(1) PAPERS PLEASE? Here in the future, an unpredictable surge in demand for books on paper has run afoul of a world-threatening pandemic: “Printer Jam: Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season” reports the New York Times.
This spring, when the pandemic forced bookstores across the country to close and authors to cancel their tours, many editors and publishers made a gamble. They postponed the publication of dozens of titles, betting that things would be back to normal by the fall.
Now, with September approaching, things are far from normal. Books that were bumped from spring and early summer are landing all at once, colliding with long-planned fall releases and making this one of the most crowded fall publishing seasons ever. And now publishers are confronting a new hurdle: how to print all those books.
The two largest printing companies in the United States, Quad and LSC Communications, have been under intense financial strain, a situation that has grown worse during the pandemic. LSC declared bankruptcy in April, and the company’s sales fell nearly 40 percent in the fiscal quarter that ended June 30, a drop that the company attributed partly to the closure of retailers during the pandemic and the steep fall of educational book sales. In September, LSC’s assets will be put up for auction. Quad’s printing business is also up for sale; this spring, the company had to temporarily shut down its printers at three plants due to the pandemic.
At the same time, there has been a surprising spike in sales for print books, a development that would normally be cause for celebration, but is now forcing publishers to scramble to meet surging demand. Unit sales of print books are up more than 5 percent over last year, and sales have accelerated over the summer. From early June to mid-August, print sales were up more than 12 percent over the previous 10 weeks, according to NPD BookScan. The surge has been driven by several new blockbuster titles, including books by Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, John Bolton and Mary Trump. Publishers have also seen an unexpected demand for older titles, particularly books about race and racism, children’s educational workbooks and fiction.
“The infinite printer capacity hasn’t been there for a while, now enter Covid and a huge surge in demand, and you have an even more complex situation,” said Sue Malone-Barber, senior vice president and director of Publishing Operations for Penguin Random House, which is delaying titles at several of its imprints as a result of the crunch.
(2) DIAL M. A trailer dropped for Come Play, a horror movie about creatures that live inside a cellphone.
Newcomer Azhy Robertson stars as Oliver, a lonely young boy who feels different from everyone else. Desperate for a friend, he seeks solace and refuge in his ever-present cell phone and tablet. When a mysterious creature uses Oliver’s devices against him to break into our world, Oliver’s parents (Gillian Jacobs and John Gallagher Jr.) must fight to save their son from the monster beyond the screen. The film is produced by The Picture Company for Amblin Partners.
(3) HUGO RULES PROPOSAL. Jay Blanc tweeted a link to their first draft of a proposed amendment to the WSFS Constitution that would provide a standing Advisory Committee for the Hugo Awards. See the text at Google Docs. Blanc’s commentary justifies the need for a new committee:
Commentary:
The intent of this amendment is to correct a point of failure in the current way the Hugo Awards are administered, a flawed institutional memory and a lack of any consistent infrastructure.
The innate problems of “reinventing the wheel” when it comes to infrastructure became obvious when the 2020 Hugo Awards online-ballot process failed to be ready for use for the ballot deadline. When it did become ready to use, after the ballot deadline was pushed back, it was discovered that it did not correctly register votes for some users.
There had been a pre-existing online ballot system, used by Helsinki and Dublin, this system was robust and had an open development process. However it is unclear why this system was not used, or if it was why it was heavily modified and those modifications kept private and unreviewed. This is a clear failure of infrastructure that can be fixed by having standing advice on applying online balloting systems.
Further, there appears to have been some issue with confusion over information provided to Hugo Award finalists, and a lack of clear communication lines and recording of any complaints raised.
While the unique localised structure of the Worldcon is overall beneficial, these problems can only be addressed by having some form of standing committee. This amendment does not mandate this committee as replacement for the Worldcon Committee’s handling of the Hugo Awards, but does establish a weight of advice and infrastructure. I would expect Worldcon Committees to opt-in to accepting this advice and infrastructure, rather than continue to reinvent the wheel. But this amendment leaves it open to any individual Worldcon to choose to go it’s own way in the administration of the Hugo Awards if it decides that is correct….
(4) OPTIONS. “‘No aspect of writing makes you rich’ – why do authors get a pittance for film rights?” The Guardian tries to answer the question.
…Stephen King requests only a token amount from anyone optioning one of his novels; the “option” reserves a book for a limited time, usually a year, with the big bucks coming if and when that option is exercised. “I want a dollar,” King said in 2016, “and I want approvals over the screenwriter, the director and the principal cast.” That’s a snip until you realise that the back end is where he makes his real movie money: he got an eight-figure cheque from the recent adaptation of It.
