Check your tickets. The winning numbers today are 4 and 770.
(1) Our Fantastic Four correspondent James H. Burns has discovered a website for an imaginary 1963-1964 FF television series with many clever faux production photos.
Cast of the faux Four series.
Elizabeth Montgomery and Russell Johnson were producer William Frye’s first choices to play Sue Storm and Reed Richards. Although neither Johnson or Montgomery were yet huge stars, Frye had worked with both on separate episodes of Thriller. He had also enjoyed Johnson’s work in This Island Earth, and Montgomery had initially attracted his attention with her Emmy-nominated performance as doomed nightclub performer Rusty Heller in The Untouchables.
Episode #5 was written by Harlan Ellison, and others were scripted by sf stalwarts Jerome Bixby, Theodore Sturgeon and Charles Beaumont.
Why is it impossible to watch this classic today?
The tapes of the actual episodes and most of the production notes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in southern California in 1974.
Because — “Flame on!”
(2) MiceAge has the scoop on plans to add “Star Wars Land” and “Marvel Land” to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure respectively:
The majority of Star Wars Land in the northernmost park acreage will be inside a massive series of show buildings, meaning the land won’t have to close for fireworks fallout. The rides and shows in the land itself are being developed in a top secret Imagineering lab in Glendale with Imagineers signing extra confidentiality agreements because the plotlines and characters are pulled from the next three episodes in the Star Wars saga and the Lucasfilm folks understandably guard that information with their lives. But what we can tell you is that Star Wars Land will include multiple attractions, anchored by a mega E Ticket using a trackless vehicle that will break the mold when it comes to how theme park visitors interact with a ride environment.
And:
The plans to expand DCA again with a Marvel Land behind Tower of Terror continue to move ahead, and the E Ticket thrill ride that is planned to anchor that expansion is going to be very unique. The ride will feature a newly Imagineered hybrid ride system that might be best described as a combination of Rock N’ Roller Coaster and Universal’s Transformers ride using every trick and gimmick WDI can throw at it, including on-board audio and effects and elaborate sets and animatronics.
(3) The Star Wars franchise is expanding in every direction. Even cosmetics. Nerdist has loads of pictures of the CoverGirl Star Wars: The Force Awakens makeup collection.
The line includes six new lipstick colors, three shades of nail polish, and ten tubes of mascara featuring quotes from the Star Wars films–including the first six films and The Force Awakens. CoverGirl Global Creative Design Director Pat McGrath has come up with six different and dramatic looks using products from the collection, and those are being unveiled at CoverGirl’s Star Wars Tumblr.
There isn’t much at the Tumblr today, maybe later on. Plenty to look at in the Nerdist post, though.
(4) Syfy channel has plans to develop Frederik Pohl’s Hugo-winning Gateway into a series. Battlestar Galactica’s David Eick is involved.
(5) The New York Times reports on a variety of computers with personality – “Siri, Tell Me a Joke. No, a Funny One”
Fred Brown, founder and chief executive of Next IT, which creates virtual chatbots, said his company learned firsthand the importance of creating a computer with a sense of humor when he asked his 13-year-old daughter, Molly, to test Sgt. Star, the Army’s official chatbot, which allows potential recruits to ask questions about the Army, just as you would in a recruiting station. Molly was chatting with Sgt. Star when she looked up and said, “Dad, Sergeant Star is dumb.” When he asked why, she said, “He has to have a favorite color, and it can’t be Army green.” Turns out, more than a quarter of the questions people ask Sgt. Star have nothing to do with the Army after Next IT programmed it with more human answers.
(6) The last few lines of Brad R. Torgersen’s long comment on Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog are sufficient to give you the flavor of the full 7-course meal. (Scroll down. The direct link doesn’t work for me.)
So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.
If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.
Because — by golly! — somebody has to make things be safe!
(7) Some writers can’t fathom how File 770 gets credit for being a radical hangout.
https://twitter.com/katsudonburi/status/631942337413935104
(8) Today’s birthday boy: Alfred Hitchcock, born in 1899.
[Thanks to James H. Burns, Petréa Mitchell, Mark, Gregory Benford, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist .]
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Rick K, here’s your evil mastermind, who was given a publicity boost a few years ago when Chik-Fil-A tried to bully him out of making his t-shirts (they lost, definitively, at the end of last year).
“When VD says he’ll burn down the awards, he’s talking about doing something else.”
Yes he is. Don’t underestimate those people.
