(1) BRADBURY CENTENNIAL. Here are a few more of the many entries about Ray Bradbury today.
- John Scalzi: “On the Occasion of Ray Bradbury’s 100th Birthday: ‘Meeting the Wizard’” at Whatever.
…The Martian Chronicles is not a child’s book, but it is an excellent book to give to a child—or to give to the right child, which I flatter myself that I was—because it is a book that is full of awakening. Which means, simply, that when you read it, you can feel parts of your brain clicking on, becoming sensitized to the fact that something is happening here, in this book, with these words, even if you can’t actually communicate to anyone outside of your own head just what that something is. I certainly couldn’t have, in the sixth grade—I simply didn’t have the words. As I recall, I didn’t much try: I just sat there staring down at the final line of the book, with the Martians staring back at me, simply trying to process what I had just read.
- Phil Nichols presents Bradbury 100 – episode 5 at BradburyMedia.
The fifth episode of my podcast Bradbury 100 drops today. The theme of the episode is biographies, as my interview guest is Jonathan R. Eller, author of three biographical volumes on Ray: Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo.
Jon is also the Director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and has done more than anyone to explore Bradbury’s thinking and authorship.
… Bradbury’s poetic, metaphor-filled prose was not easy to adapt to the screen, which is perhaps why there have been far fewer screen versions of his work than that of, say, Stephen King. But there were still a number of significant adaptations of Bradbury’s work for both the small and big screen, including some that he was directly involved in as a screenwriter….
01 – It Came from Outer Space (1953)
With the exception of a handful of short stories adapted for various early 1950s anthology TV shows, this was the first relatively major film based on Bradbury’s work and still remains one of the finest. Oddly, it wasn’t adapted from a published story but an original screen treatment he developed for director Jack Arnold (Creature from the Black Lagoon).
In the film (the first sci-fi movie to use a 3D filming process), an alien ship crashes on Earth and its crew makes copies of the local townspeople to gather what they need to effect repairs. The aliens are not hostile, but merely want to fix their ship and leave peacefully. This was an unusual idea for the time — the extraterrestrials in most films from the era were decidedly dangerous — and sets It Came from Outer Space apart as a thoughtful yet still suspenseful piece.
(2) FROM WAUKEGAN. When she was seven years old, Colleen Abel tells LitHub readers, she took something her grandmother said literally: “Growing Up With Ray Bradbury’s Ghost in Waukegan, Illinois”.
…Bradbury, intoning gravely over shots of the artefacts: People ask, Where do you get your ideas? Well, right here. As the camera pans, Bradbury says, Somewhere in this room is an African veldt. Beyond that, the small Illinois town where I grew up. He sits at a typewriter and the keys clatter. One night, watching these credits, my grandmother said to me, “You know, he’s from here.” She meant, of course, from Waukegan, “that small Illinois town” where he grew up and where we sat now in her neighborhood of tiny homes called The Gardens. But I, at age seven, thought she meant here, here in the house we sat in, that he had grown up in the house, perhaps even still lived in the basement which resembled, in its murk and books and clutter, the same office Bradbury sat down to write in during the opening credits of his tv show.
It wouldn’t be a bad premise for a Bradbury story: a young girl, bookish and morbid, discovers an author living in her grandmother’s musty basement. And in a way, he was there. My father’s old room was part of that basement, still set up the way it had been when he lived there, commuting to college and working part-time at a bookstore. One room was floor to ceiling bookshelves and by the time I was in junior high school, I would go down there regularly and pick something out to read. Most of the books were yellowed and falling apart, their covers marked with their original prices: fifteen cents. Among these were a few volumes of Bradbury’s short stories. I would pick one, often The Illustrated Man, and take it back upstairs to the velour armchair and settle in.
(3) “IN AN ATOMIC NUTSHELL.” First Fandom Experience dramatizes young Ray’s fanzine article: “In 1940, Ray Bradbury Asked, ‘Are You Ad Conditioned?’”
The latest video from First Fandom Experience brings to life a three-page screed by a young Ray Bradbury addressing the issue of the incongruous and annoying ads in pulp magazines.
The piece appeared in the Spring 1940 issue of Sweetness and Light, an edgy, satirical fanzine from a faction of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. A full reading of the piece is presented along with historical context and a selection of the offending advertisements. Enjoy!
(4) PIXEL BUDS. Plainly, it’s our duty here to signal boost the review of a product by this name: “Thoughts on Pixel Buds 2: The Buddening” by John Scalzi at Whatever.
1. To begin, they look pretty cool. Like the first generation, they come in their own little charging case, and when they’re nestled in there and the top is flipped open (which is a solidly satisfying tactile experience, by the way), it looks for all the world like a cute little robot with bug eyes (at least in the orange variant).
(5) WEREWOLF. THERE COURTHOUSE. “George R.R. Martin files lawsuit over film rights to a werewolf novella”: the LA Times has the news.
“Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin has filed a lawsuit over the film rights to his werewolf novella “The Skin Trade.”
According to the complaint, filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, Mike The Pike Productions was granted an option to the film rights of Martin’s novella in 2009. The company subsequently assigned the option to Blackstone Manor, LLC., the named defendants.
Described as a “werewolf noir,” “The Skin Trade” was originally published in 1988 as part of “Night Visions 5,” a horror anthology that also included stories by Stephen King and Dan Simmons. The story follows Randi Wade, a private investigator who is looking into a series of brutal killings in her small town, which eventually leads to her learning about werewolves and other demons. The story won a World Fantasy Award in 1989.
According to the complaint, Blackstone exercised the option on Sept. 2, 2014, and, per the 2009 agreement, it had five years to start principal photography before the rights reverted to Martin.
The complaint alleges that Blackstone “hastily assembl[ed] a barebones cast and crew” a day before the 2019 deadline “to shoot a handful of scenes” for no other reason than to maintain the appearance that it was making the progress necessary to retain the rights. Martin says the “token” production was “insufficient,” comparing the move to a contractor hurriedly building a gazebo in lieu of the agreed-upon skyscraper when faced with a deadline…
(6) WW84. DC dropped a new trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 at the DC Fandome event.
Fast forward to the 1980s as Wonder Woman’s next big screen adventure finds her facing two all-new foes: Max Lord and The Cheetah. With director Patty Jenkins back at the helm and Gal Gadot returning in the title role, “Wonder Woman 1984” is Warner Bros. Pictures’ follow up to the DC Super Hero’s first outing, 2017’s record-breaking “Wonder Woman,” which took in $822 million at the worldwide box office. The film also stars Chris Pine as Steve Trevor, Kristen Wiig as The Cheetah, Pedro Pascal as Max Lord, Robin Wright as Antiope, and Connie Nielsen as Hippolyta.
(7) LEFT IN THE SILO. Nicholas Whyte, CoNZealand’s Deputy Hugo Administrator, in “The 1945 Retros that weren’t”, runs the numbers to show why various categories did not make the final ballot.
We didn’t publish the full stats for the 1945 Retro Hugo categories that weren’t put to the final ballot this year, mainly because voting ended only seven days before the Retro ceremony and we had to prioritise fairly ruthlessly.
But after internal discussion, we are publishing them here….
(8) THE SLUSHPILE’S MY DESTINATION. DreamForge Magazine returns with further explanations: “Why We Didn’t Buy Your Story, Part 2”.
What are the numbers again? This time we received over 600 works from hopeful contributors. At a guess, over 2 million words of fiction.
The majority of those writers really tried to send us something they thought we could use. For instance, we’re not a horror magazine. People knew that and sent very little horror. We didn’t get much in the way of apocalyptic dystopia either. Sex and swearing were at a minimum, yet people also recognized we’re not a children’s magazine nor specifically aimed at the young adult market.
By and large, the stories contained hopeful themes, big ideas and presented worlds filled with diversity, empathy, heroism, and hope.
I don’t have the exact numbers, but we read a lot of good stories. Let’s say 25% were “good to excellent.” It could be more. Conservatively, that would be over half a million words.
At $0.06/word, that’s over $30,000 (if we were able to buy all those good stories). While we do a good job of making DreamForge look big-time, that’s more than our annual budget for everything related to the magazine. And if we could somehow invest in all those stories, they would fill our pages for the next 3-4 years.
… Second, creating an issue of a magazine is not just about selecting great stories. It’s about creating a reading experience. Think of it as a variety show. If all the stories are literary, philosophical, message pieces with troubled characters navigating complex plots, our readers aren’t going to make it through the whole issue.
Some stories are challenging, and they require a clear head and concentration before delivering a payoff in emotion or thoughtful meaning. And honestly, I don’t want to read those at 11:30 pm after a long day when I open a magazine for a few minutes of relaxation. I check the Table of Contents for a short story that looks light and easy to get through…
(9) ANGUS BUCHANAN OBITUARY. Industrial archaeologist and biographer Angus Buchanan died June 17. He is profiled in The Guardian. There’s a kind of steampunk sensibility to the topic.
Engineers shape economies, landscapes and how people work and live in them. Yet in the past their achievements were little celebrated. Angus Buchanan, who has died aged 90, did much to increase awareness of their endeavours and breakthroughs.
The appearance of his book Industrial Archaeology in Britain as a Pelican Original in 1972 marked a significant step forward for an emerging discipline. It supplied the crucial link between the development of industrial archaeology at regional and national levels in Britain, leading to the conservation, restoration and reuse of buildings, sites and engineering that might otherwise have been lost.
