Pixel Scroll 8/27/19 Fighting Pixels From The Sky, Fearless Scrolls Who Jump And File

(1) CROWDFUNDING RESNICK’S CARE. A GoFundMe has been launched to “Help Mike Resnick pay off a near-death experience”. There has been a strong response — in the first 18 hours, $7,100 of the $15,000 goal has been raised.

This GoFundMe is for writer and editor Mike Resnick, who has won a number of top awards and is known for his “pay it forward” nature in the writing field, ushering more than two dozen embryonic writers into the industry.

Mike unfortunately spent most of the first half of 2019 in the hospital. At the start of the year he fell twice for some (then) unknown reason, the second time being unable to get up. Carol, his wife, had to call 911 and it was determined that he had pneumonia and acute idiopathic pericarditis. In three days he had 30 pounds of fluid drained from around his heart and lungs. Then, a couple of months later, he collapsed again and within 24 hours the hospital had removed his colon (large intestine). Not many seventy-seven-year-olds recover from such serious medical complications, and he is very lucky to be alive and writing today.

Although he is still confined to a wheelchair, Mike has just this month gone back to writing and editing, and his doctors are very pleased with his progress. But he did go more than half of this year without any income, and as you can imagine the hospital bills are many and prohibitively expensive, as well as half a year’s worth of living expenses. He also still needs regular rehabilitation sessions (luckily, from the comfort of his home), and, quite frankly, he needs the assistance of the community of writers and readers he has had the privilege to call his family for more than half a century.

Mike and Carol Resnick would dearly thank anyone who is able to donate towards the medical/economic efforts in helping this Literary Great of the science fiction and fantasy community get back on his feet. Mike has many more books to write and stories to tell, but he can only do it with your help. Thanks again, in advance!

(2) MOVE FAST IF YOU WANT IT. The edition of WOOF assembled at Dublin 2019 is available as a free download for just a few more hours — WOOF44.pdf (30 MB) is available here. (Don’t ask me why it’s going away so soon.)

(3) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 27, 1922 Frank Kelly Freas. I’ve no idea where I first encountered his unique style on a cover of a SF book, but I quickly spotted it everywhere. He had a fifty-year run on Astounding Science Fiction from the early Fifties and through its change to the Analog name — amazing! There doesn’t appear to a decent portfolio of his work. (Died 2005.)
  • Born August 27, 1929 Ira Levin. Author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil. (Died 2007.)
  • Born August 27, 1945 Edward Bryant. His only novel was Phoenix Without Ashes which was co-authored with Harlan Ellison and was an adaptation of Ellison’s pilot script for The Starlost. The only short stories of his I’m familiar with are the ones in the Wild Cards anthologies. Phoenix Without Ashes and all of his short stories are available in digital form. (Died 2017.)
  • Born August 27, 1947 Barbara Bach, Lady Starkey, 72. She’s best known for her role as the Bond girl Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me.  One of her other genre appearances is in Caveman which her husband Ringo Starr is also in. 
  • Born August 27, 1952 Darrell Schweitzer, 67. Writer, editor, and critic. For his writing, I’d recommend Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions and Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out and Other Strange ExcursionsThe Robert E. Howard Reader he did is quite excellent as is The Thomas Ligotti Reader. He did a Neil Gaiman as well but not even he can find anything original to say Neil at this point.
  • Born August 27, 1957 Richard Kadrey, 62. I’m admittedly way behind on the Sandman Slim series having only read the first five books. I also enjoyed Metrophage: A Romance of the Future and I’ve got The Grand Dark on my interested in list.
  • Born August 27, 1962 Dean Devlin,  57. His first produced screenplay was Universal Soldier. He was a writer/producer working on Emmerich’s Moon 44. Together they cowrote and produced Stargate, the first movie to have a web site. The team then produced Independence Day,  Godzilla and Independence Day: Resurgence. They’re also credited for creating The Visitor series which lasted 13 episodes as The Triangle, a miniseries which I’ll bet you guess the premise of.
  • Born August 27, 1965Kevin Standlee, 54. He attended his first con in 1984, L.A. Con II. Later he co-chaired the 2002 Worldcon, ConJosé, in San José. One source says he made and participated in amateur Doctor Who films in the late 1980s.
  • Born August 27, 1978 Suranne Jones, 41. Not a long genre performance history but she shows up on the Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures as Mona Lisa. Yes, that Mona Lisa. She’ll be back on Doctor Who in “The Doctor’s Wife”, an Eleventh Doctor story as written by Neil Gaiman. She Idris, a woman hosting the Matrix of the TARDIS.  