Yes, but why would we? SFWA has nothing to do with the Hugos. At all. Period. They are unrelated. If anything, if the Hugos crash and burn, the Nebulas get more prestigious. Why would SFWA want to reinstate Beale to save an unrelated thing that benefits them not at all?
Disclaimer:
I am not speaking on behalf of any professional publishing organization or entity. Anyone who thinks otherwise has the brains of a snow pea.
StephenfromOttawa:
You’re reading it correctly. Torgersen’s comments are hateful, overwrought, self-indulgent, and have near-zero basis in fact. Many of us are made uneasy by them. File 770 does a great public service by letting those of us who are interested keep track of the Puppies without having to read everything they write.
The important fact to know about the US culture wars of the last couple of decades is that the SF community hasn’t been part of them. Some of us are interested in politics, but the way we discuss political subjects is more like what you’ll see in the comment threads here, or at Making Light, or in John Scalzi’s The Whatever.
When Torgersen and Correia first showed up to conventions, no one despised them for being conservatives. What attention they got was for their writing. (Anyone else notice that their central narrative of victimhood is a fantasy about having the attention of the entire science fiction field focused on them?) The same is true of Theodore Beale — he was on the Nebula Jury twice, for pete’s sake.
All this rubbish about political polarization in the SF world is an attempt by the Pups to import the mundane culture wars into SF.
Why?
— So that they can pretend they’re being attacked and are just defending themselves, when in fact they’ve been the aggressors all along. This works well with the Far Right rank-and-file, many of whom are hooked on cheap anger and angsty victim roleplay.
— Because if they can sell this fraudulent narrative about the field being polarized, they can use it to lay claim to half the headspace of SF, even though they and their followers represent a much smaller fraction than that.
Why has their anger been ramping up these last few weeks? At a guess, because thousands of last-minute supporting members voted in the Hugo Awards, and the Pups don’t think those votes are theirs.
This would also explain the latest version of their story: that they’re all voting No Award too, because the whole system is corrupt. Which is nonsense. They just want to plant the idea that some of those No Award votes represent their guys — again, playing for more headspace than their real numbers can justify.
Just keep making people angry, that’s sowing the dragons teeth.
Uh-huh. Beale is able to scrape together a few hundred fools to follow him. That’s hardly dragon’s teeth. He’s hardly as scary as he likes to think he is.
Get a collective document together with a significant number of contributors, promising, among other things maybe, to press to have Beale restored to the SFWA.
So are you in favor of negotiating with terrorists too? Because what you’re essentially saying is “extortion works”.
RedWombat: Isn’t SFWA in favor of members making money? Kameron Hurley said winning a Hugo was financially helpful to her.
I admit that might move the needle just from “not at all” to “not nearly enough” as far as SFWA and Beale go.
Agreed.
Yeah – I read the Hoyt piece yesterday and it’s still chapping my hide. Especially, as others have noted quoting Hoyt:
“For 99% of them, if they had an ancestor who worked with his/her hands, it was buried in the mists of time.”
OK – I’ve been a life-long sf/f reader and sometimes writer. And my elitist American bona fides?
Dad – his family has been knocking around the US from Virginia to Mississippi since the 1600s, most of them as small-time farmers. My dad grew up on a cotton farm in rural Mississippi. To make ends meet, since the farm didn’t bring in enough, my grandfather drove a school bus and my grandmother taught school (without any degree, they could do that back in the day with nothing but a h.s. diploma). They scraped up just enough to send my dad’s sisters to trade school (think secretary and bookkeeping). My dad and his brothers had to work the farm or find their own way in the world. For my dad, that turned into a few years working in factories followed by 20+ years in the military and serving in two wars. My dad could part out and build car engines, he could put full electrical systems and plumbing systems into houses, and he did all of those things. He also planted and worked vegetable gardens everywhere we ever lived. He needed to, since most of his working life he never made much money. My dad’s hands were always scarred and scabbed over from cuts he got doing labor, even into his 70s. Incidentally, my dad was also a die-hard Democrat and said any working person who knew what was good for him or her would support labor unions.
Mom – my wonderful mom was born to 1st generation Italian immigrants; my grandfather was the son of a coal miner and himself was a mechanic and a coal miner. He was killed in a mine accident in rural New Mexico when my Mom was 5. My mom was born in a 3 room mining-town cabin, where my grandmother cooked meals on a coal stove. Until my mother was in elementary school, the house she lived in only had an outhouse. My mother learned to cook on coal stoves. After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother (who left school after 8th grade to finish raising her younger brothers and sisters) worked as a waitress and took care of her own father’s house. She relied on extended family to help her raise her children in rural Colorado and worked in one way or another until she was nearly 80. My grandmother lived with poverty her entire life. My mother was the second person on either side of my family to go to college (the first was her uncle, who the family scraped together to send to law school in the 20s, when tuition was something like $150 a year); my mother went to college on full scholarship and became a schoolteacher. She’s now 80 and she still tends her garden and her house. She relaxes with a little reading each day.
