(1) AT THE CORE. James Davis Nicoll returns with a new list: “Twenty Core Speculative Fiction Mysteries Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”. Here are the first four —
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
White Cat by Holly Black
The Mountains of Mourning by Lois Bujold
Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan
(2) YOUR GUIDE TO MOUNT TBR. Gabino Iglesias devotes his LitReactor column to explaining “10 Things Only Hardcore Bookworms Do”.
- Buy the same book more than once
We buy books because they are great and smell good and feel right and occupy empty space and they’re our friends. “I don’t have this edition.” “This cover is too amazing to pass up.” “This one is signed.” “This is the one I had when I was a kid.” “This is only a dollar!” “I’ll keep it around and give it away to someone later.” I’ve even used this one to rationalize the purchase of a third edition of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper and Other Poems: “I mean, I have two editions already, but this one’s illustrated!” Yeah, hardcore bookworms will come up with amazing reasons why they “need” to buy a book they already have. On the other hand, we will also buy the same book twice by accident. It’s there and it’s affordable…and we’re not going to drive home and look through our piles for it: we’re going to buy it again.
- Judge people by their books/shelves
I know this one is tough to swallow. I also know some of you will debate that you’re better human beings than me and you are above and beyond judging others. Well, fuck it, I’m being brutally honest here and being judgmental has kept me alive this far, so I’m gonna keep doing it. If you invite me to your house and give me a tour of it and I don’t see a single book, I kinda want to get out of there because who the hell doesn’t own at least a couple of books? A house without books is like a body without a soul. If you do have some books, us bookworms will find a way to sniff them out and study them. Then, silently and with a smile on our faces, we will judge you. John Waters said “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them,” and I think most bookworms agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. Likewise, we will probably change the way we feel about you based on the quality of the books on your shelves. For me, the books you own/read and the way you treat animals are the two factors that lie at the top of the list. You read good shit and you’re good to animals, I’ll get down with you even if you’re a mercenary. Is this horrible? Yes. Is this unfair because “good books” is a subjective term? Yes. Does it matter to us? Nope. Will we change or stop doing it? Yeah…no.
(3) ACT CLEANUP NEEDED. Kisha Bertrand delivers a powerful rant about how trolls are coddled on a certain convention’s OFFICIAL Facebook group: “Shame on you, Dragon Con”.
Earlier today, a black girl posted this Io9 article in the group as she was excited about the movie adaptation and release of Black Panther along with the plethora of cosplay opportunities available to people of color. The post was meant to be positive and celebratory, but we all know what happens when black people get together in excitement of something that positively highlights us in any form of media. Yep. Angry and fragile white folx with their exclamations of, “But what about me? Why does it have to be about race?” and my all time favorite, “You only like it because it’s about black people.” Racist trolls begin crawling out of the woodwork spewing bile and nonsense to whoever will give them the time of day. I mean, god forbid PoC (“people of color” for those of you asleep in the back) are excited about a film involving superheroes who look like us and are at the forefront of the storyline.
Trolls are trolls and we all know they live to stir the pot and poke to get a rise out of people. Most of us know not to feed the trolls. In most cases we look the other way. I tend to bite my tongue because I don’t have the energy to challenge and educate bigots via social media. I’m fucking tired, y’all. I’m SOOO goddamn tired, BUT, there are those instances where trolling goes too far which is what happened today in the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group.
What started out as ignorant incompetence from some random redneck, turned into comments that were not only racist, but anti-semitic, transphobic, ableist and misogynist. It got to a point where it was no longer a matter of ignoring the troll. This guy was threatening people – a group of con goers who will be gathered in my city for Dragon Con in less than two months. People were pissed, myself included. I mean, the racist did refer to me as a monkey when I challenged him. A monkey… how clever.
Regardless of the troll, serious conversations were happening on this post. Some people were actually listening and being educated by PoC putting in the emotional labor to teach them. To be honest, some of these conversations were actually kind of awesome. The majority of white folx were celebrating the film and some of the more stubborn lot were legit backing off and LISTENING. Any PoC will tell you that getting white folx to stop making it about them and actually listen when we talk about our experiences is a pretty big deal. We’re unpacking some complicated stuff in these conversations.
