Pixel Scroll 8/1 Scroll forth, my song, like the rushing river

Ten stories, three videos and a partridge in a pear tree.

(1) It’s a privilege to be included in this Sasquan program item:

Writing About Controversies

M. J. Locke [Laura Mixon] , John Scalzi , Mike Glyer , William Frank (Moderator) , Eric Flint

Since before the Great Exclusion Act of 1939, the science-fiction community has had its share of controversies, feuds and flame wars — between pros, between fans, between pros and fans. Maybe more than its share. Discussion about these controversies — whether in fanzines or online — has often generated more heat than light.  How can we research and write about controversial issues in the field? Is it ever possible to just stick to the facts?  Panelists talk about what they’ve learned about how to approach these issues.

August 23, 3:00 p.m., CC – Bays 111A

(2) Fraser Cain discusses what would happen if a black hole met an antimatter black hole.

Here’s the part you care about. When equal amounts of matter and antimatter collide, they are annihilated. But not disappeared or canceled out. They’re converted into pure energy.

As Einstein explained to us, mass and energy are just different aspects of the same thing. You can turn mass into energy, and you can turn energy into mass.

Black holes turn everything, both matter and energy, into more black hole.

Imagine a regular flavor and an antimatter flavor black hole with the same mass slamming together. The two would be annihilated and turn into pure energy.

Of course, the gravity of a black hole is so immense that nothing, not even light can escape. So all energy would just be turned instantaneously into more black hole. Want more black hole? Put things into the black hole.

Cain says if this is your rescue plan in case you fall into a black hole, you’re out of luck.

(3) You may need a break after science-ing the shit out of that last item. Here’s the comic relief.

[Bill] Nye recently read some unflattering tweets in support of a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about him, which, to be honest, we kind of hope just turns out to be two more hours of tweets.

 

(4) Ken Liu’s novel Grace of Kings is available from the Kindle Store for $1.99 today, as I learned from SF Signal. So far I’ve only read his short fiction. Now I’m diving into his novels.

(5) I listened to five minutes of the Superversive Hugo livestream today, long enough to hear a male voice opine that No Award will not win any of the categories. And I thought to myself, that kind of boldly contrarian thinking is exactly what a livestream panel needs to pull an audience.

(6) Talk about a dog’s breakfast…

(7) Tempest Bradford has a modest proposal.

Does she mean that literally, or is this another case where an idea suffers because it can’t be fully unpacked in a tweet? Think of all the minority/marginalized groups cishet white men belong to. Religious minorities. People with disabilities. Participants in 12 Step programs. (Do I need to say that I have seen convention panels involving each of these topics?) This rule needs to go back to the drawing board.

(8) August 2 is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day.

The modern version of the ice cream sandwich was invented by Jerry Newberg in 1945 when he was selling ice cream at Forbes Field.  There are pictures from the early 1900?s, “On the beach, Atlantic City”, that show Ice Cream Sandwiches were popular and sold for 1 cent each.

And here is the ObSF ice cream sandwich content.

c_c_sandwich_1

(9) I think it’s rather sad that the person who took the trouble of setting up this robotic tweet generator doesn’t know how to spell Torgersen.

(10) File 770’s unofficial motto is “It’s always news to someone.” The Hollywood Reporter must feel the same way. Capitalizing on the imminent release of Fantastic Four, THR just ran a story about the first (1994) movie adaptation of the comic produced by Roger Corman.

If you haven’t seen the movie that’s not because it was a box office bust. It was never allowed to get anywhere near the box office. Sony exec Avi Arad ended up destroying every available print.

Here’s the trailer, uploaded to YouTube in 2006.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

262 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/1 Scroll forth, my song, like the rushing river

  1. Kurt Busiek @7:39: What annoys me particularly about this in comics is that comics, even in the US, were not a boy thing, not for a long time. Not until the comics industry chased off most of the casual readers and rebuilt the business around committed, largely-male hobbyists.

    And now that we’re starting to see success in reaching wider audiences again…aiee! Threat!

    That’s happened in a number of fields. : sometimes things get worse before they (we hope) get better.

    The word “computer”, for example, started life as a feminine noun referring to the women who programmed the machines.