(4) IT COULD ALMOST BE A FANZINE TITLE. [Item by John Hertz.] I happened to meet (on paper) Christian Thomasius 1655-1728 and his monthly review 1688-1690, Scherzhafte und ernsthafte, vernünftige und einfältige Gedanken über allerband lustige und nützluche Bücher und Fragen (German: “Jocose and Earnest, Rational and Silly Thoughts on All Kinds of Pleasant and Useful Books and Questions”).  He was at the time professor of natural law at Leipzig (1684-90).  You’ll note his review and his professorship ended in the same year (I’ve also seen 1689 for the end of the review).  He had to leave town.

(5) FORMELY KNOWN AS THE CAMPBELL. The initial response to the renamed Astounding Award for Best New Writer is largely positive. The comments in the announcement include expressions of approval by John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Nalo Hopkinson. There are posts elsewhere by John Scalzi and David Versace.

The Twitter response runs the gamut, for example:

(6) #METOO7. “Can Daniel Craig complete his biggest mission – modernising James Bond?”

The title of the next James Bond film was announced earlier this week. No Time To Die will see Daniel Craig return as 007 for the fifth time, but there’s little to suggest it will be business as usual.

It’s not just saving the world that will be on his mind for the 25th official film in the series – he’s also on a mission to catch up with the 21st Century. Speaking at the film’s launch in April, Craig promised the film would reflect changing attitudes, recognising Bond as a “flawed” character with “issues… worth exploring and grappling with”.

“Bond has always adapted for the times… We wouldn’t be movie makers or creative people if we didn’t have an eye on what was going on in the outside world.”

So how might the suave secret agent have to change, and can he do so without losing the essence of James Bond?

…Attitudes elsewhere in society are evolving – in many quarters at least – and producer Barbara Broccoli has said the new film “should reflect” the “huge impact” of the #MeToo movement.

Recruiting Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the writing team reflects this mission.

As only the second female writer in the franchise’s history, she plans to make Bond women “feel like real people”. For Sturges, this means allowing the women of the Craig era to become more than tokenistic “two-dimensional challengers” to Bond’s machismo.

(7) EXPATRIATE CHINESE WRITER CHARGED. BBC reports “China Arrests Australian Writer On Espionage Charges”.

A Chinese-born Australian writer detained for months in China has been formally arrested on charges of espionage, officials in Canberra confirmed on Tuesday.

Yang Hengjun, a former Chinese diplomat who reportedly became an Australian citizen in 2002 but retains a Chinese passport, has also lived and worked in the United States.

He is the author of three spy novels set in China, according to Reuters. In the past, he has written voluminously on his blog about the rule of law, democracy and human rights, according to news.com.au. However, according to Reuters, in recent years, he has stayed away from sensitive topics and concentrated instead on running an import-export business.

(8) READY FOR ITS CLOSEUP. “‘Rosalind Franklin’ Mars rover assembly completed” – that’s BBC’s text story; sped-up video of final stages is here.

Assembly of the rover Europe and Russia plan to send to the Red Planet next year is complete.

Engineers at Airbus in Stevenage, UK, displayed the finished vehicle on Tuesday ahead of its shipment to France for testing.

Called “Rosalind Franklin” after the British DNA pioneer, the six-wheeled robot will search for life on Mars.

It has a drill to burrow 2m below ground to try to detect the presence of microbes, either living or fossilised.

The project is a joint endeavour of the European and Russian space agencies (Esa and Roscosmos), with input from the Canadians and the US.