Of course the troll wasn’t having it. He kept on pushing and taunting, reaching into the collection of shitty memes he was no doubt waiting to unleash at the right time – some of which were direct threats to Black and Jewish people specifically. This went on for several hours, all while members of the group were reporting this guy to not only the moderators of the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group, but also sending emails to the Dragon Con staff via dragoncon.org. Strength in numbers right? I was so proud of my extended nerd family of all backgrounds joining together to vanquish the evil troll. We were all just waiting on the moderators of the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group to swoop in, swing the ban hammer, and let us continue with our conversations and celebration of Black Panther and black cosplay. That was, in fact, the whole point of the post to begin with.
I guess banning the troll would have been too challenging for the moderators of the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group because what did they do? Rather than simply remove this terrible waste of human flesh from the group, they deleted the post in its entirety. They essentially swept the issue under the rug AND KEPT THE FUCKING RACIST PIECE OF SHIT TROLL IN THE GROUP.
What makes this terribly tragic (aside from the obvious) is this is NOT the first time such an instance has occurred in the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group. They deleted posts and conversations that came up after the 2016 convention when people wanted to discuss the costumes done in poor taste (e.g. blackface and the burning world trade center towers) and what we as a community could do to stop it. People wanted to discuss what they saw at Dragon Con in the OFFICIAL Dragon Con Facebook group because isn’t that what the fuck the group is for?!?! When members asked why they weren’t allowed to openly discuss these topics, one of the moderators (there are seven of them, five guys, two women, ALL WHITE) simply said, “You’re giving these people the attention they were looking for by discussing it. We just don’t have time to moderate and read through every post.” So your solution is to silence people in the community and ignore it? You don’t have time? Well golly gee, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do as a moderator of a group? MODERATE?!?! If you don’t have the time, maybe don’t volunteer to be a moderator of a group of over 12k members. I dunno. Just using a bit of logic here.
I guess we can expect any post about Black Panther and/or the celebration of black cosplay to eventually be deleted. Posts such as these will almost always bring out the racist assholes who want to stir the pot…because racism and transphobia and anti-semitism and ableism and misogyny sure are fucking funny, aren’t they? Rather than cut away the rot, you slap a band-aid over it and let it continue to fester because, “you don’t have the time”…
This was Dragon Con’s response:
(4) SPECULATIVE POET LAUREATE. The SPECPO blog announced that poet Tracy K. Smith, whose collection, Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, has been named the Poet Laureate of the United States.
Here’s an excerpt of the New York Times’ article:
Now the Library of Congress has named Ms. Smith its new poet laureate, the nation’s highest honor in that field. With the appointment, announced on Wednesday, Ms. Smith will take on a role held by some of the country’s most revered poets, among them Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic and most recently, Juan Felipe Herrera.
Ms. Smith often plays with genre in her work and says it serves as “a distancing device.” Some of the verses in her 2007 collection, “Duende,” were inspired by westerns. Her 2011 collection, “Life on Mars,” which won the Pulitzer, is inflected with dystopian themes and tropes from science fiction. Many of the poems are meditations on cosmic affairs, like the incomprehensible vastness of space and humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, but the collection is also anchored in the personal. The escapist, fantastical themes in the collection are blended with intimate reflections: mournful, elegiac verses about the death of her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.
“I was thinking about loss, and thinking as someone who was about to become a parent,” said Ms. Smith, who lives in Princeton with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. “The distancing device of science fiction was helpful, and it changed the metaphors.”
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- July 6, 1990 — George Jetson took Jane and the rest of his gang from the boob tube up onto the silver screen as Jetsons: The Movie.
(6) BOOTS ON THE FACE. In keeping with the great tradition of Vice Presidential speeches about the space program, Mike Pence has made an Orwellian-sounding promise:
Vice President Mike Pence vowed Thursday to make space exploration a priority for the U.S., including the conquering of another planet.
“Our nation will return to the Moon and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence said during remarks at the Cape Canaveral headquarters in Florida.
(7) KICKOFF. Sports news blog SBNation.com is doing a serial science fiction story (July 5 through 15) about “What football will look like in the future”. The far future.