  2. And … the bracket!

    1. EDUCATION
    The Riddle-Master of Hed, Patricia McKillip
    The Princess Bride, William Goldman

    Riddle Master’s lyricism sounds out over Goldman’s cynicism.

    2. EXPLORATION
    Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
    Watership Down, Richard Adams

    Because the bottom line is that Small Goods is on my short list of books to demonstrate how incredibly good Pratchett was.

    3. MATURATION
    The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
    The Once and Future King, T. H. White

    To tell the truth, Arthurania and the values it promotes makes my teeth grind. Tombs is also a story about growth and overcoming limitations.

    4. DESOLATION
    Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
    The Dying Earth, Jack Vance

    The cynicism is gentler and more subtle in The Dying Earth, but no less potent. And he really outmatches Zelazney when ur congress to evocative weird scenery.

    5. RESTORATION
    The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
    Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart

    Much as I love something non-European in setting, the bittersweet sense of loss and struggle makes me remember The Last Unicorn more.

    6. GENERATION
    The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones.

    Because every fantasy writer should read it BEFORE writing their novel.

  3. Hampus:

    And Willingham being the reason for Fables being women-friendly? Naaah. Example of his script:

    The scripts don’t (usually) get published. Just the dialogue. Art directions are where you communicate to artist and editor what’ll get drawn.

    And yes, Bill’s the reason FABLES is so women-friendly. He’s not the only reason — if it were drawn by someone who was all veins and muscles and gritting teeth, I doubt it would be anywhere near as attractive as it has been with Bucky and the various other artists who’ve drawn it.

    But the stories, the characters, these are what make the book female-friendly. Not the panel descriptions. And FABLES is full of compelling female characters with agency, who don’t take a subservient role to the male characters. That’s Bill’s doing.

  4. The main characters in Jane Austen novels do not behave like that. In general the ones who cry, squeal, or swoon are either imbeciles or gold-diggers.

    I read his comment and wondered if he’d ever actually read Austen, or if he’s just going by his idea of what romance novels should be.

  5. For some reason, my brain has kicked up the title suggestion of:

    “Scroll, Scroll, Scroll in the Hay…”

  6. [off topic] Just saying thanks to Jim Henley, Cat, Snowcrash and other people here who recently pointed people to my Unified Puppy Theory essay. Somewhere along the way it seems to have got on Twitter (I don’t partake of Twitter* so I’m not sure who tweeted it) and I’ve had a bit of deluge of readers today (‘a bit’ as in today’s number of visitors to the blog equals the grand total of visitors for all of July).

    [*And don’t intend to having reached that bit in Seveneves where gur abgnoyr fbpvny zrqvn fpvrapr pbzzhavpngbe jub raqrq hc rngvat uvf bja yrtf, unf unq fhpu n phygheny vzcnpg ba shgher fbpvrgl gung na nqinapr grpuabybtvpny pvivyvfngvba nibvqf fbpvny zrqvn yvxr n yvgreny cynthr.]

  7. I read his comment and wondered if he’d ever actually read Austen, or if he’s just going by his idea of what romance novels should be.

    Could be that. Could be a joke between him and the artist, or the editor.

    Either way, he didn’t put that sort of thing into the stories. As long as it let the artist know what kind of moment was needed in the panel, it did its job.

  8. Stevie: Of course, anybody who has talked to the microbiologists knows that antibiotic resistance will take us out before global warming gets its chance. In ten years we will have lost almost all of modern medicine, because we no longer have functional antibiotics, and without it we are screwed. The Chief Medical Officer pointed this out recently, but almost everyone ignored it; they have lost the ability to deal with hard facts, because it’s so much easier to ignore them.

    I’ve got some really good news for you there.

    Climate change isn’t going to kill us all – as best I can tell, the worst case scenarios have it only collapsing civilization and turning us back into a few hundred million people living in poverty and squalor in a polluted, swampy world – not that much different from the majority of the human race’s existence. Except for no longer having the resources to build civilization again.

    And the great thing about that is not only did humanity survive without antibiotics during this period, the collapse of civilization will make life far more difficult for great pandemics. So apart from your family probably all dying in the collapse, the survivors existing as barbarians without hope of recovery, and the ruins of our society serving as a permanent reminder to them of what they lost, it’ll be all good.