…The culmination of Buchanan’s research came with Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (2002). In building the Great Western Railway and important bridges, tunnels and dockyards, the great Victorian engineer changed the face of the British landscape. Innovations at sea included the SS Great Britain, the first screw-driven iron transatlantic steamship, and his designs revolutionised modern engineering.
The biography provided the first fully documented and objective account, placing Brunel’s significance in a historical context. The desire to avoid concentrating on familiar incidents and the legends surrounding them led Buchanan to a thematic approach rather than a chronology, covering Brunel’s overseas projects and professional practices, and the politics and society within which he functioned, as well as familiar subjects, among them his other major ship, the SS Great Eastern.
The [Bristol Industrial Archeology Society] BIAS had a major influence on the preservation of Bristol’s city docks, thwarting traffic planners who wished to build a major road complex across them. In 1970 the Great Britain was returned from the Falklands to the dry dock where it had been built in 1843, and it is now a popular tourist attraction; nearby is another of Brunel’s masterpieces, the Clifton suspension bridge.
(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- August 22, 1957 — X Minus One’s “Drop Dead” first aired. Based off of Clifford D. Simak‘s story of that name which was first published in Galaxy Science Fiction in July of 1956, it’s a superb tale about a planet with a very obliging inhabitant called The Critter and how it serves the astronauts who land there. The radio script was by Ernest Kinoy with the cast being Lawson Zerbe, Ralph Camargo and Joseph Bell. You can listen to it here.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born August 22, 1880 – George Herriman. Wrote the immortal and so far unique comic strip Krazy Kat; also illustrated Don Marquis’ poetical tales of Archy and Mehitabel a cockroach and another cat. Krazy sometimes seems male, sometimes female, which hardly matters; is endlessly the target of bricks thrown by Ignatz Mouse, taking them as a sign of affection; is the subject of protection by Officer Pupp, to whom they are merely illegal. Other characters, equally unlikely, are also animals (including birds), whom anthropomorphic is equally inadequate for. Nor does dialectal justly describe the language, nor surreal the landscape. Here is the theme. Here is a variation. Here is an elaboration. (Died 1944) [JH]
- Born August 22, 1919 — Douglas W F Mayer. A British fan who was editor for three issues of Amateur Science Stories published by the Science Fiction Association of Leeds, England. He was thereby the publisher of Arthur C. Clarke’s very first short story, “Travel by Wire”, which appeared in the second issue in December 1937. He would later edit the Tomorrow fanzine which would be nominated for the 1939 Best Fanzine Retro Hugo. (Died 1976.) (CE)
- Born August 22, 1920 — Ray Bradbury. So what’s your favorite work by him? I have three. Something Wicked This Way Comes is the one I reread quite a bit with The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles being my other go to regularly works by him. (Died 2012.) (CE)
- Born August 22, 1925 — Honor Blackman. Best known for the roles of Cathy Gale in The Avengers, Bond girl Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Hera in Jason and the Argonauts. She was also Professor Lasky in “Terror of the Vervoids” in the Sixth Doctor’s “The Trial of a Time Lord”. Genre adjacent, she was in the film of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary as Rita Vandemeyer. (Died 2020.) (CE)
- Born August 22, 1945 — David Chase, 75. He’s here today mainly because he wrote nine episodes including the “Kolchak: Demon and the Mummy” telefilm of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He also wrote the screenplay for The Grave of The Vampire, and one for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Enough Rope fur Two”, which he also directed. (CE)
- Born August 22, 1946 – Rafi Zabor, 74. Seldom does work from outside our field wholly engage with our spirit. But The Bear Comes Home is superb. Naturally we ignore it. It does have explicit sexual activity, not gratuitous. In a year when Earthquake Weather could not reach the ballot, of course The Bear could not muster even 5% of the nominations. Don’t let that stop you now. [JH]
- Born August 22, 1948 – Susan Wood. Her we do recognize. Met Mike Glicksohn at Boskone 4, 1969; Energumen together to 1973, Hugo as Best Fanzine its last year; both Fan Guests of Honour at Aussiecon (in retrospect Aussiecon One) the 33rd Worldcon though marriage gone. Three Hugos for SW as Best Fanwriter; Best of SW (J. Kaufman ed.) 1982. Taught at U. British Columbia; Vancouver editor, Pac. NW Rev. Books. Atheling Award, Aurora Award for Lifetime Achievement, Canadian SF Hall of Fame. One Ditmar. (Died 1980) [JH]
- Born August 22, 1952 – Chuck Rothman, 68. Two novels (Atlanta Nights with many co-authors was –), fifty shorter stories. Interviewed in Flash Fiction Online Nov 15. Movie-TV-music blog Great but Forgotten. Einstein and CR’s grandfather. [JH]
- Born August 22, 1954 – Gavin Claypool, 66. Los Angeles area actifan. LASFS (L.A. Science Fantasy Society) Librarian. Won LASFS Evans-Freehafer service award twice; only five people have ever done so. Reliably helpful to others e.g. at SF cons. [JH]
- Born August 22, 1955 — Will Shetterly, 65. Of his novels, I recommend his two Borderland novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which were both nominees for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature, and his sort of biographical Dogland. Married to Emma Bull, they did a trailer for her War for The Oaks novel which is worth seeing as you’ll spot Minnesota fans in it. And Emma as the Elf Queen is definitely something to behold! (CE)
- Born August 22, 1963 — Tori Amos, 57. One of Gaiman’s favorite musicians, so it’s appropriate that she penned two essays, the afterword to “Death” in Sandman: Book of Dreams, and the Introduction to “Death” in The High Cost of Living. Although created before they ever met, Delirium from The Sandman series is based on her. (CE)
- Born August 22, 1964 – Diane Setterfield, Ph.D., 56. Three novels. The Thirteenth Tale sold three million copies (NY Times Best Seller), televised on BBC2. “A reader first, a writer second…. The practice of weekly translation from my undergraduate years [her Ph.D., from U. Bristol, was on André Gide] has become an everyday working tool for me: when a sentence doesn’t run the way I want it to, I habitually translate it into French and retranslate it back into English. It’s like switching a light on in a dim room: suddenly I can see what’s not working and why.” [JH]
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Speed Bump has a moment of deja mom.