Danny Sichel sent the link with this endorsement: “Jon Bois is doing some incredible things with the medium, and I say this as someone who really doesn’t care about football.”
The whole thing was kind of dizzying to me – you’ve been warned.
(8) BRAVE NEW WORLD. Visiting the real site behind The Technicolor Time Machine: “The first European settlement in the New World”.
Twenty minutes later, I continued on my journey; it was another 80km to L’Anse Aux Meadows National Historic Site. Stepping out of the car, my nostrils filled with the crisp, briny sea air carried in by a breeze that rippled across the grassy landscape.
It is here, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, that a significant moment in human migration and exploration took place.
In the year 1000, nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus set sail, a Viking longboat, skippered by Leif Erikson, brought 90 men and women from Iceland to establish a new settlement – the first European settlement in the New World.
(9) SCENERY CHEWER. Adam Rowe reprises “The Secret History of J. Jonah Jameson, Comics’ Greatest Supporting Character” at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog.
J. Jonah immediately latched on to Spider-man for a weirdly specific reason: he feared the young hero’s violent actions would lead children to idolize him, and they’d get themselves hurt in the process. “He is a bad influence on our youngsters” is a direct quote from page five of Amazing Spider-Man #1, and a direct summation of Wertham’s views. The parallels get stronger from there: while Wertham compared superheroes to the “Nazi myth” of the Ubermensch, J Jonah contrasted Spider-man against his own son, all-American astronaut John Jameson. Wertham called for comic censorship, and J. Jonah called for Spider-Man to be “outlawed.”
(10) BACK TO THE PRESENT. Marvel has announced the following creative teams and Legacy titles:
FALCON #1: TAKE FLIGHT! PART 1
Written by RODNEY BARNES
Art by JOHN CASSARATHE INCREDIBLE HULK #709: RETURN TO PLANET HULK PART 1
Written by GREG PAK
Art by GREG LANDX-MEN GOLD #13: MOJO WORLDWIDE PART 1
Written by MARC GUGGENHEIM
Art by MIKE MAYHEWX-MEN BLUE #13: MOJO WORLDWIDE PART 2
Written by CULLEN BUNN
Art by JORGE MOLINA
(11) NOT THE SON OF A CARPENTER. But the creator himself! Variety has the story — “John Carpenter Inks Overall Deal With Universal Cable, to Develop Two New Series”.
Horror master John Carpenter has signed an overall deal with Universal Cable Productions (UCP), Variety has learned.
Under the new deal, Carpenter will executive produce scripted programming with UCP for the NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment portfolio, as well as for external networks and streaming services, along with his producing partner, Sandy King, under their Storm King Productions banner.
UCP and Carpenter are already in development on “Tales for a Halloween Night” for SYFY. Based on Carpenter’s award-winning graphic novel anthology of stories, the series brings together storytellers from the worlds of movies, novels, and comics for a collection of horror stories featuring graveyards, sunken ships, and all the things that go bump in the night. A search for a writer is underway. Additionally, UCP and Carpenter are developing “Nightside,” based on the literary series by New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green, with “Scream” TV series co-creator Jill Blotevogel attached to write the script. In the series, Nightside is the secret heart of London where creatures of the night congregate
“John Carpenter is an incredible creator whose dark imagination has left an indelible mark in film and in our dreams,” said Dawn Olmstead, executive vice president of development at UCP. “We are thrilled to have a master of the horror genre join UCP.”
(12) HEAVY DUTY. LHC “double heavy” particle to shine light on strong force.
Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.
The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called “strong force” which holds the centres of atoms together.
The existence of the new particle was theoretically predicted but this is the first time it has been identified.
The details of the Xi-cc++ particle were presented at a high-energy physics conference in Venice.
…Nearly all the matter that we see around us is made of neutrons and protons, which form the centres of atoms. These are made up of three smaller particles called quarks which can be either light or heavy.
New arrangement
There are, however, six different types of quarks which combine in different ways to form other kinds of particle. Those that have been detected so far contain at most, one heavy quark.
This is the first time that researchers have confirmed the existence of one with two heavy quarks. According to Prof Guy Wilkinson of Oxford University, there is an intriguing difference between the new particle and the ones that have been discovered before.
