Four news items, a tweet and a trailer in this collection of clippings for today.
A.V. Club
“Grant Morrison is the new editor-in-chief of Heavy Metal magazine” – July 6
Much like an obscure background character in an old comic book who very few people remember and even fewer care about, Grant Morrison has suddenly shown up to reveal that he’s actually very important and everyone needs to listen to him if they want to have any idea what’s going on. Also, the obscure background character is actually Morrison himself, and all of this takes place in a miniature pocket universe that Morrison created, and also all of us are actually Grant Morrison. Anyway, the important news that Morrison wanted to pass on—which comes to us from Entertainment Weekly and not, for once, Morrison inserting a fictionalized version of himself into this Newswire—is that Grant Morrison has been named the new editor-in-chief of famed sci-fi/fantasy/boobs magazine Heavy Metal.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
”Projects” – Updated July 6
Ever wonder why I gripe when I come up with a new story idea? Here’s why — I already have all these and haven’t had time to write them.
These are things I’ve started, but am not currently seriously working on. I do hope to get back to them all eventually. I’m not listing short stories because there are simply too many of them; only longer works. Except for the Bound Lands, I’m also generally not listing more than one volume per new series; I’m not going to write a sequel to, say, The Dragon’s Price before I finish The Dragon’s Price.
(I’m making an exception for the Bound Lands, and to a lesser extent for Ethshar, because stories in those settings don’t need to be read in order.)
I posted the first-draft openings of several of these on my blog, and I’m linking to those where they exist.
Newsarama
Len Wein informed his Facebook followers, “Well, the secret is out. I’m gonna be doing Swamp Thing again, after the terrific response the character had in Convergence. I’m also gonna be doing Metal Men finally, one of my all-time favorite books. 2016 is gonna be a fun year.”
“DC Reveals 8 New Limited Series – Metal Men, Sugar & Spike, Metamorpho, More” – July 6
In 2016, DC will launch Swamp Thing, Metal Men, Raven, Firestorm, Katana: Cult of the Kobra, Metamorpho and Sugar & Spike. Some of the series will be written by the characters’ original creators. The list of titles and writers are:
- Swamp Thing by writer Len Wein
- Metal Men by writer Len Wein
- Raven by writer Marv Wolfman
- Firestorm by writer Gerry Conway
- Katana: Cult of the Kobra by writer Mike W. Barr
- Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life & Death by writer Amy Chu
- Metamorpho by writer Aaron Lopresti
- Sugar & Spike by writer Keith Giffen
“We want the best writers working on our characters, and these are the best writers for these characters,” said [Dan] DiDio.
Of Raven, Marv Wolfman says it’s a way to to tap into the renewed popularity of the character from the Teen Titans Go! animated series.
“When I go to comic conventions it thrills me to see all the young fans cosplaying as Raven from the Teen Titans GO! cartoon show,” said the long-time Teen Titans writer. “Because so many comic fans are boys, it’s wonderful that there’s something about her that connects with both girls and boys.”
George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog
“Buy Tor Now” – July 7
In one of the more recent developments, the Rabid Puppies and some of their allies and fellow travellers have declared a boycott of Tor Books. I say “Rabid” here because Beale is backing the boycott, while Larry Correia says the Sad Puppies are not boycotting anyone… though Correia and some of the other Sads certainly seem deeply sympathetic to the boycott. I am not, needless to say. Neither is most of fandom. Which makes this a perfect time to BUY SOME TOR BOOKS!!
…And, hey, you can even buy some AUTOGRAPHED Tor books by me. My Wild Cards series is published by Tor, as it happens, and we have signed copies of INSIDE STRAIGHT, BUSTED FLUSH, SUICIDE KINGS, FORT FREAK, and LOWBALL available through the Jean Cocteau… along with hardcovers of our award-winning anthology, DANGEROUS WOMEN, also published by Tor. You can find them all at the cinema bookshop, here: http://www.jeancocteaubooks.com/
[How’d that get in here?]
A rare photography of The Puppyslug Nebula from the Hubble Telescope.#deepdream pic.twitter.com/YjslsSlYAo
— Devine Lu Linvega (@neauoire) July 2, 2015
[Didn’t you people get the memo either?]
Mr. Holmes – in US theatres on July 17
[This trailer was released in May. I just saw it at a movie theatre last week.]
[Thanks for these stories goes out to Rob Thornton, Hampus Eckerman and Will Reichard.]
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The Holmes trailer looks delightful. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the stories done from that viewpoint before. Plus McKellen, of course.
The issue with Hate just makes me sad. I read the leaked email and it clearly is not a threat to dox her, the author was saying that she obviously will not do so. Not one person pointed that out.
This!