More common are those tales of writers whose work takes an interminable time to reach the screen – Caren Lissner, for instance, whose book Carrie Pilby was optioned on several occasions between publication in 2003 and the film’s production in 2016 – or those that never get greenlit at all.
How realistic is it for writers to get rich from selling adaptation rights? “It’s just not,” says Joanna Nadin, whose YA novel Joe All Alone was adapted into a Bafta-winning 2018 television series. “It’s unrealistic to think any aspect of writing can make you rich.” Nadin confesses that she gets dollar signs in her eyes when she learns that a book of hers has been optioned. “For about 10 minutes, I revamp my Oscar acceptance speech, choose my mansion and dine out on imaginary caviar. Then I try not to think about it, knowing that, if anything happens, it won’t be for many years.”
(5) SCRIBE OF MARADAINE. The Austin Chronicle’s Wayne Alan Brennervisits “The Many Worlds of Author Marshall Ryan Maresca”.
Marshall Ryan Maresca’s debut novel, The Thorn of Dentonhill, came out from DAW Books in February of 2015. Five years later – now, in 2020, smack in the midst of a global pandemic – Maresca is publishing four different series of novels with DAW, each series already three books in, each one set in his originally devised city of Maradaine. And there are many more books on the way.
Even those of us who write almost creatively, day-in, day-out, to meet the relentless deadlines of journalism are like, “Maresca, how the hell? How do you write so much so quickly? And how do you sell novel after novel after novel when other writers we know can’t even seem to land a publisher?”
…”When I started this particular project,” says Maresca over a cup of java and safely distanced at a picnic table outside Thunderbird Coffee on Manor, “I’d already had the world stuff built out, but it wasn’t quite working for me. I thought that, since I’d done all the world-building, I needed to show all of it to the reader at once. Which was a terrible idea, and it didn’t work. But when I was working on that book – which is now sitting in a drawer and will never see the light of day – I had this sort of wild idea, that drew in part from inspiration from comic books.”
Note: Maresca’s favorites among comics are West Coast Avengers, Chris Claremont’s classic run of X-Men, and Mark Gruenwald’s many-charactered D.P.7 – all adding, he tells us, to the authorial influence of such unillustrated story cycles as Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Green Sky trilogy and David Eddings’ Belgariad. But, the wild idea?
“I thought, instead of trying to show everything,” says Maresca, “why don’t I just show one city, different aspects of that? And from there, I could tell different kinds of stories and have them be somewhat interconnected. And so, somewhere in my file cabinets, there’s a handwritten piece of paper, where I’ve written four story tracks: one vigilante-by-night, one old-time warrior, one two-brothers-heists, one two-cops-solve-murders. And that was the origin of everything. And so I slowly built up my outlines of what all these were – and part of that also came from just the way the publishing industry is. I wrote Thorn of Dentonhill first, and then, while I was shopping for agents, I was also like, well, I should just keep writing. But it’d be silly to write a book two of this series without knowing if I sold book one. So I wrote a different book one – the first book of a different series. And then, as I was looking for someone to buy Thorn, I got that second book one done. And I was like, okay, now that I have an agent interested, I’m gonna write another book one. So that, by the time my agent Mike Kabongo was shopping things around, and the editor at DAW was interested, I had the first book of each of the four series already done.”
(6) ILLUSTRATING KINDRED. Artist James E. Ransome is interviewed by Aaron Robertson for LitHub in “An Illustrator Brings Realism into Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction”.
The Folio Society recently published a special edition of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, a time-travel narrative set between modern-day Los Angeles and a pre-Civil War US. I interviewed the book’s illustrator, James E. Ransome, about what it took to depict scenes of slavery, Ransome’s artistic influences, his dream projects, and more….
AR: Had you read the Damian Duffy/John Jennings graphic novel of Kindred before working on this?
JR: I hadn’t read it beforehand, but I came across it at a bookfair in the middle of working on this project. I was impressed. It was good to see a graphic novel with an illustration for every scene, and as a creator I enjoyed getting another take on the material.
AR: How did you decide which scenes to showcase?
JR: The Folio Society’s art director, Sheri Gee and I discussed it in a series of conversations. We were looking for dramatic scenes that would be interesting to capture. Things that were more dynamic than, say, two people sitting at a table talking. The very beginning scene, with the boy drowning, was a natural choice. Butler’s chapter titles—“The River,” “The Fire,” etc.—were also helpful leads.
(7) RUH-ROH. Scooby-Doo’s co-creator and former children’s TV mogul Joe Ruby passed away August 26. The Hollywood Reporter has the story: “Joe Ruby, Co-Creator of Scooby-Doo, Dies at 87”.