“In contrast to other particles of this type, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a particle with two heavy quarks is expected to act like a planetary system, where the heavy quarks are like two stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system.”
The research team will now measure the properties of the Xi-cc++ to establish how this new arrangement of quarks behaves and how the strong force holds the system together. They also expect to find more double heavy quark particles.
(13) THE SOOTH IS OUT THERE. Looking for the remnants of a volcano bigger than the one that spawned Frankenstein: “The massive volcano that scientists can’t find”.
It was 10 October 1465 – the day of the hotly anticipated wedding of King Alfonso II of Naples. He was set to marry the sophisticated Ippolita Maria Sforza, a noblewoman from Milan, in a lavish ceremony. As she entered the city, the crowds gasped. Before them was a sight so strange and beautiful, it was like nothing they had ever seen before.
….In fact, what Alfonso’s wedding party witnessed may have been more extraordinary than anyone imagined. Many thousands of miles away in the tropics, a giant volcano was making geological history. This was an eruption so big, it produced an ash cloud which enveloped the Earth and led to the coolest decade for centuries.
The blast itself would have been heard up to 2,000km (1,242 miles) away and created a tsunami which caused devastation hundreds of kilometres away. In terms of scale, it surpassed even the 1815 eruption of Tambora, which unleashed energy equivalent to 2.2 million Little Boy atomic bombs and killed at least 70,000 people. Traces of the eruption have been found from Antarctica to Greenland.
The thing is, scientists can’t find the volcano that did it. What’s going on?
(14) FIBER COUNT. Dirty laundry: Are your clothes polluting the ocean?
“Not many people know that lots of our clothes are made of plastic,” says Imogen Napper, a PhD student at Plymouth University, “polyester, acrylic.”
Ms Napper and Prof Richard Thompson study marine microplastics – fragments and fibres found in the ocean surface, the deep sea and the marine food chain.
And in a recent lab study, they found that polyester and acrylic clothing shed thousands of plastic fibres each time it was washed- sending another source of plastic pollution down the drain and, eventually, into the ocean.
(15) MORTALITY TABLES. Robert Chan, in a Yahoo! piece “‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 Peril-o-Meter: Who Dies Next?”, looks at 20 characters on Game of Thrones and ranks them by the likelihood they will be killed.
It’s not easy predicting who will be the next to go on Game of Thrones. Some deaths seem so certain as to be almost predestined (Ramsay Bolton); some were literally predestined (Cersei’s children, Hodor); and some feel like they’re there just to mess with us — Ned Stark’s death basically told us, “This ain’t your grandfather’s fantasy series.” We did pretty well with last year’s Peril-o-Meter, so here are our best predictions for this season on a scale of 1 to 5 — with 1 being “Very Likely to Survive” and 5 being “Call a Mortician.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, James Davis Nicoll, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Stephen Burridge, Andrew Porter, Jim Henley, and Danny Sichel for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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The appertainment center is open! I have to run out, but I’ll be back to make the inevitably needed corrections in a couple of hours.
First second!
[godstalk]
Back to read later
Fanficlet: Temeraire attends Worldcon.
I’ve published my Best Graphic Story ballot.
(2) Definitely guilty of 3. There isn’t a bookshelf I don’t study. Even in movies, if there are bookshelves in the background, I try to make out what’s on them. Sometimes it can be funny. “HEY! This movie is set in 1978 and The Hotel New Hampshire wasn’t published until 1982, or so. That’s wrong!”
(11) YES! YES! YES! But I will believe it when I can actually see it.
(6) If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a Martian face… forever.
(1) Hmmm … Cyrion a mystery? I do remember most of the stories having a distinct puzzle element, at least. And being (unsurprisingly since Tanith Lee) really, really good.
(2) Guilty as charged. Although I don’t read multiple books simultaneously, and these days when I’m traveling I’m happy to just bring my (stuffed to the point of overflowing) Kindle rather than a stuffed to the point of overflowing backpack full of paperbacks. (When I was bringing “real” books on vacation, I’d start with 1/day, then probably double that. I’d usually focus on a single author, so I’d pack all of the Cherryh or Heinlein or Moorcock or Burroughs or Jo Clayton or whatever; I remember one traumatizing vacation back in high school when I brought Niven’s Known Space, read all of them in about half the vacation, then had to start over. Never again! shall be my motto.)