  9. Hmm, I went looking around for some info on Willingham, since I’d never heard of him before this thread, and I found a discussion on this thread at RPG.net, where a lot of comic fans, some of them women, seem somewhat disillusioned by him:

    [..] my then-girlfriend and I were told that Fables is amazing, so we read it, and it was amazing, and I likewise had his experience of “there is some weird shit in here, but I’m sure it’s just meant to reflect that fairy tales are fucked up and FableTown is a fucked up situation.” And I kept having mostly goodwill toward the author, even after the Israel thing, and even after the arc where the Arabic fables show up and have to be taught to submit to civilized European values, and maybe even a bit past the reclamation of the homelands. It ebbed away slowly, drop by drop, but I just had so much pent-up goodwill from the early arcs, you know?

    Then I read Jack of Fables. And then I started to learn more about Bill Willingham. And that’s when I had my Verbal Kint moment and realized that all of the stuff I had sort of glossed over were not mis-steps, they were the point, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel like reading Fables anymore.

    If Willingham was ever good at writing women characters, that seems overshadowed by later developments. Of which this mis-managed panel is just one.

  10. And … the bracket!

    1. EDUCATION
    The Princess Bride, William Goldman

    2. EXPLORATION
    Small Gods, Terry Pratchett

    3. MATURATION
    The Once and Future King, T. H. White

    4. DESOLATION
    Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny

    5. RESTORATION
    Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart

    6. GENERATION
    (Free bracket)
    You already know what I am going to put here: Silverlock
    “If I had cared for it to win, it would have lost”

  11. Ooops, just realized Silverlock will be ruled ineligible. Edit function timed out while I was trying to erase it. Back to the drawing board.

  12. Robert Reynolds: One answer before I otherwise respect NelC’s request: you seem to assume that acknowledging the existence of other axes of oppression, of other marginalizations, will in some way erase your own. Or at least that my comment was dismissive of your own, in the same way you read Tempest’s necessarily incomplete listing of several such axe to be. I can’t speak for Tempest’s list, but I can say for myself, this is not so. Mistreatment of the disabled is very much a Thing. It’s insufficiently talked of, and too often erased.

    But what I am asking is that you not deny other people their encounters with prejudice and oppression because of your own. Willingham’s asshattery exists, and Tempest’s frustration with the straight white cis male population has some really obvious sources, even if her failure to add able-bodied, middle-class-or-higher, neurotypical and others leaves people on those axes feeling stung once more in their turn. (and if white dudes who don’t do the dickery, like Mike and yourself, still feel tarred by her insufficiently nuanced take.)

    Your pain is valid. So is hers. Neither should erase the other.

  13. I’m not sure Silverlock WAS in a bracket. It’s not on my list of stuff from the brackets I haven’t read. So either I deleted it by error or it was only ever a write-in.

  14. I have celebrated icecream sandwitch day with a klondike bar which is technically not a ‘sandwitch’ but close enough !

    The brackets look to be close, its going to be another tough one this round and next round will be even more hard choices. I love all the write in candidates, some I have read but others are unread and I look forward to reading them when I get a chance.

  15. Matthew Johnson on August 2, 2015 at 8:07 pm said:

    The word “computer”, for example, started life as a feminine noun referring to the women who programmed the machines.

    Not to invalidate or disagree with anything else you said, but no. The word “computer” existed centuries before there were calculating machines, and referred to people who did calculations. The 1971 edition of the OED defines computer as “One who computes; a calculator, reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.” with citations from 1646, 1704, and 1855. Surprisingly for 1971, this is the only definition.

  16. even after the arc where the Arabic fables show up and have to be taught to submit to civilized European values,

    You’re quoting someone else, Nel, but I’ll point out here that one of those “European values” the quotee sees the Arabic fables as being taught to “submit to” is that women aren’t chattel. It’s less a clash between Arabic values and European values than it is a clash between the rules and laws of a culture that remained what it was centuries ago, and those of a culture that had New York grow up around it and change everything. Snow White, Beauty and Cinderella didn’t grow up in a culture that was dramatically kinder to women than Scheherazade did. But they’d grown into one, as had most of Fabletown’s male Fables. One never really got the idea Prince Charming got it, though.

    Hansel and Prince Brandish are “European fables,” but having not spent time in Fabletown, they’re every bit as medieval about women as the cultures they sprang from. So it seems less about the Arabic fables being Arabic and more about them not having had modernizing experiences.