(9) BRANDING. Brian Niemeier explains why he avoids online drama. (You didn’t know that, did you?) Thread starts here.

(10) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In Rabbit on the Animate Projects Archive, Run Wrake explains the bad things that happen when two children kill a rabbit.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Michael A. Rothman, Juli Marr, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Juli Marr, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]

52 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/27/19 Fighting Pixels From The Sky, Fearless Scrolls Who Jump And File

  1. Title credit! And first?

    3) My personal favorite Darrell Schweitzer is Mask of the Sorcerer, weird fantasy in the truest sense of the term.

  2. @3: there was a major Freas book narrated (and assembled?) by him, covering his first ~30 years — but that means it came out most of 40 years ago. Hardly surprising that it’s out of print — quality color work is still expensive.

    @5: Ng being called a nobody millennial by a nobody notcher? Quick, somebody hand me some pearls!

    @7: I wonder whether that will even ripple across the consciousness of the Chengdu bid?

    @10: somebody’s imagination is attempting to demonstrate that J. B. S. Haldane was wrong.

  3. I always enjoy chatting with Darrell Schweitzer at his dealers’ table (he gives a good panel too)

  4. Freas was pretty much my favorite when I was a sprout. A quick Google search suggests there have been two books of his work: the old one I remember from ’77, and a more recent one from 2000. (Amazon links provided not to try to sell copies, but because they were the first links I found.)

    Brian Niemeier saying he “learned the hard way” makes me think his claim is at least plausible. I mean, I’ll wait and see before I make up my mind, but stranger things have happened. And if he has learned, well…that was indeed the hard way! 😀

    I just picked up a copy of Richard Kadrey’s The Grand Dark. Haven’t opened it, yet, so I can’t offer opinions, but I will when I can.

    Oh, and happy birthday, Kevin!

  5. (1) Mike Resnick has ushered “more than two dozen embryonic writers into the industry”? Name the former Campbell award after him.

  6. @bill–The decision has been made, by the people responsible for the award.

    Astounding is a great name for it–and if you think there’s nothing problematic about Resnick, you’ve got your head in the sand. Yes, he has also helped develop young writers and made other positive contributions to the field–but this is exactly why naming awards after people isn’t necessarily a great idea. No matter how legit someone’s excellent qualities are, they may in time be found to have flaws that make recipients less than comfortable.

    It might be time to stop digging.

  7. In any case, why would Dell Magazines choose someone with no particular connection to Dell Magazines to name their award after, when they can name the award after their own ground-breaking magazine which first introduced so many legendary SF writers?

    (Plus all those other reasons.)

  8. (3) that Suranne Jones bio could do with its tenses updating .The Doctors Wife was aired right years ago.

  9. @Xtifr —

    I just picked up a copy of Richard Kadrey’s The Grand Dark. Haven’t opened it, yet, so I can’t offer opinions, but I will when I can.

    I’ve got it on Mt. TBR, but I’m a little afraid to read it in case I don’t like it! I’ll be so disappointed if it isn’t good…..

  10. @Joe H

    Very much agree on Mask of the Sorcerer though I find too much weird undercuts the horror in what I’ve read of Schweitzer other work. (And I think a little less of him for an essay in which he gloats about haunting second-hand book sales looking for stuff to sell on the collector’s market. Which isn’t actually a sin but makes my inner teenage book addict sad.)

  11. 5) As pleased as I would be to claim Ng for my generation, the Internet informs me that she was born in 1977, which makes her a millennial by exactly no one’s definition. I’m used to seeing millennial misapplied to people from the generation after mine; seeing it pushed backwards as well is novel, I guess.

  12. NickPheas says that Suranne Jones bio could do with its tenses updating .The Doctors Wife was aired right years ago.

    It’s Doctor Who so time tenses are always suspect.

  13. Here’s another vote for Schweitzer’s Mask of the Sorcerer. I nabbed it because that edition had a Gene Wolfe blurb on it, and Gene definitely did not steer me wrong.

  14. @Rob Thornton that edition had a Gene Wolfe blurb on it, and Gene definitely did not steer me wrong.