Ruby met Ken Spears when both were sound editors and then staff writers at the cartoon powerhouse Hanna-Barbera, and they created the supernatural kids show Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, which centered around a talking Great Dane and bowed on CBS in September 1969. All but four of the first 25 episodes were written and story-edited by them.
In the early 1970s, then-CBS president of children’s programming Fred Silverman hired Ruby and Spears to supervise the network’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup, and they followed the executive to ABC for similar duties in 1975. (Scooby-Doo joined that network’s lineup as well.)
Two years later, ABC set up Ruby-Spears Productions as a subsidiary of Filmways, and the company launched Saturday morning animated series around such characters as Fangface, Plastic Man, Mister T and Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Ruby-Spears was acquired by Hanna-Barbera parent Taft Entertainment in 1981.
…In the 1980s, legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby was hired by Ruby to bring his vision to Ruby-Spears Productions. As a result, the Ruby family owns the rights to hundreds of original Kirby-designed characters and more than two dozen projects developed by Ruby. The intellectual property rights to those characters, artwork and projects are now being offered for sale.
(8) BOOK ANNIVERSARY.
- In August sixteen years ago, Catherynne M. Valente published her first novel, The Labyrinth. Described by the publisher as “a journey through a conscious maze without center, borders, or escape–a dark pilgrim’s progress through a landscape of vicious Angels, plague houses, crocodile-prophets, tragic chess-sets, and and the mind of an unraveling woman”, it was published by Prime Books with an introductory essay by Jeff VanderMeer. It is not currently in-print. (CE)
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born August 27, 1922 – Frank Kelly Freas. Three hundred covers, over a thousand interiors (I think; I lost count twice) for us; five hundred saints for the Franciscan Order; MAD magazine 1957-1964 with Alfred E. Neuman front, advertising-parody back covers; airplanes while serving in the U.S. Air Force; Skylab; comics; gaming. Interviewed in Galileo, Interzone, Lighthouse, Locus, Perigee, SF Review, Shadows, Solaris, Thrust. Eleven Hugos; three Chesleys (with wife Laura). LASFS (L.A. Science Fantasy Soc.) Forry Award (service to SF); Skylark; Inkpot; Phoenix; Frank Paul Award. Writers & Illustrators of the Future Lifetime Achievement Award. Fellow, Int’l Ass’n Astronomical Artists. SF Hall of Fame. Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon 10, 14, 26; Boskone 10, Lunacon 34, Balticon 31, Loscon 27; Chicon IV (40th Wordcon), Torcon 3 (61st Worldcon; could not attend). Eight artbooks e.g. A Separate Star; As He Sees It. This famous image was adopted by the Judith Merril Collection in Toronto. This famous image was adapted by the band Queen for its album News of the World. Here is John Cross in Slan. (Died 2005) [JH]
- Born August 27, 1929 — Ira Levin. Author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil. All of which became films with The Stepford Wives being made twice as well as having three of the television sequels. I’ve seen the first Stepford Wives film but not the latter version. Rosemary’s Baby would also be made into a two-part, four hour miniseries. (Died 2007.) (CE)
- Born August 27, 1942 – Robert Lichtman, 78. Leading fanwriter, faneditor. Fourteen FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) awards, as a correspondent and for his fanzine Trap Door. TAFF (Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund) delegate. Secretary-Treasurer of FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Ass’n, our oldest and highest-regarded apa, founded 1937) since 1986. Edited Ah! Sweet Laney! (F.T. Laney collection; named for FTL’s I’m-leaving-goodbye zine Ah! Sweet Idiocy!), Some of the Best from “Quandry” (Lee Hoffman collection; her zine Quandry so spelled), Fanorama (Walt Willis collection; his columns in Nebula); co-edited last issue of Terry Carr’s fanzine Innuendo. Fan Guest of Honor, Westercon 55. [JH]
- 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 that I’m familiar with are the ones in the Wild Cards anthologies. Phoenix Without Ashes and all of his short stories are available from the usual digital suspects. (Died 2017.) (CE)
- Born August 27, 1947 — Barbara Bach, Lady Starkey, 73. She’s best known for her role as the Bond girl Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me. (A Roger Moore Bond, not one of my favored Bonds.) One of her other genre appearances is in Caveman which her husband Ringo Starr is also in. It’s where they first hooked up. (CE)