  17. I have celebrated icecream sandwich day with a klondike bar which is technically not a ‘sandwich’ but close enough !

    The brackets look to be close, its going to be another tough one this round and next round will be even more hard choices. I love all the write in candidates, some I have read but others are unread and I look forward to reading them when I get a chance.

  18. @Camestros, I gotta admit when I came to both those points in Seveneves, I spent about ten minutes wondering whether I should be horrified or amused.

    (for the record, first instance horrified, second instance amused)

  19. I’ve had a bit of deluge of readers

    Camestros, congratulations. You have a terrific blog. Everyone should check it out – especially “puppies,” to get a creative alternative take on the issues without being growled at. My favorite is still “The Parliament of Cheese and Curds.” I really hope fandom can tamp down the rhetorical arms race. If you put together a compilation, I’d love to put it on my next ballot.

  20. Hmm, my editing of sandwitch to sandwich seems to have resulted in a double post when the browser reloaded.

    Sorry about that … maybe the universe is telling me I am allowed another sandwich 😉

  21. I add my words in agreement that your blog Camestros is excellent. I have read through some of the postings and they are very interesting. The puppy analysis was lucid and I found myself in agreement with much of it.

  22. Kurt — You’re doing that thing Brian Z does, of concentrating on a minor point so much that you’ve apparently lost sight of the main thrust of the comment. Which is, to be explicit, great as Willingham may have been at some other space-time co-ordinate, that doesn’t have a lot to do with him being a jerk now.

    Lovely, cuddly human being and a pleasure to work with he might be with you, say, but that doesn’t mean that he’s incapable of losing the plot in other circumstances. There was a lot of corroborative correspondence in the Mary Sue post as to his jerkiness on this occasion, and a substantive number of posters at RPG.net saying that even his comics aren’t all that, considered as a whole. To concentrate on your interpretation of some plot point that I don’t even know anything about makes it seem like you see the argument but are trying to avoid acknowledging it. Like, at all.

  23. Then I will vote with my heart, and vote for the Susan Cooper. The Grey King, I think, though I’d happily vote for the whole Dark Is Rising Sequence, if allowed.

    And it may be that Kyra is a faceless demon from the dimensions of madness who gorges herself upon our suffering, but she does brilliantly witty filk and is a lovely raconteur. She’s welcome in my salons any day.

  24. since I don’t see Kyra closing the voting, I’ll leap in now:

    1. EDUCATION
    **The Princess Bride, William Goldman
    —–
    Because it’s actually more novel and complex. Also, I love Inigo Montoya
    SO MUCH.

    2. EXPLORATION
    **Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
    – no contest

    3. MATURATION
    **The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
    ——
    standing in for all of Earthsea.

    4. DESOLATION
    **Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny

    5. RESTORATION
    **The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

    6. GENERATION
    Illusion by Paula Volsky

  25. Kurt Busiek – pull up a chair and kick your shoes off!

    I’ll say one thing about Kurt. Though he may sometimes run with a pack of armchair activists, he does frequently speak from the strength of his convictions, which is something I rarely mind reading about.

  26. snowcrash on August 2, 2015 at 9:27 pm said:

    @Camestros, I gotta admit when I came to both those points in Seveneves, I spent about ten minutes wondering whether I should be horrified or amused.

    Yes, likewise 🙂
    And thanks Brian and Shambles for the kind comments.

  27. You’re doing that thing Brian Z does, of concentrating on a minor point so much that you’ve apparently lost sight of the main thrust of the comment. Which is, to be explicit, great as Willingham may have been at some other space-time co-ordinate, that doesn’t have a lot to do with him being a jerk now.

    I haven’t said anything about “him being a jerk now.” I wasn’t at the panel, I have no reason to doubt the accounts of people who were, and I haven’t suggested anyone should.

    The stuff I’ve brought up has no bearing on whether Bill was a jerk on that panel, I haven’t pretended it does, and if you think I have I think you’re misreading. However, the flipside of all this is that Bill being a jerk on that panel similarly has no bearing on whether FABLES was a big success with female readers or whether Bill’s writing abilities are the major reason why.