(13) SUICIDE SQUAD ROLL CALL. Adam B. Vary, in the Variety story “‘The Suicide Squad’ First Look, Full Cast Revealed by Director James Gunn at DC FanDome” says that director James Gunn revealed at DC Fandome that the cast of The Suicide Squad, coming out in April 2021, includes Margot Robbie and Viola Davis from the 2016 film Suicide Squad but also Nathan Fillion, John Cena, and Peter Capaldi as “The Thinker,” a DC villain from the 1940s. Principal photography was completed before the pandemic hit and the film is completed and ready to go.
… Among the new cast, Gunn said that he reached deep into the DC Comics canon to find a motley crew of villains to populate the movie, and it appears he brought some invention of his own to the project as well.
(14) A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN. “DC FanDome: Snyder Cut of Justice League to be four hours” at Lyles Movie Files.
…A big question was how the Snyder Cut would get released in HBO MAX. Snyder revealed it will be split into four one-hour segments.
Snyder then teased an entire full uninterrupted version as well with maybe the possibility of a solo purchase version.
(15) SOME CELESTIAL OBJECTS WILL BE RENAMED. “NASA to Reexamine Nicknames for Cosmic Objects”. The full statement is at the link.
Distant cosmic objects such as planets, galaxies, and nebulae are sometimes referred to by the scientific community with unofficial nicknames. As the scientific community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful. NASA is examining its use of unofficial terminology for cosmic objects as part of its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
As an initial step, NASA will no longer refer to planetary nebula NGC 2392, the glowing remains of a Sun-like star that is blowing off its outer layers at the end of its life, as the “Eskimo Nebula.” “Eskimo” is widely viewed as a colonial term with a racist history, imposed on the indigenous people of Arctic regions. Most official documents have moved away from its use. NASA will also no longer use the term “Siamese Twins Galaxy” to refer to NGC 4567 and NGC 4568, a pair of spiral galaxies found in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Moving forward, NASA will use only the official, International Astronomical Union designations in cases where nicknames are inappropriate.
…Nicknames are often more approachable and public-friendly than official names for cosmic objects, such as Barnard 33, whose nickname “the Horsehead Nebula” invokes its appearance. But often seemingly innocuous nicknames can be harmful and detract from the science.
The Agency will be working with diversity, inclusion, and equity experts in the astronomical and physical sciences to provide guidance and recommendations for other nicknames and terms for review….
(16) HONEST GAME TRAILERS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Fandom Games asks in this Honest Game Trailer, “Destroy All Humans”, since alien invasion is “the only box left on the 2020 bingo card” why not enjoy this 2005 game where you’re an alien mowing down humans and giving bad Jack Nicholson impressions?
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
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(11) I enjoyed Bradbury’s non-genre Death is a Lonely Business
Clickity
The Wonder Woman 1984 trailer was the only one of today’s new trailers that actually made me want to watch the film. Everything else looked like typical DC grimness, not to mention that the trailers all share the irritating habit of DC movies to use really great songs to bolster their lacklustre films.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” (for Suicide Squad 1) or “Hallelujah” (for the Snyder cut Justice League) are so powerful they can make pretty much any old footage look good. But if you have to use them for your trailer, you should earn it and Suicide Squad didn’t and I’m pretty sure that Snyder’s Justice League (now twice as long with half the laughs) won’t earn it either.
(11) Honor Blackman didn’t spell her name with a “u” despite being British, assuming the Guardian obituary had it correct: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/06/honor-blackman-obituary.