- Born August 27, 1952 – Darrell Schweitzer, 68. Three novels; two hundred fifty shorter stories, as many poems; anthologist, bookseller, correspondent, editor, essayist, historian, interviewer, reviewer. “Books” in Aboriginal, “The Vivisector” in SF Review, “Words & Pictures” (motion-picture reviews) in Thrust and Quantum. Editor, Weird Tales 1987-2007 (sometimes with J. Betancourt 1963- , G. Scithers 1929-2010). If sandwich man were still a current expression one could pun that DS often serves dark and horror on wry. A few essay titles: “Naked Realism versus the Magical Bunny Rabbit”, “Prithee, Sirrah, What Dostou Mean by Archaic Style in Fantasy?”, “Halfway Between Lucian of Samosata and Larry Niven”. Two Best Short Fiction of DS volumes expected this year. [JH]
- Born August 27, 1955 – Steve Crisp, 65. Two hundred twenty-five covers, a dozen interiors, for us; illustration, photography, outside our field. Here is Best Fantasy Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Here is The Worlds of Frank Herbert. Here is a Fahrenheit 451. Here is a Neuromancer. Website here. [JH]
- Born August 27, 1957 — Richard Kadrey, 63. 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 The Everything Box. I’ve got The Grand Dark on my interested in listening to list. (CE)
- Born August 27, 1962 — Dean Devlin, 58. His first produced screenplay was Universal Soldier. He was a writer/producer working on Emmerich’s Moon 44. Together they co-wrote and produced Stargate, the first movie to have a website.The team then produced Independence Day, the rather awful Godzilla rebootand Independence Day: Resurgence which so far I’ve avoided seeing. They’re also credited for creating The Visitor series which lasted just thirteen episodes, and The Triangle, a miniseries which I’ll bet you guess the premise of. (CE)
- Born August 27, 1965 – Kevin Standlee, 55. Long active in San Francisco Bay Area fandom. Fan Guest of Honor at Baycon 1993, Marcon 43, CascadiaCon (8th NASFiC; North America SF Con, since 1975 held when Worldcon is overseas), Westercon 72 (with wife Lisa Hayes and her bear Kuma); co-chaired ConJosé (60th Worldcon; with T. Whitmore); chair of Westercon 74 (scheduled for 2022). Has chaired World SF Society’s Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, Mark Protection Committee; has chaired Worldcon and other con Business Meetings, no small task, notably and heroically at Westercon 64, when no bid for Westercon 66 got enough votes and site selection fell to the Bus Mtg in a contentious 3-hr session. Patient explainer of parliamentary procedure. [JH]
- Born August 27, 1970 – Ann Aguirre, 50. Forty novels, a dozen shorter stories, some under other names, some with co-authors. Honor Bound (with R. Caine) a Hal Clement Notable Young Adult Book for 2020. Withdrew Like Never and Always from RITA Award consideration. “Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?” “It’s just like the flu. Don’t worry about taking precautions.” [JH]
- Born August 27, 1978 — Suranne Jones, 42. Not a long genre performance history but she shows up on the Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures as Mona Lisa in “Mona Lisa”. Yes, that Mona Lisa. More importantly, she’s in “The Doctor’s Wife”, an Eleventh Doctor story as written by Neil Gaiman. She’s Idris, a woman hosting the Matrix of the TARDIS. She’s Eve Caleighs in The Secret of Crickley Hall series, an adaption of the James Herbert novel. (CE)
(10) YOU ARE DEEP SIX. Camestros Felapton takes notes while “Timothy and I Watch Patriotic Submarines”.
- Camestros: There is literally nothing I want to watch here…
- Timothy: We could…
- Camestros: No, no, we are not watching Cats again. Look, maybe it’s time to go outside?
- Timothy: No way! It’s a hellscape out there! A seething dystopian nightmare! Woke mobs are cancelling cats for not wearing masks! It’s EU commissioners herding us inside our borders and stealing our holiday homes in the South of France and forcing us to use metric! It’s Attack on Titan but with giant buck naked Boris Johnsons eating people! There are SCOTTISH people about!
(11) PRESELLING LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. Variety delves into “How HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ Marketing Campaign Spotlighted the Blerd Community”.
…In late July and early August before the series aired, the network sent out stylized packages made up of “Lovecraft Country”-inspired items from Black-owned businesses, brands and creatives. The gift bag included a backpack from Life on Autopilot, sunglasses from Bôhten Eyewear, a “Sundon” candle by Bright Black, a Grubhub gift card for recipients to order from Black-owned restaurant; as well as the novels “Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi, “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and “Lovecraft Country” by Matt Ruff (provided by Amalgram Comics & Coffeehouse).
For Gagne and her team, the creation of the kit was also about saluting “Lovecraft Country’s” creator Misha Green and the Black heroes of her story, so the package also included direct nods to the show with a “South Side Futuristic Science Fiction Club” sweatshirt from BLK MKT Vintage and a notebook which serves as a “field guide” to understanding the cultural context behind all of the items in the bag, as well as information on the businesses themselves.