    So when someone says Bill can’t possibly be the reason for FABLES’ success because of a panel description readers did not see, I think I’m on solid ground disagreeing. That’s not a matter of losing sight of the main thrust of the comment, because it’s a response to a different comment.

    I also think that, in the wake of one of the characters making an analogy comparing Fabletown to Israel, Bill got a lot of pushback from people who suddenly realized he was a conservative, which led to what I think are misreadings like the one you quoted above. But the New York fables preventing the Arabic fable delegation from treating the women who were part of running Fabletown like dirt is not really germane to a con panel that happened years later, nor is it an example of Bill having problems writing women, as you seemed to be implying it did.

    So if you’re trying to say, “You can’t push back when I quote this thing from years back that’s about Fabletown standing up for modern women because it gets in the way of saying Bill was a jerk on this panel,” I have to disagree. The two are unrelated, and I don’t think disagreeing with the one means I’m losing sight of the other.

    Lovely, cuddly human being and a pleasure to work with he might be with you, say, but that doesn’t mean that he’s incapable of losing the plot in other circumstances.

    I may be misremembering, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked with Bill, nor have I said he can’t lose the plot in other circumstances. I have no real desire to cuddle him, either.

    Conversely, behaving poorly on a con panel also doesn’t mean that he’s a bad writer, or that all criticism of his writing you can find on the internet is therefore well-grounded and accurate. Just as you point out that him being a good collaborator (which I’m told he is by those who’ve collaborated with him) doesn’t mean his panel behavior can have been bad, so too does bad panel behavior not mean he can’t be a good writer. Works both ways.

    There was a lot of corroborative correspondence in the Mary Sue post as to his jerkiness on this occasion,

    And what have I said that you think denies any of that corroboration?

    and a substantive number of posters at RPG.net saying that even his comics aren’t all that, considered as a whole.

    I disagree with those posters. Disagreeing with those posters does not equate to disagreement about the panel.

    To concentrate on your interpretation of some plot point that I don’t even know anything about

    It’s a plot point you brought up.

    makes it seem like you see the argument but are trying to avoid acknowledging it. Like, at all.

    I don’t follow this at all, I’ll admit. If you think the stuff you quoted is irrelevant, to the point that responding to it constitutes dodging the original point, why quote it in the first place?

    What you seem to be saying is that by not agreeing with you when you cite criticisms of stories you haven’t read as proof that he’s not a good writer (something that has no bearing on the original subject), I’m not being sufficiently condemnatory of Bill. I think that’s nonsense. I expect there are people who were at the panel, thought Bill was a jerk, and still think he’s a good writer.

    But if it’ll help you out, I don’t, haven’t and won’t make any defense of Bill’s behavior on the panel. I wasn’t there, and have no more to go on than you do, and no reason to doubt any of it.

    That does not mean, however, that I won’t disagree when people say Bill’s not a good writer, that he’s not responsible for the success of the series he created or that he’s lost his skill at writing women by having those women stand up to medieval treatment. If you think you know more about Bill’s skills or record, having not heard of him before today, because you read some negative discussion somewhere, well, it’s an awfully neat parallel, after you said I was acting like Brian, to say you’re acting like Tuomas, but it sure seems to fit.

  28. Brian:

    Kurt Busiek – pull up a chair and kick your shoes off!

    I’d have to get up out of this chair and put my shoes on before I could do that.

    I’ll say one thing about Kurt. Though he may sometimes run with a pack of armchair activists, he does frequently speak from the strength of his convictions, which is something I rarely mind reading about.

    Spoken as someone who doesn’t even manage to be an armchair activist. You’re an armchair someone-else-be-active-ist, and you don’t appear to have any convictions, given your track record at dumping an argument as if you’d never made it (sometimes even lying about having made it) in order to adopt the latest talking point from Puppydom.

    Comparing me to you was the most insulting part of Nel’s post. The rest just seems to be misunderstanding — he can’t figure out why I’m talking about non-panel-related Bill things in response to other people saying non-panel-related Bill things, because it doesn’t seem to defend the panel-related stuff.

    Since I wasn’t trying to defend the panel-related stuff, hopefully I’ve cleared that up.

  29. Man, I really screwed up with the blockquote function in my response to Nel. And then didn’t catch it ’til after the deadline.