This is why I cannot subscribe to the sweeping advice “Don’t feed the trolls” or, even crueller, “Ignore them and it will go away.”
All that does is leave their victims hanging, high and dry and alone in the roaring silence that is always interpreted as approval and alliance.
After years of only hearing about the Culture novels, I started reading Consider, Phlebas last night. Got pulled right in. Perhaps I flounced onto it?
@Jim
you lucky fecker.
Don’t overlook the Iain-Banks-without-the-M books either
Jim: Wow, I didn’t know you hadn’t read those. I hope you enjoy.
The Book Smugglers talked up Archivist Wasp, so I read through the prologue. Upon finishing the prologue I immediately purchased the book and finished it within the day. Very highly recommended.
Without wanting to discuss the plot much, Wasp holds a religious office that requires her to trap, study, and destroy ghosts. It also requires her to fight to the death in order to maintain her station. And, no, she doesn’t get to quit; the only way out is at the end of the blade. Which…she’s just a little bit tired of, when the novel starts. And so she quickly antagonizes the already-hostile priest, which leads to, well, a journey through the underworld. By turns grim (the way seemingly-careless sentences twist the knife is mean, but very well done), exhilarating, and, yes, touching.
Pat Cadigan on July 9, 2015 at 1:21 am said:
No, if you block someone on twitter you can’t see their tweets, even ones directly at you. If they block you, you can still see them unless you also block them. There’s also some weird condition under which someone you have blocked can retweet something you say and that is visible to you because twitter is basically designed by a crack team of passive agressive chimpanzees.
Your issue with their policy of picking the best hominid for the job sounds suspiciously speciesist.
These days I try (but don’t always succeed) to phrase any social justice oriented direct criticism mildly. I don’t want to burn any heretics, I don’t want to consider someone less than human. There are, of course, exceptions: I’m rarely mild when talking about people like BS or VD. (I appreciate that acronyming their chosen pseuds brings such pleasing results. Sadly none of Andy Blake’s pseuds work that way!)
Re: Twitter
Perhaps BS means mute when she says block – blocking notifies the blockee but muting doesn’t. Muting also allows you to go to their feed and check tweets – which would make it easy for to collect “incriminating” screenshots of “harassment”.
@Liz Williams and Pat Cadigan
I’m glad you’re both doing okay.
@Meredith
I now always look at LC and assume it is verbalized as the disgusted sound Cassandra makes in the latest Dragon Age Inquisition.
@Jim: You’ve been Phlebased!
@AMaxL: Archivist Wasp does sound good.
@Liz & Pat – Live well. It’s the best revenge.
@Jim Henley,
I wish you a wonderful experience of reading Iain M. Banks for the first time. I am a little envious. The non-M books ( non-SF) are also excellent, my favourite of which is Crow Road. It has my favourite opening line: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Slight topic drift: What is your favourite opening line to a novel?
Fred Davis: thank you for your explanation of how blocking works on Twitter. It clears up why I didn’t understand––I’ve never blocked anybody. And strangely, Twitter doesn’t tell you when someone’s blocked you. Is it because they’re afraid your feelings will be hurt? Or is it part of the passive-aggressive package?
Given the above, blocking someone on Twitter seems an awful lot like putting your hands over your eyes and announcing, “You can’t see me!”
Anyway, I’ve decided to do the polite thing and pretend the tweets in question are invisible. It feels appropriate.
@Pat Cadigan:
Ma’am, you are a class act.
Meredith, thank you! My main concern at the moment is a distinct lack of bookcases.
I’ve started The Goblin Emperor. Thus far it is much, much better than The Dark Between the Stars. Like, light years better.
> “Slight topic drift: What is your favourite opening line to a novel?”
I don’t know as I have a favorite. There are certainly a lot of well-known ones I think are brilliant (Gravity’s Rainbow, Pride & Prejudice, 1984, Riddley Walker, Fahrenheit 451, etc., etc., etc.) So instead of listing a favorite, I’ll mention a less well-known one I read this year that I thought was really striking:
“On the day I killed my husband, the scent of lilacs startled me awake.”
Unfortunately, the rest of the book (The Hawley Book of the Dead, by Chrysler Szarlan) was only OK, but damn. Now that’s an opening line.
@Liz Williams
An eternal shortage of bookshelves is a common problem to most of us, I think!
@Aaron
No shit. 😉
Favorite opening line? Clive Barker. Weaveworld:
That’s chutzpah, that is. 🙂
Northanger Abbey doesn’t have a first line as good as Pride & Prejudice but the first page as a whole is pretty great.
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Or possibly:
“Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold.”
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
@Bruce Baugh,
I might have to revisit Weaveworld which I think I read when I was too young to properly appreciate.