With “influencer kits” and their focus on Black-owned businesses, Gagne says, “given everything that’s going on, I think that that’s something that people really embrace and honor and really want to support in a big way.”…
(12) READING TIMES. Amal El-Mohtar’s Otherworldly column for the New York Times deals with “Power and Passage: New Science Fiction and Fantasy”.
The discourse about reading fiction during the pandemic has followed two broad tracks: There are those who take comfort in the activity, and those who have found reading impossibly difficult. I belong to the latter camp, but I’m all the more excited to share the following books, which, while very different in genre and mode, shook me out of listless distraction with their originality.
DANCE ON SATURDAY (Small Beer Press, 318 pp., paper, $17) is Elwin Cotman’s third collection of short fiction. We tend to call fiction “short” when it’s not a novel, but the six stories in “Dance on Saturday” are long, deep and rich, each so thoroughly engrossing and distinctive in its style that I had to take long breaks between them…
Also praised:
THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS (Del Rey, 327 pp., $28) is Micaiah Johnson’s debut, but that word is utterly insufficient for the blazing, relentless power of this book, suggesting ballroom manners where it should conjure comet tails…
(13) THE HYDROGEN BOOM. “New Video Shows Largest Hydrogen Bomb Ever Exploded” reports the New York Times.
Hydrogen bombs — the world’s deadliest weapons — have no theoretical size limit. The more fuel, the bigger the explosion. When the United States in 1952 detonated the world’s first, its destructive force was 700 times as great as that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
And in the darkest days of the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans didn’t only compete to build the most weapons. They each sought at times to build the biggest bomb of all.
“There was a megatonnage race — who was going to have a bigger bomb,” said Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age. “And the Soviets won.”
Last week, the Russian nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, released a 30-minute, formerly secret documentary video about the world’s largest hydrogen bomb detonation. The explosive force of the device — nicknamed Tsar Bomba, or the Tsar’s bomb, and set off on Oct. 30, 1961 — was 50 megatons, or the equivalent of 50 million tons of conventional explosive. That made it 3,333 times as destructive as the weapon used on Hiroshima, Japan, and also far more powerful than the 15 megaton weapon set off by the United States in 1954 in its largest hydrogen bomb blast…
(14) THE EYES HAVE IT. Cora Buhlert shows off her handiwork.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Check out Klaatu on top of the Capital Records building (along with some other famous guy named Ringo)… From 1974.
[Thanks to David Doering, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, JJ, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title cedit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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Never was a pingback more appropriate
(13) “No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow.”
(9) Happy birthday, Kevin!
(14) Awwww.
[9] I cherish the memory of the era when the word would go out at a con like Nashville’s KublaKhon: “Kelly’s doing sketches in the consuite!” If you were one of the lucky few, the legendary Kelly would cheerfully do a sketch of you with felt tips, using lighter fluid on q-tip swabs to create wash effects, and leaving you with a quick portrait* which bears the same resemblance to a county fair “caricature” that a Beethoven sonata does to a third-rate Van Halen cover band.
*”And done for free
Which blows the Dorsai mind”
(3) HUGO RULES PROPOSAL.
I think there’s a need for improvement in the way that Worldcon Programming and Hugo Ceremonies are run, but that poorly-conceived proposal isn’t going to accomplish it.
JJ, I’m currently amusing myself at the thought of Certain Parties reading it.
Also, as someone who has a fair amount of direct, actual experience with the software the writer described as “robust”….
Ahahahahahahah
wheeze
Bonnie McDaniel on August 27, 2020 at 6:41 pm said:
Thanks! Many years, I get a Worldcon for my birthday. This year was just another day at the office, albeit an eleven-hour-long one. Good thing my commute is just from my bedroom to my “office” in my living room and has been for some years. (The pandemic lockdown for me only means I haven’t been to my nominal “office” in the Bay Area for over a year now.)
Chris Rose: as someone who has a fair amount of direct, actual experience with the software the writer described as “robust”…
It seems clear from the proposal that its author has never participated in either the Hugo Awards administration process, the Hugo Awards Ceremony, Worldcon Programming, or the Business Meeting.
9) I really need to reread Darrell Schweitzer’s Mask of the Sorcerer one of these days.
(9) Ira Levin’s late-1960s novel This Perfect Day, by virtue of the popularity of his earlier work, made it into the libraries of many book-club members (including my parents) who wouldn’t otherwise have bought an overtly SF hardcover novel. Yet it seems to have no reputation at all within SF. Theories?
[I found it rather memorable when I first read it (I was probably 15), and still can recall many details including the poem with which it begins – although the ultimate vulnerability of UniComp (what, no backups?) seems absurd today.]
gottacook says Ira Levin’s late-1960s novel This Perfect Day, by virtue of the popularity of his earlier work, made it into the libraries of many book-club members (including my parents) who wouldn’t otherwise have bought an overtly SF hardcover novel. Yet it seems to have no reputation at all within SF. Theories?