2.3 – Nah totally not afraid to say I totally look at people’s bookshelves and movie shelves as one of the first things when I visit a new house to see what they like and if there’s stuff that I might be interested in.
3 – If there was enough garbage in there to make it difficult to delete I can get that. Really it’s sad how toxic online environments have become in general. Playstation changed their logo to a rainbow to support London Pride and it caused trolls to come out. Anyone excited or supportive draws these parasites who feed off of trying to turn positive things into pain for fun. It’s sucks that there are people who lead such sad lives that the only way they can enjoy something is if someone else suffers.
7 – I’ve seen that making waves as people get drawn to this weird serial sports fiction story.
15 – Go Team White Walker!
(2) If a home doesn’t have a bookshelf, it’s just a place, not a home. I can’t imagine living in a home without books. I’m at my parents’ house, the one I grew up in, right now and there are books and bookshelves all over the place. I spent my youth reading just about anything I could get my hands on, and here there are lots and lots of books to read.
(13) Oh, wow. Thank you! I hadn’t heard of this one before (or just didn’t remember it). I love this sort of scientific mystery. I also like reading about scientists making assumptions and later realizing they fell into the assumption trap.
@1: I’m not sure what happened to the quoting, italicization, and spelling of the titles, but I think I’ve read 13 of the 20, which is astounding given how JDN spreads these out. (I do read a scattering of mundane mysteries, but I don’t hunt them out.) They’re an interesting spectrum of how far an SF work can go and still have a legitimate (IMO) mystery-to-solve in it. Some of the others look interesting enough (and penetrable enough, which isn’t always true for me nowadays) to add to Mt. T….
@2.3: is it worse to criticize someone else’s shelves, or to put editorial markings in the books of possible visitors on one’s own shelves? Wilhelm said Knight used to do the latter — not as a trap but because he was an obsessive editor.
@7: “dizzying” is not the term I’d use.
@Meredith: that was amusing. Not coherent, but amusing.
(2) YOUR GUIDE TO MOUNT TBR
Puts hand up as another person whose gaze is drawn to bookshelves whether on a TV show or in a movie, and who attempts to read the book titles instead of paying attention to the scene.
Really, “hardcore” bookworms only pack six books for a trip? At least in the pre-Kindle and airline fee days, I’d have the clothes suitcase and the book suitcase.
(2): The great thing in this age of DVRs is that you can freeze the scene in order to peruse the bookshelves.
(7) KICKOFF.
I give the author big marks for creative use of multimedia in storytelling. But after the first installment, the one with Nine and Ten, which was rather interesting, it got old really fast.
🙁
I see the ones I did not italicize. Which did I misspell?
1) I’ve only read three of these, the lowest of the lists so far.
2) it has never occurred to me to scan the bookshelf in a movie. I assumed that they were generally fake book looking cardboard not actual books?
@1, I only have read seven; I must fix this.
@Meredith, that was quite funny. Especially the veiled reference to puppies, and the bit with Novik.
2) I’m totally guilty of investigating the bookshelves of people I visit. Homes with no bookshelves make me despair. How am I supposed react to you, if I can’t even see what you read?
Coincidentally, I’m also guilty of starting conversations about random books spotted on a bookshelves. “I see you have ‘The Doctor of Stalingrad’? Is it as racist as everybody says?” Turned out the owners inherited it from a deceased aunt and never read it.
One of the strangest bookshelves I ever saw was that of an English professor who had about fifteen different editions of Moll Flanders. When I asked him about it, he said that Moll Flanders had been the subject of his PhD thesis some thirty to forty years ago. When I found a German edition of Moll Flanders that he didn’t yet have, I gave it to him.
(2) I tend to assume that movie bookshelves are random, unless perhaps the scene calls attention to a professional’s bookshelf (for example, Robin William’s character in Good Will Hunting). I don’t remember which bookstore(s) do this, but I seem to recall at least one that sold sets of random hardcover books by the foot (yard? probably not meter, it was in the US after all), presumably for stores and restaurants that were trying to provide a particular ambience. For a few dollars, the studios could have enough for most of their sets.