(11) In addition to being a genius, George Herriman was a complicated guy. His family was from New Orleans, and he was of black Creole descent. They moved to Los Angeles when he was ten, and he passed for white the rest of his life. His short-lived strip “Musical Mose” starred a black musician, but the strip was full of racial stereotypes. Herriman himself performed once in blackface in a minstrel act at a benefit show for other newspapermen.
(missed the edit window) Thus, Krazy Kat’s line of 11/24/1919 takes on new meaning: “Oy, it’s awful to be lidding a dubbil life — like wot I am,”
Yes, definitely no “u” in Honor Blackman’s name.
@Andrew (not Werdna)
Hard Case Crime recently reprinted a collection of Ray Bradbury’s crime fiction.
I didn’t entirely understand what was happening in the Wonder Woman 1984 trailer, but I had fun watching it, and it convinced me I’ll enjoy figuring out what’s going on via watching the movie, which is all I really ask from a trailer.
Happy birthday Tori Amos! Speaking of the Neil Gaiman connection, Tori fans will have noticed that she references Neil or one of his creations more or less once an album, sometimes explicitly and at length as in “Carbon” (“get me Neil on the line, no I can’t hold / have him read / Snow Glass Apples where nothing is what it seems”), sometimes more obliquely as in “The Beekeeper” (“‘do you know who I am’ / she said ‘I’m the one who taps you on the shoulder / when it’s your time'”). I’m pretty sure “Where are the velvets when you’re coming down” in “Hotel” is a Neverwhere reference.
But I think her SF songwriting credentials stand on their own, slipstreaming in via the weird fiction and magic realism subgenres at the very least.
1) From Scalzi, first comment:
Propositions:
1)The maximal SF canon is made up of all those works of SF which do that for someone who reads SF.
2)There is no member of a minimal SF canon which is incapable of doing that.
@Cora Buhlert: Thanks!
@John A Arkansawyer, but how do you quantize an emotional response? Let’s call the required attribute “sensawonder”.
For example, my husband, who has many other excellent qualities, bounced HARD off Bradbury. (Before you say “of its time,” that was back in the 1970s, when it WAS its time, and he’s never read anything by Bradbury since.) He simply doesn’t enjoy that style of poetic metaphorical language. I submit to you that there is no way to make your “minimum” list, because what evokes sensawonder for one person will do nothing for another. So who is the arbiter whose sensawonder counts, and who is not? (I suspect John Norman’s “Gor” novels would be on SOMEBODY’s canon list, although emphatically not mine…)
@Cassy B.: I agree with everything you’ve written. That’s why I edited what I said from the minimal canon to a minimal canon. The unfortunately fictional Stakeholders of Gor would, sadly, be in the maximal canon as I’ve defined it. It’s not in any minimal canon I’d care to assemble.
I wouldn’t quantize it. I’d just note its absence or presence.
That’s theory. In practice, for someone to feel that probably means the emotion has passed some barrier. And in practice, that’s all you can measure (if that). Same diff.
The big idea is:
I don’t think a work can be canonical SF if it hasn’t, can’t, and won’t produce sensawonder in some reader.
11) I love both The Illustrated Man and The October Country.
@Cassy B
Yeah, I’ve read some Bradbury, and…just not my thing. My sensawunda isn’t tunes to that wavelength, I guess.
Where can we find this War for the Oaks trailer?
John A Arkansawyer says I don’t think a work can be canonical SF if it hasn’t, can’t, and won’t produce sensawonder in some reader.
So canon is like candy. Bradbury loved Clark Bars so they formed his canonical candy but my canonical such candy is Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups. My canonical genre is almost all less than forty years old such as Emma Bull’s Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. So if I’ve not read-read several times for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the story over again, it’s not my canon.
When I first saw JUSTICE LEAGUE, I fell asleep for much of it. I then stayed awake for a second viewing and decided my snores were justified. It’s not a very good movie. The villain is very much like Thanos but without the wit and intelligence Kevin Feige brings to MCU films. So the idea of four hours of Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE is right up there with, “and second prize is TWO weeks in (fill in city you make fun of).
Also: did ANYONE other than Zack Snyder want an evil Superman?
Tenner says Where can we find this War for the Oaks trailer?
OGH didn’t include a link because his system told him clicking on a link to it initiated a download of the .mov fIle that Will sent me twenty or so years ago. I couldn’t replicate that problem using either a MacBook or an iPad. If you want to see it, you can find it here.
Cassy B. Asks hopefully: So who is the arbiter whose sensawonder counts, and who is not? (I suspect John Norman’s “Gor” novels would be on SOMEBODY’s canon list, although emphatically not mine…)
The only person that counts is the individual reader. It’s really dumb that Puppies believe that the Hugos are decided by a small canal whose opinions sway the rest of us. (Ha!) Puppies believe in a canon that way too — that it has a physical reality that everyone should acknowledge. And I expect that more than a few of them think most genre fiction since, oh, the Fifties isn’t really legit unless they wrote it.