I have no idea. I’d never heard of it and didn’t take the time to verify it was SF, so didn’t include it. I’ll certainly will do so the next time I list his Birthday. It never got made into a film, nor did the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby.
Now playing: Marianne Faithfull’s “Why’d Ya Do It” which surely didn’t get radio play.
4) That headline is a lie; the article does not question the why of it. I wonder how much of this is due to negotiations, though; I remember… I think it was Kameron Hurley… saying that she has a minimum and if people won’t come up to at least that much for optioning she tells them not to waste her time.
@Cat Eldridge: “Now playing: Marianne Faithfull’s “Why’d Ya Do It” which surely didn’t get radio play.”
You’d be surprised.
9) Happy birthday, Kevin.
14) Thanks for sharing, Mike. BTW, you can see several of the novels of today’s birthday girl Ann Aguirre in the photo, because I’m a big fan of her work.
13) There has been a video of the Tsar Bomba explosion floating around the internet for a while now, but that one was taken from further away, probably because it’s difficult to hide an explosion that big. This video seems to be official material by the Red Army.
(9) I was at that Westercon Business Meeting.
Herding fen is herding cats on a good day. Herding fen into proper parliamentary procedure on only a few hours’ notice with emotions running high and a plea from LASFS (who own the “Westercon” trademark and are thus the court of last resort) to “Don’t make us decide. We don’t want to piss off half the West Coast” is not a good day. Oh and of course the whole thing was being streamed live so All Of Fandom Was Plunged Into (Twitter) War.
Happily the resulting Westercon was utterly delightful.
(10) Tim’s conjured up a true hellscape there. Except Scottish people don’t frighten me. Well, maybe Glaswegians a tiny bit. But nowhere near as much as Boris Johnson.
(14) First thought: “Cool.” Second thought: “Ancillary Eyeballs”.
@lurkertype: I mean, given the state of the Radch’s ability to brain mod, that’s maybe not that farfetched…
15) The album sleeve of Goodnight Vienna features Ringo dressed as Klaatu with Gort. (Do I get a beverage out of pointing out that Gort was the robot?)
Gort! Pixlet ovroscroll!
9) I have heard a This Perfect Day filksong, so it’s not forgotten, just obscure.
9bis) Devlin had a small acting role as one of William Atherton’s student drudges in Real Genius, one of my favorite films.
14) So that’s where the shoggoths got off to.
But apart from that…
Soon Lee: But apart from that…
😀
(3)
I’m very much in favour of tools being standardised and handed over, but I’m not convinced that creating another layer of committees is the way to do it.
(9) Kelly Freas entry: the hero of Slan is “Jommy” Cross.
(8) The Labyrinth actually IS in print, as part of the collection Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels, which also contains Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and Under in the Mere.
These early works of Valente are more abstract and literary than many of her later ones, but fans of literary SFF may find them a treat. I especially like The Labyrinth, in fact.
Never read the book, but from reviews, got the hymn stuck in my head.
Jay Blanc was a volunteer at the Dublin and Helsinki Worldcons, per this tweet, and has been talking WSFS Constitution issues for a while. While I admire the boldness of your assertion, it seems unlikely to me that an attending member would dive into the arcane subject of Worldconstitutional Law without having participated in a business meeting. That would be like skipping the Sorting Ceremony at Hogwarts.
rcade: it seems unlikely to me that an attending member would dive into the arcane subject of Worldconstitutional Law without having participated in a business meeting. That would be like skipping the Sorting Ceremony at Hogwarts.
Yes, it would be, wouldn’t it? And yet, based on their proposal and their tweets, that’s obviously what they did. Perhaps you should go point out to them that they should do the Sorting Ceremony first.
Clickity
“Wow, this obviously awesome system wasn’t used. I wonder why that is? Maybe I should ask someone. Nah, that would be silly, I’ll just create a constitutional amendment instead.”
Kyra says These early works of Valente are more abstract and literary than many of her later ones, but fans of literary SFF may find them a treat. I especially like The Labyrinth, in fact.
Yes they are. My favorite work by her is The Orphan’s Tale which I really wish had come out in hardcover. It deserved being so done.
Now playing: Clannad’s “An Gabhar Ban” off Clannad 2.
I don’t have a problem with him floating a first draft of a WSFS amendment 11 months before the con. There’s plenty of time for it to attract co-submitters and make changes if the idea has any legs.
It would have been better received if he had privately brought in more submitters and they worked on it together before releasing a draft, but what he did isn’t much different than proposing major Retro Hugo changes in a File 770 comment or how E Pluribus Hugo began. (Anyone remember how many co-submitters it had at first announcement?)