As for me – well, I grew up an Army brat and there was no money for college for me. I dug my heels in and got myself to an ivy-league alternative private college anyway, which I paid for through scholarships and loans. I got a hard-core liberal arts degree and then worked my way through graduate school in computer science. I’ve turned that education into a career in IT. I’m the 3rd person on either side of my families to attend any amount of college and the first one to go to graduate school. Which I paid for (am still paying for) on my own.
My dad didn’t like to read and was constantly making fun of my mother and I for liking to read. Nobody in my family read sf/f – I had to find that on my own too.
So Hoyt, et al. can bite me if they think I’ve some sort of elitist pedigree. My people have always works hard, with their hands. Normally for very little reward.
and, apparently, unlike the rest of us, they can’t go unless one of them has been nominated for an award? Is either one of them planning to go to Sasquan, or are they afraid of getting cooties if they’re in the same room as David Gerrold? Or being Sodomized by a Crusader?
ETA:
As of this evening, neither one of them is listed as being on the program, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since Lamplighter’s editor (who I believe is also David Gerrold’s current editor) will be at the con, but not on the program.
“Yes, but why would we? SFWA has nothing to do with the Hugos. At all. Period. ”
That’s a narrow way of looking at it. Its not Hugo’s, or the SFWA, or any one specific thing. Geez, you guys have a hard time with fuzzy concepts. Call it “fandom” if you like. There are plenty of overlaps between all the people interested in Hugos and Nebulas. Heck, I bet most of the prominent people know each other, or know people who do. This is a small town. The Sheriff has pull with the Fire department.
“So are you in favor of negotiating with terrorists too?’
What was I saying about hysterics ?
You aren’t dealing with terrorists.
Metaphor isn’t reality.
This is a tempest in a teapot.
That’s a narrow way of looking at it. Its not Hugo’s, or the SFWA, or any one specific thing. Geez, you guys have a hard time with fuzzy concepts. Call it “fandom” if you like. There are plenty of overlaps between all the people interested in Hugos and Nebulas. Heck, I bet most of the prominent people know each other, or know people who do. This is a small town. The Sheriff has pull with the Fire department.
You’re demonstrating that you don’t understand. It doesn’t work that way.
@Mike Glyer – While I have infinite respect for Kameron, her experience is not typical. I made about $1500 off my Hugo, plus GoH gigs at a couple of furry conventions. (I spent more than that to go pick the thing up.)
Which was awesome, don’t get me wrong! I drank cuba libres out of a bucket with fursuiters at a rave in Berlin because of that thing! But I think the financial value of the Hugos keeps being extrapolated from Hurley’s book deal, and that’s…well, one data point.
David Goldfarb:
What?!
I must have this book.
Yes he is. Don’t underestimate those people.
He’s fired his best shot. What is he going to do? Show up at MidAmeriCon with a bomb? All he’s done is use a dishonorable tactic to get a handful of nominees on the Hugo ballot in one year. He’s gone from being known by a few people as a mean-spirited clown to being known by a lot of people as a mean-spirited clown.
I’ll make a couple of Hugo predictions. Multiple Puppy nominated works will finish behind “No Award”. There might be one or two Puppy-nominated works that win – I could see Sheila Gilbert getting a win, or possibly Kary English for Totaled. Maybe Guardians of the Galaxy, but that has tough competition.
Beale will be buried behind “No Award”. Wright will go from being known as someone who got a lot of nominations to someone who is known for having more stories finish behind “No Award” than anyone else. The Puppy wailing will be loud, epic, and completely predictable. The fact that they lost by larger margins than any other Hugo nominees in history will be dismissed as the work of evil SJWs.
EPH will pass for the first time at MidAmeriCon.
The Pups will put together two slates next year. Paulk will call hers something other than a slate, but it will be a slate. Beale will just call his a slate. They will get some works on the ballot, but they won’t sweep it again because there will be more nominators.
EPH will be passed for a second time at MidAmeriCon.