@Martin Wooster: “Also: did ANYONE other than Zack Snyder want an evil Superman?”
Whichever executives signed off on it?
@Cat Eldridge: “If I’ve not read-read several times for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the story over again, it’s not my canon.”
I didn’t think of the pleasure re-read as a particular sign of sensawonder.* That’s a great thought! That’s part of how I feel about it for myself.
*I know it also signifies other things.
I’m bouncing hard off thoughts like “my canon” and “somebody’s canon”. This is not at all what people like Harold Bloom mean when they write about a “canon” (and I note that Scalzi isn’t using “canon” to talk about his own personal list of influential works; but he does make reference to the idea that there may or may not be overlap between the/a SF canon, and his own list of influential works). “Canon” and “general consensus” are tightly wrapped up with each other; no matter how much an individual reader or writer may like John Norman, his works are not canonical — there’s no general consensus that they are important or influential to the genre.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Lately I’ve been finding in the spam or trash folders what look to be (and in one case were confirmed to be) comments meant to be posted. And I mean ones I didn’t put there myself. The antispam program — Askimet — has been doing a good job up til now. This has involved maybe three or four comments, but some of them are pretty good. I’m trying to keep an eye on this situation.
@bill: I’m accepting that “general consensus” is less possible as time passes and everything gets bigger and more complex. The idea of a maximal canon is to give outer bounds to what might be in a classical canon. The idea of a minimal canon is to shrink “general consensus” to “consensus of one”.
If there’s a classical canon of SF–which I’m not convinced of–it’s between the two. (It’s not impossible there’s someone whose canon is THE canon, but it’s pretty unlikely.) I think it’s closely approximated by the union of a small number of minimal canons, and there the analogy stops being useful.
@Cassy B.: “So who is the arbiter whose sensawonder counts, and who is not?”
Here’s a worse question: Who decides what sensawonder counts? I felt something very much like sensawonder after reading The Godfather, which ain’t SF.
That’s right, everyone knows it’s actually an inlet that makes all the decisions.
@bill–
I think, on the contrary, there’s plausibly a consensus that John Norman’s works are not important or influential for the genre.
That said:
1. Harold Bloom was a bit of a self-important ass, attempting to enshrine an Old White Guys definition of culture permanently, before it was too late. Not that there’s not a lot of quality in his canon, but it’s still his canon, and leaves out a lot that’s important.
2. In days of yore, it was possible for any sf fan to read all that was published in the genre, and it was possible for a real consensus to develop. Now, much less so. And in even older days of yore, pretty much all educated people could read everything, and it was possible to have a consensus on the literature in whatever your language was. The first of those things was possible in my lifetime, while the second of those hasn’t been possible for, being generous, about three centuries. Longer, for the less generous.
Bloom’s canon was a really interesting basis for discussion, when it came out–more than a quarter of a century ago.
@John A Arkansawyer — but if a maximal canon is so large that it includes Gor, then “canon” is just rhetoric at that point. And if “minimal canon” is shrunk down to where it just includes the works that a single individual, then that isn’t “canon” either — “consensus of one” is an oxymoron.
I agree that “canon” has fuzzy boundaries, and that reasonable people can argue over whether a particular work is or isn’t canonical, or over how big the canon is. But I think it is beyond argument that if “canon” means anything at all, works like Starship Troopers and “Martian Odyssey” and “Nightfall” and others are canonical.
I think some people reject the idea of a canon because canons don’t typically include recent works that are relevant to them. But the fact that recent works may not show up in the canon is because it takes time for the consensus to form around them, not because the works themselves aren’t important.
@Lis –
I’m not arguing for Bloom as an accurate lister of what is in the canon; just referring to him and his definition of what “canon” means. “Bloom” is almost shorthand for “canon”, or at least the type of canon I’m talking about.
Yes, SF is bigger than readers in general can keep up with. But Western Literature is vastly bigger, yet “Hamlet” is still canon. The size of a literature doesn’t mean that canon cannot exist.
“Bloom’s canon was a really interesting basis for discussion” — “basis for discussion” is the best (almost only?) reason to refer to a canon.
James Moar says That’s right, everyone knows it’s actually an inlet that makes all the decisions.
Nor enough sleep last night as the knee was deciedly acting out and my proofreading of my own material is hence bad today.
Cabal, not canal.