The idea of having a standing committee that supports the technology of Worldcon, including the Hugo Awards process, appeals to me. I don’t know that it needs to be extended to cover the administration and issues like qualification.
lurkertype on August 27, 2020 at 10:07 pm said:
Not streamed, which possibly was for the best. Recorded and posted as soon thereafter as my bandwidth would allow, which in this case means a week after the convention (July 12, 2011, to be precise). (Also, in those days YouTube had an upload limit, so it’s on Vimeo.
And I agree that we got an excellent Westercon out of the process, so I guess we could say that the system worked, even though it was a bunch of extra work. And I do know how to deal with the same situation more effectively should it ever happen again.
(Short version: go into Committee of the Whole as soon as possible to discuss the various proposals informally and allow lots of test votes, rather than paint ourselves into a parliamentary corner the way we nearly did in San José in 2011.)
Unambiguous statement:
Software for Hugo stuff is already offered to every seated Worldcon. Nothing needs to be done to get that to start happening.
The conventions make decisions about whether or how to use it based on their needs and requirements and unless you’re in the very small group of people at the top of the food chain for the Hugos on any particular year, you are going to (appropriately) be entirely ignorant about the reasons for the choices…..but there are always purposeful reasons that conventions choose not to use a particular solution. Just because you don’t know what the reason is doesn’t mean the decision was inappropriate.
I follow this particular stuff very closely and even though I really disagree with a few of the reasons historically for not using existing software….at every stage it’s been the seated convention’s right to make that choice because they have the responsibility to put something forward that fits what they want to do and you have to let the seated conventions do that.
People who are not responsible for the event need to let the ones who are actually be responsible.
Sometimes mistakes happen, sometimes things take longer than expected, but this is only a very occasional problem and not something that requires entire new levels of permanent WSFS bodies that the organization has repeatedly shown it doesn’t want.
@lurkertype: …with emotions running high…
Pre-coffee, I read that as “with emoticons running high”.
As a full-time software developer I don’t understand why any Worldcon is choosing to create new software to do anything, particularly important tasks like collecting Hugo nominations and votes. The decision to do that might be purposeful but it’s also an extremely risky one. If software is available that works and has proven itself in a past Worldcon, use it. Don’t take the chance of having to delay the vote because of problems that arise. New software that has never been used by actual users always has bugs.
One of the reasons is that asking members to create >1 account is friction not all cons want, but any long-running stack would need to be integrated into the membership systems of each con as they go, and those vary a lot more than the hugo nomination and voting process. Single sign-on would be something that would need to carry over, for example. There’s the confounding part where worldcon members have this bizarre “you can’t use email as an anchor to identity because waves hands” (and if you want to get me ranting, ask me about that one person who fucking insisists that they don’t have an email, which is utter horseshit)
Another reason is that software that is written isn’t necessarily maintained, and that carries a cost of its own; in general the frameworks that were relevant 5 years ago have at least been upgraded, but in some cases have simply faded into obscurity. There’s work involved in keeping those up. Software isn’t static, and it’s not reasonable to build it once and then re-use that way. At some point, it becomes “impossible” to do the incremental work as the world moves on.
It’s also a purely volunteer thing; con staffing for skilled IT folks is hard enough as it is, and finding volunteers who want to work on maintaining the old stuff instead of building new is even harder. Devs generally like coding, not patching.
(I should note that I’m writing these out not because I think you don’t know them, rcade, but because it’s probable that not all readers here do)
That’s true but writing from scratch is also something you’re warned about all the time by experienced devs. You just end up with new bugs to fix and a lot of lessons to relearn you learned in the old codebase.
Everything I saw of Helsinki’s code was first rate and the bulk of it was open source. It wasn’t an ancient framework or platform that needed to be dropped because nobody is available who wants to work on that any more.
Thanks for offering your perspective.
I read ‘This Perfect Day’ way back when but constantly confuse it with “Brave New World”.
Probably because I read them both about the same time.
IIRC, and I probably don’t, that was also about the time I read “Future Shock” and “I Will Fear No Evil”.
@rcade I have experience with the Kansa system (Helsinki/Dublin’s reg system) as well, having operated it to run the Chicago in 2022 bid presupport registration system, and I’ve operated CoNZealand’s system, having modified it to support Chicon 8’s registration. I … do not agree with the characterization of Kansa as first rate, I’m sorry to say, which is why after the bid we elected not to proceed with it for the con itself. I can get into detail, but I don’t think it’d be a productive thing to do here; hit me up via DM on Twitter if you’re interested. I’m not entirely sold on the CoNZealand codebase as a sustainable system there either, but I have higher hopes for it than I did for Kansa.