As far as buying more than one edition of a book, does buying ebooks when you already have it in print count? I mean to sell all those print books I’ve now got duplicated in ebook, but for the most part, I just haven’t gotten around to taking them to a used book store or library sale.
I can’t imagine it checking out someone’s shelves. I mean seriously, how could you possibly not check out the shelves? What could possibly be the thought process thst leads to that decision?
Heh. I’ve only read one.
(1) argh. Only read 2.
(2) it’s a fair cop. I have a couple of things in both e and dead-tree formats. I also have “walking copies” of a few favorites: paperbacks that I can easily take along on long walks, to read when taking a break.
(3) I do hope the author of the original post puts it back up.
On the subject of books, specifically Hugo finalists, I have reviewed The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley.
1) Of these twenty books, I have read zero. However, counting ones I “have on their shelves,” I have eight.
The one that has sat on my shelf unread the longest has to be Needle by Hal Clement. I’m sure I bought that as a teenager.
###
Nevertheless, she pixelated.
1) For some reason, I’ve never seen Speculative Fiction Mysteries as a category, but when seeing it, it’s kind of obvious. Anyhow, I have greatly enjoyed the six books on the list I’ve read, so that means I will have to take a look at the rest.
2) Yes, I bought my new copy of annotated Lovecraft last week. As if I hadn’t enough Lovecraft since before. And of course I look at others bookshelves. The first thing I do in a new place is to look for the bookshelves.
As for me, I hope the future of football looks like this, with students designing robotic football players, and the best-engineered team taking the trophy. Avoids all the micro-concussions & other damage to human players.
If you know anybody who’d be interested in this sort of thing, let me know. The College Robotic Football League really wants to grow!
(1) 7 this time, and I even own some of the older ones in dead tree.
(2) This is entirely correct, although I try not to buy the same book twice and succeed 99% of the time. Although dead-tree and e-book count as different as long as the e-book is cheap or free.
(3) This is my complete lack of surprise. Is it just tooooo haaaaard to ban one chucklehead at a time? Really?
And are they afraid that *-ist broflakes won’t like them any more if they don’t delete all the *-related posts instead of, I dunno, MODERATING away the racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/assholes? Either do the job or don’t — don’t let this stuff fester for ages and then wipe everyone out.
At least cut out the obvious toxic trolls; they know who it was FFS. If they feel they need to zap the whole discussion, okay, maaaaybe — but there’s no reason to let someone who was the direct cause of the zappage stick around to do it again.
(7) I know this has gotten a lot of buzz today, but so far it strikes me as thinking it’s much more clever than it is just because it has flashy graphics, woo!
(14) I wear natural fabrics just cuz I prefer them, but now I’m glad for the oceans.
@Meredith: delightful!
3) I do moderate a forum of 1600 persons (we are only two moderators) and it used to be hell to moderate. Sometimes when I woke up, there were hundreds of comments of abuse, personal grudges. I used to lock the threads instead of deleting them though.
Nowadays, we have a better abuse system. Anyone can report a comment and it will automagically be hidden. That stops all runaway abusing in its track. However it can be misused. I doubt it would be possible to use with ten times as many members and dedicated griefers.
Time I think for the Dragon Con mediators to ask for more volunteers to help them and make it clear that they would welcome diverse applicants.
I note the moderators say they “quickly” removed and banned the troll. I know nothing about moderator powers on fb nor if the group has safeguards to prevent rogue moderators. If for example bans require some sort of contact with someone that is offline, then I can understand a short delay. I have no real idea of the time frame. the ban might have been implemented before Kisha Bertrand finished typing the rant. I suspect the rant was produced almost immediately after the thread was deleted. but really i could be wrong.
1) Got 9 nine this time which is more than I expect, because mysteries are not a subgenre I consciously seek out to read.
8) I’d love to visit it one day.