@John/@bill:
Hmm. If we could poll everyone in the world, and collect information about what they had read, we’d find a lot of overlap – many people who read “Middlegame” also read “Ten Thousand Doors of January,” etc. With that data, we could find a set of works that 90% of all SF readers had read, a set that 50% had read, etc. The set of works that 50% might be considered a “canon,” (but a 90% or 30% selection could also work). Decades ago, the overlap would be more clustered – there would be a lot of people who had read “Nightfall” and “Roads Must Roll” and “Slan” and very few people who had read any SF at all who hadn’t read a lot what’s in the SF Hall of Fame. Now, there’s probably more dispersion. I’ve never read B. V. Larsen but I know people who have read many of his works, and probably haven’t read “Space Opera” or “Aurora.” A 50% canon would cover a lot of works, and the natural dropoff point might be at 10% level. This kind of approach (looking at the overlap in reading habits) naturally incorporates a moving canon – if only 1% of SF readers have read Tumithak of the Corridors that work is no longer in the canon, even if Asimov felt it was foundational (heh!) for him.
This approach doesn’t deal with other aspects of being in a canon – like being influential even if not read much.
I wish I could find, either physically or online, the book that made me think about canons a different way. It was a small format trade paperback–I’m thinking Vintage or Doubleday–titled something like “An Alternative Canon of English Poetry”. It was a new slice through the old stuff–more of this author, less of that one, different choices, some people I’d never heard of–and it was wonderful. Reading through it was no less rewarding than reading a similar chunk of a canon-adjacent anthology. The stuff that wasn’t in it certainly wasn’t lessened by the new stuff I read–though I think it’s where I got a particular Dickinson poem stuck in my brain–if anything, it was enriched.
One canon, two canon, red canon, blue canon.
(11) I’m a fan of Death is a Lonely Business also
(14) True artistry is taking a film in a direction that other artists would not and for that we must applaud Znyder. Few directors could with so much effort intentionally make a dull film duller but here, for the sake of art, we may get the apotheosis of dull. A mediocre we’ve already seen but now longer and more sanctimonious.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, this question occurred to me a few minutes ago —
If hedgehogs are relatively common in the UK and western Europe, then why do we never see people hunting or roasting or eating hedgehogs in the many myriads of UK-set fantasy books? We frequently see various road-trip stories incorporating hunting or snaring rabbits, but never hedgehogs. Why?
I can understand why an American author might not think of it, but there are plenty of British fantasists out there. Hmph.
Mysteries of the universe!
Quite! You’re killing me… 🙂
Andrew (not Werdna) says: This approach doesn’t deal with other aspects of being in a canon – like being influential even if not read much.
Well there’s the small matter of defining just who a generalised genre fan is. Hugo voters obviously are but are readers who only read a narrow slice of the genre to be classified as true fans? My problem with a canon is that it pre-supposes that the genre is unified enough that a canon can exist.
@Cat
That reminds me – this morning I read a Twitter thread about Cat Valente’s Minecraft novel. The thread-owner recommends it as being thoroughly engaging, with a twist they didn’t see coming.
https://twitter.com/ClarkeDoty/status/1296889786809094144
I’m pretty sure that I have read a book whiter there was at least talk of cooking and eating a hedgehog .
That said, we love our hedgehogs, and generally don’t think of them as food.
Re Bradbury – my first encounter was through the collections S is for Space and R is for Rocket, which I repeatedly borrowed from the library. It’s been a long time but the story Pillar of Fire still sticks with me.
@Paul —
Except that they were evidently eaten rather frequently back in the day, so one would think an author seeking verisimilitude would consider including them.
Harrumph, I say.
As for Bradbury — I have read shamefully little of him, despite the fact that I wax rhapsodic over what I have read. I really need to work on that.
There’s nothing particularly complicated about what a “canon” is:
1) a list
2) of items that are a) authenticated-as-genuine (as in the contents of the Bible or a roster of recognized saints) or b) required or at least strongly recommended for study, particularly in an institutional setting, as an indication of mastery of a body of subject matter.
Note that 2) amounts to an express or implied “ought.”
A canon is distinct from, say, a taxonomic or historical list–items that fit a given set of categories or belong to a lineage. (Even though imprecise users might call a taxonomy a canon, perhaps because the “ought” means “we ought to clump these items together.”)
Outside of the academy, which has always maintained required-reading lists, there is no SF canon in the historically- or functionally-precise sense. (We’re still arguing about definitions, but that’s not quite the same thing as canonization.) Any faction or fraction of an audience might share a set of preferences or favorites–books they agree are important or influential and that one ought to read–but those “oughts” are no more compelling than any other faction’s. And audience segments grow and wane and interpenetrate and age, and their lists of favorites, their rankings of best or worst, will change–or, sometimes, they don’t, though without a mechanism to enforce the “ought,” I’m not sure how stable such a pseudo-canon can be.
When I was doing my formative reading of SF (1955-60), probably the strongest source of recommended reading was implicit in the big retrospective anthologies, and their force was based on availability–if you wanted to read what had been published from the late 1930s onward and didn’t have access to a magazine archive, they were your sources. So Healy & McComas, Groff Conklin, Anthony Boucher, Ted Dikty, E. F. Bleiler, and later Judith Merril formed my idea of what SF was and where it came from.