I think that the structure of the worldcon bid/seat process makes the creation of a mature product difficult, but that’s partially separate from issues of code quality or maintainability.
The seated Worldcon is making thousands of decisions and most of them involve some form of risk.
While running long and being late is inconvenient to the members, it doesn’t materially damage the process. As someone who has administered the awards several times, I can tell you the vast majority of our nominations and votes come in the final week. CoNZealand had enough time available for both that the awards were not damaged by it.
There are a lot of variables about software the convention uses that cross boundaries of responsibility and the Hugo software definitely crosses areas since it is required to communicated heavily with whatever registration system is in place and there is no such thing as a perfect package for us in reg software….our memberships are finicky and we change stuff about them every year.
The existence of a negative outcome (especially in a scenario impacted by a pandemic) is not evidence in any way that NZ made an irresponsible decision.
While you understand the development aspect of it, until you’re responsible for the convention and the Hugos and actually have to look at what all the decisions are and make them in concert in a way that makes sense for your team…..your opinion on what should happen isn’t the most informed.
@Chris Rose
Each convention should have its own set of accounts, not sharing them with others. Even if they’re using the same software, they wouldn’t be sharing it.
(7) RIP Scooby Forever (stamp)
I don’t claim expertise over how the whole Worldcon is run, just how software is developed. That’s why I prefaced my comments with the fact that I do that for a living. When I hear new software is being created by a Worldcon I cringe.
Do I know there’s never a good reason to start from scratch? No. But in my experience it’s done a lot more than it’s needed. That’s great for me because it keeps me in work, but organizationally it’s often buying more hassles than the perceived benefit.
I’m surprised to hear member registration systems change so often. That would obviously put requirements on every other system that has to integrate with registration. But the user requirements are pretty much the same each year, no?
Andrew (not Werdna): Those reviews you read were wrong-headed if they called “Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei…” a “hymn”; at the outset of the book, it’s described as “Child’s rhyme for bouncing a ball.”
Also (as anyone who’s read it knows), the rhyme contains what turns out to be a salient plot point…
@gottacook – no, that’s my error.
@rcade
Each years convention is in complete control of what kinds of memberships are available (there are always more than just supporting and attending) and even on this covered ground there are administrative decisions about transferability and process for same that change from year to year because each convention is making decisions that are best for them. It is not simple.
Just to cover my bona fides on this particular topic….
1) Software developer for 30+ years at this point
2) Former chair of the convention (the only one in recent memory that was actually forced to write Hugo software).
3) Hugo admin 3x
4) Original developer of the Hugo administration package (back end, not website) that’s been used about half the time since 2014.
I hear what you’re saying on people choosing to develop far too often and for insufficient reasons. I really do. I disagree with several particular choices about development in recent history….
However, the other part of my experience (admin and chair of convention) put a very different spin on things and I remain convinced that the right answer to to keep our hands off of the seated convention and let them make the decisions that are best for them, even when we disagree.
We have the luxury on the outside of caring about things the way we choose to and none of us are really going to be forced to make everything work and work together. If the seated convention believes it’s in their interest to cover this ground a different way, they need to be trusted to do it. We already trusted them with our legacy and responsibility for more than a million dollars of our money. Trying to steer administrative decisions is just back seat driving.
The folks who have been connected to this stuff and care are making sure there are tools available to the convention, but we don’t take offense when the tools are not used because we know the decisions there are not as simple as they appear from the outside.
@9 (Freas): according to a conversation with him, he adapted the Analog cover. He said that they asked him to come to a concert to see what they looked like in action; it was the loudest place he’d ever been.
(3) Perhaps I’m reading it wrong, but it seems like the committee would have no power at all unless the seated worldcon turned over administration of the Hugos to the advisory committee, and I can’t see any worldcon doing that. and if that’s the case, the proposal is kind of pointless.
(3) Maybe the committee can maintain a repository of software that’s been successfully used, so wheels don’t have to be reinvented.
That’s already happening.
In the past 10 years only one Worldcon has had to write Hugo software because nothing that had worked in the prior couple years was available. That was in 2012 and the situation was remedied, software has been perpetually available and offered to the seated Worldcons for their use….though nature of the web means the front end is likely to never be a “finished product” and need constant updating.
@cathy
I think the point is to establish a central place that new Worldcon administrators can go to obtain pre-existing tools and resources, and that they can then deposit such tools and resources they develop for future Worldcon use.
If a new Worldcon admin doesn’t know how to get the tools that previous ones used, this would be useful. However, my uninformed view is that new admins already know previous admins pretty well, and channels already exist to transfer corporate knowledge if desired.
So all it does is formalize something that already exists, informally.