2) I admit to always looking at the shelves when I visit someone. They might have read or be reading something interesting that *I* want to read! (I did this most recently when I was staying with Donna Maree Hanson on my DUFF trip, she does have a quite nice collection of SF and research books, and since most were Australian, a fair chunk unfamiliar to me…)
I’m an admin for a handful of 10k+ Facebook pages and it’s… really not that hard to delete and ban trolls. It takes time, but so does doing anything. The simplest solution (removing the entire post) is also the worst. It does nothing to stop the negativity if and when it’s reposted, it just if anything makes it worse (because then you’re put through it all again on a fresh post.) and if that keeps happening, you’re going to get less page interaction from regular people who don’t want to be jumped on by assholes.
(1) I’ve read one! This might be the best I’ve ever done on one of JDN’s lists.
@Jeff Smith: Eppur si scorre, as Galileo almost said.
(3) Sadly, I’m not surprised. Not because it’s DragonCon, but because the same reaction is everywhere. Automated tools like Hampus describes can be a help to make the effort in time needed more tractable, but won’t help you in any way with the emotional effort, the competence of the moderators, or the will needed.
(6) Ugh. I mean, Kennedy was also very-much America first, but he at least saw America as acting as a leader for the rest of humanity, and he had far better reasons to set moon as the goal than mere jingoism.
2. yes, yes and of course!
In re scanning shelves in movies and whether they are deliberately assembled or not:
three times now since 2013 I have been contacted by various film production companies for “clearance” to use Amazing Stories magazines as set dressing; all three times the production underlings sent along on this task have failed at “negotiation”. (They don’t know what an opening bid is, they don’t understand IP and they simply will never understand that dropping a name like Angelina Jolie does not make me lose all reasoning abilities.)
The point being that, at least for some films, the things in the background of a set are often the product of a lot of hard work and research, not to mention obstreperous rights holders who want crazy things, like their Federally registered trademark listed in the credits at the end (like, you know, every other trademark owned by the studio in question and required at least by implication of the usage rules for such things).
Now you know why 1930s issues of Amazing Stories magazine didn’t litter the boyhood bedroom of Louis Zamperini in the film Unbroken.
(2) I definitely peruse other people’s bookshelves. It gives a starting point for conversation! And I also own at least two copies of some books, often a hardcover and a paperback. I do own three copies of AMERICAN GODS, because I have a signed hc, a paperback, and the TV tie in paperback that is signed that I picked up at the Neil Gaiman event in Boston.
The flip side of #2: I used to live in a side apartment of a house. When the house was being sold, potential buyers would come to check out the apartment as well. So many times people would walk into my apartment and say “Have you read *all* those books?” and I would reply in the affirmative. It was only three 5 shelf bookcases in the living room and 2 in the bedroom, plus two smaller bookshelves in the bedroom. That’s not too much for a two room apartment!
This is why I’m glad to know people who read.
@Bruce A: I think The Strand in NYC does books by the foot.
Person of Interest took great delight in the protagonist’s library base, with many book jokes and references. Such as Reese reading Stress Fractures in Titanium in a Heat shout out in one episode.
And,
Small Presses and Fandom in the Press:
Yesterday’s Washington Post has an article about small presses, including Haffner press which is republishing Kuttner and Brown, and notes that the recent Kuttner title has a foreworld by Robert Madle, who attended the first Worldcon
2) All I can say is, guilty as charged, throw myself on the mercy of the court, would like additional counts of Buying Books Just To Give Them To Other People, Always Diverting Conversations Towards Books, and 386 instances of Excessive Fanfic to be taken into consideration.
3) Oh, look, it’s faint-hearted, wishy-washy management time! Cutting out the toxic material will take work, and will involve arguments and counter-accusations (“Why did you let that comment about black cosplay stand, but delete my perfectly civil comment about how the Jewish homosexuals control everything, you social-justice-obsessed snowflake?”) – much easier to brush the whole mess under the carpet and try to pretend it didn’t happen. My respect for DragonCon’s runners has not noticeably increased, here.
JETSONS: THE MOVIE sounds about as high minded as any other Hanna Barbarian film. They keep trying to make trash into art an only make more trash.
But of the movie related news I read recently was that for a few years Tim Burton held the right to remake THE QUATERMAS EXPERIMENT.