That’s still not quite canonization, though enthusiasts could and did assemble lists of must-reads from those volumes. Nor is that the kind of canon-making that has ruled English departments, where the culture has a notion of most-significant works and built around it a curriculum, including required courses and comprehensive exams. And that canon has itself changed periodically since the emergence of English lit as a field of study distinct from classics and philology more than a century ago. You can track it in the contents of classroom lit anthologies and required-reading and course lists over the decades.
The list of, say, Hugo and Nebula winners is not the same as a canon, even though some people might choose to treat it as one. And in the unlikely event that SFRA or IAFA or MLA or some other academic organization were to decide to treat that list as a canon, it would not mean much outside of the academy.
@Cat:
Oh, I agree. That’s what I was trying to get across with the idea that in 1950, the distribution of popular SF would be narrower than it is now. I’d say that readers who only read a narrow slice of milSF are still genre readers*. Back in 1950, people had different favorites, but there were few enough options that there couldn’t be niche readers (I think).
I read milSF – but apparently a different kind that other people do. At a panel once, was ready to talk about the milSF of William Tenn (he wrote some – “Down among the Dead Men,” for example), which was not what everyone was interested in.
Andrew (not Werdna) says Oh, I agree. That’s what I was trying to get across with the idea that in 1950, the distribution of popular SF would be narrower than it is now. I’d say that readers who only read a narrow slice of milSF are still genre readers*. Back in 1950, people had different favorites, but there were few enough options that there couldn’t be niche readers (I think).
Oh I fully agree. I think that the genre is much healthier fir having the much great diversity of writers and also of readers. A true community consists of many individuals not all who have the same tastes. Early fandom was more of a closed, private club rather than a true community that welcomes and celebrated diversity.
Now playing: a live version of Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz”
Current reading: I’m about a quarter of the way into Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer, which seems to be sitting squarely in the Venn diagram where one circle is labeled Jack Vance and the other is labeled K.J. Parker. Enjoying it quite a bit, although I admit I wasn’t expecting as much actual faerie magic as I’ve encountered.
Also, Quillifer may be a bit of a dick, although he’s young and foolish and so may grow out of it.
All this talk of canon is making me think of Delaney’s “Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand” – which contains, among many other things, some sly arguments against the idea that a stable canon could exist or be useful if it did. I didn’t agree when I first read it many years ago, but I think I do now.
Hedgehogs are a protected species in the UK, so we’re not really allowed to eat them. Having said which, hedgehog baked in clay is supposed to be a traditional food for the traveller community. (Apparently it’s originally a Provencal dish.)
There were, also, hedgehog flavoured crisps, at one point. I never tried them myself, though.
And then there was Not the Nine O’Clock News and the hedgehog sandwich, but the less said about that one, the better.
Traditionally hedgehogs are slow roasted wrapped in clay, takes a fair bit of time in preparation and cooking time. They are also nocturnal so you need to spend more time trying to find them during daylight. Rabbits tend to be easier to peel and they cook more quickly so once they developed the ability to live outside artificial warrens and became widespread, eating rabbits was a better investment of time and effort for your average travelling party.
Also, canal v cabal: The sort of thing referred to elsewhere as a ToBAGO, TypO, But A Good One.
@Steve —
Sure, but I’m thinking more of all the ubiquitous pseudo-Medieval pseudo-UK/Europe fantasy out there. They seem to eat plenty of rabbit and squirrel and deer and boar, but no hedgehog!
Things that make ya go hmmmmm……
Maybe we have secret hedgehog overlords who don’t appreciate being munched on?
@Anthony —
But they also move a lot more slowly than rabbits, so they should be easier to catch.
@Anthony again —
If I’m being serious about the subject, this is probably the biggest thing. Hedgehogs can’t be any harder to peel than porcupines, which were commonly eaten in North America and which do show up in fiction being eaten — but porcupines are a lot bigger than hedgehogs. While hedgehogs are slow, they have the triple whammy of being small and spiny and nocturnal — so both more effort to find and less pay-off once found.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that they ought to get eaten by intrepid fantasy travelers at least occasionally. Their size and spininess could even be played for humor. It’s a failure of imagination, I tells ya — or maybe censorship by those hedgehog overlords!
@Camestros Felapton
I initially read this as “True artistry is taking a film in a direction that other artists would not and for that we must applaud Zapruder.”
Which is one way of looking at his film, I gues.
Anthony notes Also, canal v cabal: The sort of thing referred to elsewhere as a ToBAGO, TypO, But A Good One.
After dying three years ago this month (eleven times before Cardiac Critical Care stabilised me), it took nearly a year before my speech patterns were relatively stable. (They’re not normal even today.) To say that verbal ToBAGOs were common would be more than a bit of an understatement.