    We shall not speak of the time Baen put a Gene Wolfe blurb on the cover of a novel by Leo Frankowski and I, not knowing the author, read the whole thing under the impression it was an elaborate satire.

  15. 1) Best wishes for Mike Resnick. I hope he faces no further complications.

    6) Metoo is hardly the only issue with Bond – spies generally are no longer seen as glamorous heroes and spy agencies are regarded with suspicion. And most of the valuable information comes from computers. The protagonist of Person of Interest is the modern Bond.

  16. Though Bond was always more of a counter-spy, and sometimes counter-counter-spy, than a normal spy.

  17. ambyr said:

    As pleased as I would be to claim Ng for my generation, the Internet informs me that she was born in 1977

    According to this article, Ng is 33 years old, which would indeed make her a millenial. (Which isn’t to say that Paolinelli is correct on any other point except maaaybe the unimportance of the Thanos vs. Darkseid argument. [The right answer is Darkseid, but the really right answer is that it doesn’t matter because Squirrel Girl can beat both of them.])

  18. @bookworm1398 good point in re Person of Interest. Great show, never got the love it merited IMO.

    Now that I think on it, I haven’t heard anything from Niemeier in a long time. Perhaps he really is regretting the actions of his fandom adolescence. Mind you, he’s witch hunting over at his site (literally, not figuratively) but that’s what one’s own site is for – whatever floats your boat.

  19. Squirrel Girl doesn’t so much beat Darkseid as use her computer science skills to demonstrate a solution to the Anti-Life Equation, then go on to interest Darkseid in more advanced computer science topics, such as solving the equation for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.

  20. Let’s rename the Hugo. Let’s rename Washington, DC. Let’s rename the state of Washington. Let’s rename Tarzana, Calif. Let’s rename….

    Why, even I was renamed, back in 1964. By my parents…

  21. Person of Interest was excellent. We get so little tv time now, and there’s so much to watch that I haven’t seen once, it’s hard to justify going back to one I’ve watched before, but I have considered it. I want to see how much of where it ends up is seeded in the first season, which struck me at the time as some basic problem of the week tv, if fairly good for the type, and the background plot as dressing, not core.

  22. @Andrew PorterI lived for fifty years in Nieuw Amsterdam, where I sometimes went to Idlewild Airport to fly to Londinium; I have a bachelor’s degree from the Collegiate School.

    (New York City, JFK Airport, London, Yale)

  23. (5) and its comments: I have absolutely no evens for anyone who equates disassociating an award from a person with unpersoning that person. I mean, the fact that I’ve never had an award associated with my name is absolutely nowhere on the list of things threatening my personhood today.

  24. (5) For me its easier, the dumbest thing Ive read today was easily Paolinellis tweet (I probably misspelled his name).

  25. @Jack Lint:

    Why did Constantinpixel get the works?

    That’s Scrollbody’s filings but the Turks!

  26. Off-topic, but can someone suggest a good sub-genre name for a story written in the form of a scholarly document? It’s the sort that usually comes with a framing story explaining where the document came from, and it typically has footnotes with faux references and/or explanations. It’s not an epistolary story, since it’s not in the form of letters. These occur both in SF and Fantasy.

    “High Fantasy Research Paper” or “High Fantasy Scholarly Report” are awkward/misleading. Anyway, I’ve seen quite a few of these lately, and I’m wondering if anyone can suggest a clever way to describe them. Right now I’m leaning towards just saying “High Fantasy” and explaining the format in the blurb.

  27. @Greg – Could it be described as a monograph? Because I’ve seen the term fictive monograph before. I’ve also seen ‘invented’ used in a similar situation. So, maybe “High Fantasy Invented Scholarly Article.

  28. Thanks! These are all great suggestions!

    “STET” probably could have been described as an SF Monograph, I think. I’ve also seen at least one story recently that would have been well-described as an “SF Documentary,” given the way the POV shifted in a way that reminded me of “Stand on Zanzibar.”

    Two that I’m looking at right now are from the same issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.: “The Mirror Dialogues” and “Elegy of a Lanthornist.”