Apropos of nothing, I just finished Martha Wells’ new novel The Harbors of the Sun, after a brief delay resulting from a ibook preorder snafu. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
I find myself sad that Wells has definitively stated this is the last Raksura novel. There are so many delicious world-building details that could be followed-up, and it is hard to say goodbye to her protagonists. Although she provided fairly satisfying resolutions for many of the characters, there’s definitely more that I want to know. Headcanon is all very well, but it can’t match ex cathedra pronouncements from the author.
Spoilers:
V zrna, jr’ir frra gung Sebfg unf fhpprffshyyl vagrtengrq vagb Vaqvtb Pybhq pbheg naq jvyy yvxryl zngher vagb n jvfr Dhrra, ohg gung cybgyvar frrzrq n yvggyr guva. Gur unys-sryy syvtug jnf snfpvangvat, ohg jvyy gurl ernyyl or noyr gb frggyr va gur Ernpurf, rira haqre Znynpuvgr’f cebgrpgvba? Jung ner hapbeehcgrq Sryy ehyref yvxr? Jvyy Pbafbyngvba trg n pbafbeg? Jnag zber!
1) Interesting list. I’ve only got (or even read) two on the list, the Beukes, which is fantastic, and the Cadigan, which is… not. I’d be curious to know what the criteria were for marking these as “core” books. Most of them I’ve never heard of (I have skipped a *lot* of classic SF), but aside from a childhood obsession w/ Robotech novelizations and Dune, I only really connected to SF as an adult through my love of noir–which perhaps unsurprisingly turned me into a massive cyberpunk fan long after it was already over–and virtually none of these writers or books have ever hit my radar. (Joan D. Vinge, Jo Walton, and Melissa Scott did, but not for these books.)
2) This is me in just about every respect, except that it’s rare for me to buy the same book twice or to read more than one book at a time. As far as keeping books everywhere, though… back when my living situation was a bit more precarious (I lived in a dank basement that flooded a few times a year) I basically lived in Fort Book.
These services are popular with realtors and with rich people who want to have the cultural cachet of owning a library without having to actually read anything. The practice goes back a long time, for the latter group (I’ve seen references to it going back to at least the ’40s).
Chances are very good that any set dressing not 100% crucial to the plot or with sentimental value to the director has a strict budget and they (the PAs) don’t have the time or authority or budget to go beyond a certain point, and if a publisher isn’t willing to play ball right away they (the book/publisher) literally are not important enough to be worth more of even a lowly PA’s time in negotiations. Sad but true.
(1) I’ve read only the Bujold and the Walton. For me, Nicoll’s lists serve mainly as reminders that there’s a huge amount of presumably interesting writing out there that I haven’t even heard of, let alone read.
(2) Sort of amazed that so much of that is so accurate where I am concerned.
1. Worst list so far.
2. I don’t see anything wrong with checking out bookshelves. I am leery of judging people based on their reading taste. Don’t most serious readers have wide ranging tastes? I do buy multiple copies of books.
3. I don’t know how FB moderation works, but couldn’t they have read the flagged comments? Do you actually have to read all comments in order to review flagged ones? If so, what’s the point of flagging? I also feel their apology was somewhat lacking. Why would they think the OP would ever post to their site again when they have basically said that this will happen again because we don’t have time to do better? Banning one troll is not much moderation.
Back later. Overslept this morning. I have to get up and walk the dog.
3) Is it just me, or is this phrasing by Dragoncon extremely awkward?
Isn’t bigotry derogatory by nature? Will they tolerate non-disgusting forms of bigotry?
Seems to me it would have been simpler to state “We do not approve nor will we tolerate any form of bigotry.” [shrug]
@Bruce A
About 25 years ago, I was in a department store that was going out of business and actually was able to buy a book that was on display in the furniture section (for ambience), which I how I got my copy of “Zotz!” by Walter Karig (I had enjoyed the movie as a kid).
Yes, as if there is a difference between disgusting bigotry and tolerable bigotry.
For “tolerable bigotry” I think of an ancient bedridden grandfather in a nursing home. Nothing you say will change him, and he can do nothing anymore to hurt anyone, so you roll your eyes and privately apologize to his nurses for his attitude.
But that’s about the only context I can see for the phrase.