For SF, it’s hard to beat “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” from “Neuromancer”. Although I am amused by how technology has changed its meaning from snow/static to the dead-channel blue of modern televisions.
https://youtu.be/I3ZAMjpjYfQ
There’s a Charles Stross nod to that in the opening sentence of “The Family Trade”, “The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain.”
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Hard to top that.
Favorite first line: There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
I remain appalled by BS and the fact that she still has supporters.
BS update: Some retweeting angry tweets aimed at Sarah Jeong (who wrote a short blogpost about the definition of doxing – now thoroughly misrepresented as requiring Social Security Number *sigh*), some tweets about Athena Andreadis (nasty stuff).
So yep. Working on down the list. Sigh.
@Lis Carey
Me too.
Best opening lines:
“Tom!”
No answer.
“Tom!”
No answer.
Favorite opening lines:
Favorite opening lines:
Cheating wildly, I’m very fond of the opening chapters/prologues of Game of Thrones and Lives of Tao.
From Steel Beach by John Varley
‘In five years, the penis will be obsolete’ said the salesman.
Favorite opening line to a novel is probably:
“The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was passed out drunk in the back seat of a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith on the terrace of The Dancers.” — Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye.
Runners-up: “In my younger and more vulnerable days etc.” –Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and Hemingway’s opener to The Sun Also Rises.:
“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”
For SF novels, I have to give it to Algis Budrys:
“An’ dark. An’ nowhere starlights.” — Rogue Moon.
But for short fiction, I love the first sentence of Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” beyond all reason:
“The coupe with the fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered over the curb like the nose of a nightmare.”
NB: I’m quite attracted to the idea of Iain Banks’ mimetic novels, though I do have an intention of doing the “read more women and POC” thing, so there’s a question of scheduling.
This challenge/request/topic has proved to me that I have no memory for really good first lines nor do they play a large part in my fondness for a book, she says, sadly, after ransacking her bookshelves and coming up with nothing but a fondness for first chapters that launch you into the action (or at least an action).
I’m enjoying everyone else’s picks, though!
Amen to that!
Good on both of you for standing tall and showing real grace under pressure. 🙂
@Meredith
Yeah, this is much harder than it seems at first…
@XS
Yep. The Goblin Emperor for example, great first chapter, right? Starts at exactly the right point in the story, pulls you in, gets you up to speed. The first line?
Which is. Not bad, it does its job very well, but it doesn’t exactly bring the wow factor, you know?
Opening lines:
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
If we’re including short stories:
“Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 kilometers per hour on those turns.”
It isn’t an obvious one. Once you’ve read the whole thing, it sneaks up on you. Or at least, it did for me.
“You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway.”
This is from Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory, a book that immediately went to the top of my nomination list for next year.
Not quite the first line:
“James Bolivar diGriz I arrest you on the charge—”
I was waiting for the word charge, I thought it made a nice touch that way.
mk41: I’ve got a piece of the original artwork from Narbonic which I selected specifically because it includes that quote.
“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
I know, I know. But it’s so damn classic! “The Gunslinger” by King. It just… works.
Kafka again, this time The Trial:
Cordwainer Smith, Nostrilia:
And of course Stephen King, “The Mist”:
@Bruce Baugh
If I remember correctly, Stephen King said he stole that opening line from Douglas Fairbairn’s Shoot.
Redheadedfemme: Yes. I wasn’t finding where he’d written that down or what the source was, though I do love his description of it as “the mantra of all story”.
@Gabriel F
I hope someone’s used that as a jumping off point for a Justified fic. Its damn near perfect.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
The first sentence is good. The second makes it better. The following first two-and-a-half pages take it to legend.
@Pat Cadigan:
1. HOLY FRAKKING FRAK PAT CADIGAN IS POSTING ON FILE770!!!
2. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, there’s a tool called HootSuite (https://hootsuite.com/) which you can use to *mute* any unpleasant posters, which has the slight advantage of never actually notifying the person they’ve been muted, so they continue to post into the void. Barring that, they could at least have the decency to make their insults of you work-specific. Such as:
“Hey, Pat Cadigan! Go stand on a bridge! ‘Cause then you’ll be a LUNATIC on a bridge!”
or
“Whattaya gonna do, Pat Cadigan, go out for sushi?!”
well hopefully those made you laugh. Wishing you all the best.
Totally off topic, but I just watched this video short, and it made me smile, and laugh, and creeped me out, all at the same time: The One-Minute Time Machine
Enjoy
@Lis
Ooo thanks! That was neat, I liked how they turned that on its head. I sort of want to see/read the continuing adventures of!
Do we even have an off-topic? I haven’t found one yet. (If one of the other threads doesn’t cool off I think I’ll ask everyone what their favourite pasta dish is. Not known for my subtlety, me.)