    Ah well, it’s still readable, if weird…

  30. Shoot. Wanted to reply to that amendment proposal of Paul’s but forgot to. Thanks to Brian Z for the reminder.

    @Paul, what is the aim of extending the eligibility period? Is it to give more time for lesser known works to gain visibility? Is it to give works that came out late in the year a fair go?

    I do see issues with it, formost of which is that allows works 2 bites at the apple. A simple fix would be to add wording to disqualify any work that was nominated in the year of publication. I would also go as far as to disqualify anything that was, say, the top 20 vote getters, as they would have had sufficient visibility but did not get the attention. However the latter is harder to word I think.

    Thus far I see a couple of reasons, but I’m currently opposed.

  31. At the risk of sticking myself into the middle of things….

    Kurt is right that Fables was a hit with women readers, almost immediately and for a long time. Look up reviews from the early ’00s at Goodreads, Amazon, comics news & reviews sites: the press was really favorable, from women as least as much as men. And that remained the case for a long time – here’s a typically articulate and thoughtful piece by Kelly Thompson, one of my favorite comics commentators, that she wrote in 2010.

    It is also true that Willingham has alienated more of his readership as time passes. By the time Fables started, darned few folks actively buying new comics from Vertigo remembered the hinkiness of the Elementals sex specials and such. But random asides and beats in the stories and random comments outside them in interviews and such turned some readers off. These things tend to accrete. But even now, monthly sales are much stronger than on many series so far into their run, and the collections sell like gangbusters, I’m given to understand.

    Kurt is right: Willingham has written many, many pages of stories that a lot of women have bought and enjoyed, and is certainly qualified to talk about what he knows, guesses, intuits, whatever, about the process. And Willingham’s critics are right: he was a terrible choice for moderator, and he’s managed to write and say many things that anger a bunch of women, who have stopped buying his stuff (or never started). These aren’t, I think, contradictory.

  32. But even now, monthly sales are much stronger than on many series so far into their run, and the collections sell like gangbusters, I’m given to understand.

    Not quite “even now,” since FABLES is now over. The second-to-last issue came out this past February. The last issue took until July to come out, because it wasn’t an ordinary monthly issue but a full-sized trade paperback, about six issues’ worth of material at once.

    But yeah, FABLES sold strongly until the end, and even that last issue sold huge, and even at a TPB price, sold out almost immediately.

    And the TPBs and hardcovers do indeed sell strongly. I expect they’ll continue to — and if and when they start to dip, DC/Vertigo will implore Bill to do a mini-series or something to add another volume to the stack and goose sales all over again.

    Heck, they’re probably imploring him already…

  33. Kurt: you’re welcome. You are right, I’m not an activist. Though, despite not seeing eye to eye with you on anything at all, I care about the genre, and if nothing else, I’m glad you do too.

  34. So, Brian, you’ve admitted to being most worried for how novelettes will fare at the Hugos, seeing that you think they’re the life blood of the genre, and have said that your favorite novelettes of late have been “the Chinese ones.”

    Since you missed it when Ursula asked you in the 7/30 thread, and missed it again when she asked you again in the 7/31 thread, which Chinese novelettes have been your favorites? Anything you’d nominate in the Hugos, seeing as how you want more people to nominate stuff, and this is the form you’re most worried about?

    Since you care so much about SF and the Hugos and all.

  35. Silverlock has indeed been on the bracket. It got placed into the Big Round on the strength of off-bracket votes, but it lost there to Little, Big.

  36. NelC: Kurt — You’re doing that thing Brian Z does

    Is this level of vicious, vitriolic insulting really necessary?

  37. Camestros – I tweeted your unified puppy piece yesterday, but more significantly, my tweet was retweeted by Charlie Stross, which probably accounts for most of your influx of readers. I hope they have been nice.

  38. Kurt Busiek:

    “You’re quoting someone else, Nel, but I’ll point out here that one of those “European values” the quotee sees the Arabic fables as being taught to “submit to” is that women aren’t chattel. It’s less a clash between Arabic values and European values than it is a clash between the rules and laws of a culture that remained what it was centuries ago, and those of a culture that had New York grow up around it and change everything.”

    That is not an argument, more something that makes it worse. It is not a random choice to let all arabic fables be stuck in middle ages and treating women like chattle. It is the political choice of the writer to describe them so and put them in that context. And it goes hand in hand with him taking a stand for Israel.