The next year, the Pups will try to slate the nominations again, and will fail miserably. They will fade to irrelevance again. The authors who signed on to and promoted the Sad/Rabid slates will see their careers stagnate. Few will want to work with them, and few will want to buy from them. Guys like Wright and Correia will have their niche audiences, but that will be the limit of their careers. They will become trivial footnotes in the history of science fiction and fandom.
Also, consider the results of Tom Doherty grovelling to VD and company over the Gallo thing.
“You’re demonstrating that you don’t understand. It doesn’t work that way.”
Worldly experience tells me that it does. Things overlap, friends know friends, favors are done.
Am I the only one who’s been reading about blue-collar-ancestry here and starting to think of Monty Python?
And John Wright and his wife, for example, have been wanting to go to a Worldcon for ages.
Nothing has ever stopped them. Why did they not go last year? Or the year before? It was in Baltimore in 1998. It was in Philadelphia in 2001. It was in Boston in 2004 and Chicago in 2012. All of those are reasonably close to Maryland where they live. What prevented them from attending any of those?
“He’s gone from being known by a few people as a mean-spirited clown to being known by a lot of people as a mean-spirited clown.”
He has boosted his pageviews, he is selling books, he has attracted some significant authors/material, and his comment rate is very high. He has more “troops” with $40 in paypal. One mans mean spirited clown is another’s champion of justice.
Again, the problem here is an inability to understand another point of view.
Red Wombat:
Trade publishing has lots of datapoints. The Best Novel Hugo is the one award in the field that reliably yields a bump in sales. The size of the bump varies, but it’s always there. This isn’t true of any other award.
You aren’t dealing with terrorists.
How would you describe someone who says “Give me what I want (that I don’t have any right to expect) or I will destroy something’?
Worldly experience tells me that it does. Things overlap, friends know friends, favors are done.
The problem is, you’re just making shit up. People who actually know are aware that this is not “how things are done”. You’re like a kid smearing poop all over his face thinking it is cute.
I’m worried about the people here who don’t have back channels. We discussed front channels extensively the other day and established there was the usual variety here.
[too puerile?]
“Give me what I want (that I don’t have any right to expect) or I will destroy something’?”
The IRS ?
“I’m worried about the people here who don’t have back channels.”
Dont sell yourself short. Mingle. Network.
He has boosted his pageviews, he is selling books, he has attracted some significant authors/material, and his comment rate is very high.
Yes, he has gotten more attention. That’s what being a well-known clown does. He is “selling books”, but his sales are trivial when compared to actual publishers (or even most small press publishers). The author he attracted since this began is Pournelle, who is allowing him to publish ancient material from his back catalog. I suspect that sales of this will be disappointing, as most anyone who actually wants copies of Pournelle’s old back catalog material already have them. “Comment rate” is a silly measure that means almost nothing.
He’s a clown. He’s a loud, obnoxious clown with hateful views, but he’s a clown.
The IRS ?
Awww, you’re one of those “taxation is theft” pseudo-libertarians aren’t you?
Buwaya, far be it from me to question your vast, vast experience, but you’re leaving out one teensy weensy factor.
A whole bunch of SFWA members would leave. Bail. Stroll arm-and-arm into the sunset. Do a slow-mo walk toward the camera. (I count myself among them, actually.)
You may not know that before his expulsion, SFWA took a poll of the membership to see if they wanted him kicked out. The poll results…well, we see how things turned out. This would not be a popular move. The membership liked Beale about as well as it liked the human papilloma virus.
SFWA, if it lost its collective mind and reinstated Beale, would hemorrhage members. It doesn’t matter if it would help the Hugos. They’d pay through the nose to save an award that a chunk hold in contempt anyway, another chunk doesn’t particularly feel applies to them, and a final chunk would rather see fail than share an organization with Beale again.
It won’t happen. You can act all worldly with the people-do-favors all you want, but you’re asking the Girl Scouts of America to reinstate Lizzie Borden.
“Yes, he has gotten more attention.”
This is the internet. Attention is its primary metric.
Another problem, not limited to those here, is when one mistakes “ought” for “is”.
He also has Van Creveld and Lind. Both of those guys were and still are on the armed forces required reading lists. And I suspect he has several others up his sleeve.
You know, guys, File770 doesn’t have a troll problem.
It has a replying to trolls problem.
You might want to look at that.
/written while not angry.
No.
That’s my theory, too.
“you’re asking the Girl Scouts of America to reinstate Lizzie Borden.”
Well, there you go. This is the emotional hump that everyone needs to get over.
The guy is annoying (well I rather like the SOB), but he isn’t actually Lizzie Borden.