    “Elegy” fits the “High-Fantasy Scrapbook Story” perfectly I think, although given all the footnotes, I suppose “Monograph” would work too.

    “Mirror” probably fits “Scrapbook” too, although it purports to show fragments of a single document rather than multiple different ones.

    Thanks again! That was really fast!

  29. Steven desJardins says
    Squirrel Girl doesn’t so much beat Darkseid as use her computer science skills to demonstrate a solution to the Anti-Life Equation, then go on to interest Darkseid in more advanced computer science topics, such as solving the equation for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.

    There is no perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe as it depends upon temporal mechanics which is to say it depends exactly when the cookie is eaten as the same cookie eaten at the wrong time can become an inferior cookie. I once did a chocolate chip chip crawl and discovered how important getting them just out of the oven was. The recipe is important but the condition of the cookie is I think just as crucial.

  30. Cat Eldridge: To me that just says that the perfect recipe includes full timing information, whether that contains “eat as soon as the temperature is below 100 degrees F”, or “best consumed after between 3 and 30 years of aging at cellar temperature”.

  31. @David Shallcross
    Three days in a covered stoneware crock. Just enough to make them a little crunchy, instead of soft all the way through.

  32. “Serving size: one cookie. Best consumed while watching episode 397 of ‘The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.'”

    “Serving size: ten cookies. Best served after crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women!”

  33. David Shallcross says to me To me that just says that the perfect recipe includes full timing information, whether that contains “eat as soon as the temperature is below 100 degrees F”, or “best consumed after between 3 and 30 years of aging at cellar temperature”.

    I like that idea a lot .

  34. I’m off tomorrow to get a GI ultrasound. My autonomic nervous system disorder caused by the severe head trauma of now just about two years ago has resulted in a twenty pound weight loss in the last six weeks due to an inability to eat. (Think nausea and cramping on a constant basis. Doesn’t make for a desire to eat much.)

    So Jenner my NP needs to get a handle on going on what’s gone wrong this time. This week alone I shed four pounds. It’s something that can sustained long term.

    Have I noted that I see her weekly?

  35. @Cat
    Good luck, and I hope there’s a simple solution that doesn’t involve pining for the fjords.

  36. From what Cat has said, “just pining for the fjords” would be preferable to the current issues.

  37. @Greg – Can make another suggestion? If I saw ‘SF Monograph’ just by itself I might think it was non-fiction. If you include a descriptor like ‘invented’ or ‘fictive,’ as in ‘SF Fictive Monograph’ that might make it clearer.

    Or not. Everyone’s mileage varies.

  38. A desert bar opened a few short months ago in downtown shopping district. A few weeks ago they opened a small bakery. Most days they’ve got a constant flow of most excellent chocolate chip cookies just out of the modified pizza open for sale. So far they’re by far the best ones I’ve found.

    I’d eat them with milk but I’ve been banned from it by Jenner for now as some of my new meds react with lactose quite badly beyond the minimal amount in coffee. (Meagan, my osteopathic manipulation therapist at Martins Point, has declared me “an unusual case”. H’h.)

  39. @Cat Eldridge: Meagan, my osteopathic manipulation therapist at Martins Point, has declared me “an unusual case”. For most people that would be an unpleasant warning; you’ve been through the mill enough that I wonder whether it’s just another comment.

  40. Chip say re me For most people that would be an unpleasant warning; you’ve been through the mill enough that I wonder whether it’s just another comment.

    Prolly you’re right. The fact that my meds need adjusting weekly speaks for the unusual nature of my condition. I’m just hoping that the blood test Jenner decided to do for celiac sensitivity doesn’t turn out positive as that be a real game changer right now on top of the fact that I’m not producing several B vitamins or iron.

  41. Chip Hitchcock notes From what Cat has said, “just pining for the fjords” would be preferable to the current issues.

    I didn’t have a DNR order so the Cardiac Critical Care team had to keep reviving me. Which they did, Ten times before I stabilised. Apparently they were beginning to lose hope part way through as they called Martins Point and told them that they weren’t sure they could keep reviving me.

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