  39. Did Bill establish that all Arabic fables were stuck in the Middle Ages? That group of them were, certainly, but so were lots of European fables.

    But I’d say it is an argument — not for Bill being even-handed to Arabic fables, but against the idea that it proves Bill doesn’t write female-friendly material or had lost that knack, or something, which is what it was being cited for, it seemed to me. The Arab fables were sexist, and Fabletown didn’t accommodate that, just as they didn’t accommodate it with European fables.

    I’d still argue that it’s an example of the sort of writing that made FABLES quite popular with female readers. If offered as an argument that FABLES was not even-handed toward Arabic fairytale characters, I wouldn’t argue against that. But that wasn’t the point at hand.

  40. Checking back over the last few Pixel Scrolls, votes don’t really come in after midnight-by-the-posting-time, so I’m going to call a close to voting shortly, let’s say in half an hour.

  41. In the free bracket, there was a tie for first between The Black Company and Swordspoint, with The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter just behind them. I will randomly pick which of the winners goes in.

    All told, there were 30 works suggested. The top vote-getters got five votes apiece (9.4% of the votes cast.)

    I don’t normally bring up the Hugos when discussing the bracket, but in this case I can’t help but notice how much this brings home exactly how easy it is to game this kind of nomination system with a slate. If even a tenth of the voters had colluded in advance to vote on a specific work, rather than nominating what they thought was best, they would have won.

  42. In the paired brackets, we had two close races and three not-so-close races:

    WINNER: The Riddle-Master of Hed, Patricia McKillip – 30
    The Princess Bride, William Goldman – 27
    Hitting a tie over and over in a match reminiscent of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever vs. Dune, The Riddle-Master of Hed pulled forward at the end to just barely edge out The Princess Bride. Interestingly, this was the one match this round where no one actually voted for a tie.

    WINNER, seeded: Small Gods, Terry Pratchett – 35
    Watership Down, Richard Adams – 22
    It took the Holy Hand Grenade to do it, but the Vorpal Bunny has finally been eliminated. Watership Down has down the best yet against Small Gods (the scores in Small Gods’ previous matches were 38-11, 37-15, and 44-2), but the victory goes to Pratchett.

    WINNER, seeded: The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin – 38
    The Once and Future King, T. H. White – 19
    T. H. White gives Le Guin her toughest challenge yet, reaching fully half her vote total. The Once and Future King might have gone further than this, but a fairly tough match against Fire and Hemlock last round left it battered — or, at least, unseeded — setting it up for a fall in this one. (So, Fire and Hemlock fans, you have your revenge as DWJ strikes back from beyond the bracket.)

    WINNER, seeded: Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny – 38
    The Dying Earth, Jack Vance – 14
    Nine Princes in Amber handily defeats The Dying Earth. As clever as Cugel is, he cannot best Corwin. Also, Cugel wasn’t actually in The Dying Earth.

    WINNER: The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle – 31
    Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart – 25
    A fairly close match. The Last Unicorn pulled out ahead about midway through the voting, and while Bridge of Birds slowly closed the gap, it couldn’t make up the difference in the end.

  43. @Paul, what is the aim of extending the eligibility period? Is it to give more time for lesser known works to gain visibility? Is it to give works that came out late in the year a fair go?

    Yes, and yes. As for your another of your concerns, there would be no chance to double-dip. This includes declining one year’s nomination, which would disqualify you from the following year.

  44. Paulcarp, rather than a two-year eligibility (like the Campbells), what about a one-year, two years ago eligibility? Vote in 2020 on what came out in 2018? More time to read works, but less confusion with who is eligible. Of course, it’d take making really good notes on the readers’ parts, especially for the short fiction….

    (I’m not sure whether I like this proposal, but it does strike me as interesting.)

  45. Cassy B: I like your line of thought, but not for the Hugos. I actually think retro-Hugos would be a better arena for picking a year, any year, and re-visiting what (sh/w)ould have won.

    I read slow. I can’t finish 5 novels between January and nomination. Some years (Neuromancer/Spin/The Diamond Age), I get lucky, and have already read the work in question by the time it’s on the ballot. But this year? I only finished ANCILLARY JUSTICE in March. Too late to vote for it last year.

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