Dark, evil forces. Endarkened forcible dark forces of malignant dark evil, I’ll be bound.
Only the Winning of a Hugo can break the curse.
And you Aaron, and I mean specifically you, are keeping that curse in place! What is it with you people. Just because you are all members of the British Royal Family and Muslim Marxists, you think that is OK to keep a noble person locked in an eldritch cage by voting No Award at your secret ceremonies.
Reviews of Graydon’s books and pointers to where to buy them can be found here.
@TNH – (Hi!) I don’t doubt that people do get a bump from Best Novel, but Kameron’s data point keeps getting used to apply across the board, and I think it’s…err…building up some unrealistic expectations for non-Best Novel winners.
I don’t know what a Best Novel normal yields (nor do I actually expect to, ever) but I strongly doubt it’s enough for SFWA to think that Beale’s worth having kicking around the place again. Particularly since SFWA doesn’t get a cut.
Hell, we could probably convince Sparhawk to just hand people cash easier than we could convince the board to pull Beale back into the fold.
@buwaya – The fact you ignored the entire rest of my post to fixate on that one metaphor didn’t go unnoticed…
The guy is annoying (well I rather like the SOB), but he isn’t actually Lizzie Borden.
When he’s trying very hard to kill the Hugos rather than accept that he isn’t a Great Writer, then he might as well be Lizzie Borden.
This is why I say that you don’t understand.
TNH:
It’s a shade better than The March North; it’s doing more original things. (Full disclosure: I was an advance reader for it.)
More generally: the culture war importation into the SF discussion can be laid at the feet of Larry Correia, who, when looking around for reasons he hadn’t taken home the Campbell, decided that it had to be one or both of (a) he wrote good old-fashioned narrative with no fancy-schmancy shades of gray or round characters, just lots of action, and the SF establishment had been taken over by metafiction-committing post-post-Structuralists and (b) he was a conservative second-amendment-loving religious libertarian and the SF establishment had been taken over by radical intersectionalist socialist queer-theorists who were pushing their ideas in place of Story. Ever since the first Puppy campaign it’s wavered back and forth between the two.
He picked up sympathizers out of Ben’s Bar who also identified as story-only-loving right-wingers, and the result is as we see today.
I can take a hint from the owner.
I’m gone.
I have tried to make peace.
@buwaya.
Re: Lind. Yes, the selfsame William Lind who thinks we should build a Great Wall across the US-Mexico border and shoot border crossers.
Oh, and in presenting two speculative of the next ten years in response to a nuclear terror attack, the “Good” future involves nuking Saudi Arabia outside of Mecca to glass and putting in a constitutional amendment banning Islam from America.
That William Lind?
@Amina:
You fell foul of a common misconception. There are only five Amber novels. Unfortunately, the publisher now insists on bundling Go Set a Merlin with them, causing no end of confusion.
@Aaron
The author he attracted since this began is Pournelle, who is allowing him to publish ancient material from his back catalog. I suspect that sales of this will be disappointing, as most anyone who actually wants copies of Pournelle’s old back catalog material already have them.
I would have descrfibed it as more of an issue of demand for thirty-year-old anthologies of original SF not being all that.
Wasn’t she acquited?
It’s amazing how consistently the people who show up saying they’re not Puppies and not [some insulting descriptor of non-Puppies that Puppies use] counsel two things:
1. Get into the culture war, fight the Puppies on their terms, because they’re badass.
2. The method of fighting? Surrender and give them what they want or they’ll do worse things, because they’re badass.
@Ann: It has a replying to trolls problem.
SIWOTI is strong amongst this community, I have noticed.
I’m figuring some people just have fun doing it (and I’ve been impressed by the snark and humor of some).
I am impressed by the sheer longevity of Brian Z.
That’s about all I’m impressed by, but he is hanging in there.
@ann somerville
Yes we do !
@ Buwaya
Yeah, they hate that. Just hate it.
Heh.
buwaya: I don’t think you are the one who was supposed to take that hint.
@Ann Somerville
It has a replying to trolls problem.
My usual response isn’t “But…but this one still has candy in him!” but “This one still has viscera in him.”
@jim
“Unfortunately, the publisher now insists on bundling Go Set a Merlin with them, causing no end of confusion.”
I am a lover of Amber, but that is the best description of the Merlin novels I’ve ever seen, Jim. Internet gold star for you.
@rrede
I am impressed by the sheer longevity of Brian Z.
You silver-tongued devil, you.