Shetterly’s Gospel of the Knife, a very peculiar sequel to his Dogland. I spent the first oh, 10-20% of the book assuming that any moment now I’d reach a new chapter/section and then the tense would change to something more conventional, but nope.
In other Marvel news, apparently the young black female character that they’ve been teasing in the main Iron Man title is about to pick up the Iron Man mantle for a time, while Tony Stark goes off on an undercover mission of his own. Major announcement today to that effect.
Entitled white dude fans are, of course, losing their collective minds over this. Much repetition of the magic phrase of condemnation, “SJW.”
I was having so much trouble getting into “Seveneves” that I picked up “The Fifth Season”, to see if the trouble was book-specific or a more general “don’t want to do homework” feeling. It’s definitely the former: I read The Fifth Season almost straight through, only stopping reluctantly for meals, sleep. (note: though I was reading the paperback, I had no trouble with the font.) It’s *definitely* getting my first-place vote for Best Novel.
I agree with those who found it not really depressing, but more *angry* — in a completely justifiable way. I guessed the Big Reveal at the end quite early on – starting with the “think about what you’re not noticing” Interlude in the middle. And I anticipated why some sections are in second person, which I’ve only seen well-done in stories (fanfic) about characters with complex or conflicted identities: Ozma, Methos, Clark Kent/Superman/Kal-El, etc.
What I wasn’t expecting was that The Fifth Season has gur fnzr cerzvfr nf frirarirf, n jbeyq jvgubhg gur zbba. Jnf gurer n punyyratr tbvat nebhaq? Na negvpyr gung tbg n ohapu bs crbcyr guvaxvat nobhg gur vqrn? GSF vf fb zhpu orggre guna gur ovgf bs Frirarirf V pbhyq trg guebhtu gung V qba’g guvax V’yy rira obgure jvgu gur Fgrcurafba (fbeel qhqr) (abg fbeel).
As with “Ninefox Gambit”, I don’t find TFS to be so much “epic fantasy” (as it says on the cover, wtf) as “Clarke’s Law-Level SF”. The fact that the Science in this SF is geology of course fills me with great glee — it’s one big reason I don’t find the book as grimly dystopic as I feared. Like one of the characters, I am distractable by SCIENCE.