(1) THE BARGAIN BIN. NASA’s trash is their cash: “NASA flight suits bought for $1.20 could fetch thousands”.
A pair of Florida college students browsing the racks at a thrift shop ended up paying $1.20 for a stack of NASA flight suits that experts said could be worth more than $5,000.
Talia Rappa and Skyer Ashworth said they were shopping at a thrift store in Titusville when they came across the five blue NASA flight suits and a white “control suit” under some sweaters in a plastic bin.
… The American Space Museum said the names and flight dates on the suits’ labels match the time frame of the 1983-1985 shuttle missions flown by astronauts George “Pinky” Nelson, Robert A. Parker and Charles D. Walker.
(2) CROWDFUNDING VOL. 2 OF THE DELANY JOURNALS. Kenneth James is editing the personal journals of Samuel R. Delany in a multivolume series for Wesleyan University Press. The first volume, In Search of Silence, with Delany’s journals from the 1960s, came out earlier this year and received positive reviews in The New Republic (“Samuel R. Delany’s Life of Contradictions”), The Gay & Lesbian Review, and at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog by SF critic Paul Di Filippo. (The G & L Review article is unfortunately behind a paywall).
James has just launched a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo — Autumnal City: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany — to fund the completion of next volume.
The next volume, which I’m working on now and which is entitled Autumnal City, collects Delany’s personal journals from the ’70s — during which time Delany wrote some of his most groundbreaking work, including Dhalgren, Trouble on Triton, and Tales of Neveryon. During this time he also did substantial preliminary work for the novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
…The goal of this campaign is to raise $30,000 to support the remaining year’s worth of work needed to complete the second volume. This funding will cover three areas: expenses associated with the project (travel to the archives, travel to interview subjects, office expenses, and so on), expenses associated with this campaign (fees and percentages, cost and shipping of rewards, and so on), and personal expenses. Funds raised in this campaign will not support Wesleyan University Press, but rather will go directly to me, in support of my scholarly labor. In academic publishing, an author’s income comes not from book advances or sales, but rather from a university paycheck – or, if the author is an independent scholar (as I am), from some other source. For this project, you will be that source.
(3) ELLISON BIO. As for Paul Di Filippo, today at Locus Online he reviews A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff.
Chapter two takes our hero through high school, through SF fandom, and into the professional world of editing Rogue magazine, among other accomplishments. Segaloff shows that he, as biographer, is willing to skip around in time thematically when the narrative demands. Thus, hearing of Ellison’s first marriage, we also get an immediate foretaste of those to come. And in fact, as we shall soon see, Segaloff will abandon strict chronology at a certain point, in favor of totally thematic chapters, out of which the linear factual events of Ellison’s later life can be readily assembled.
(4) ALL RISE. Walter Jon Williams alerts the media to “Stand By for Greatness”.
So while I was in Finland, Orbit reverted the rights to all three of the Dagmar Shaw books.
I’ll try to make those available as soon as I can. I can hardly do a worse job of promoting them than the original publisher.
(5) KEEP FIVE IN MIND. Victor Milán knows the magic number – “Five Classic Works of SFF by Authors We Must Not Forget” at Tor.com. Here’s one of his picks:
Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore
Catherine Lucille Moore (1911-1987) had to use her gender-neutral initials to get published in the 1930s. That didn’t stop her creating the fledgling genre of sword and sorcery’s first female protagonist in Jirel of Joiry. As brave, capable, and arrogant as any man, yet far from invulnerable, Jirel was more than just a red-haired, female Conan. While her adventures were clearly influenced by Robert E. Howard, as well as by Moore’s and Howard’s literary acquaintance H. P. Lovecraft, they focus less on her sword-swinging than her spirit and furious determination. A curious blend of compassion and cruelty, she’s a pious Catholic who’ll risk damnation to gain the means to overcome her foe—then brave the very Hell she sent him to, to free his soul from eternal suffering.
And you’ll never catch Jirel in a mail bikini. She wears the same practical armor as any other warrior of her unspecified Medieval period would.
Moore’s writing is brisk, strongly sensory, and evocative of settings Earthly and alien, though flavored with a few too many adjectives for the modern palate. She had a long and successful career with Jirel and the space opera adventures of Northwest Smith, then writing in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. Jirel of Joiry is a collection of most of the Jirel tales.
(5) SECOND FIFTH. Moments after posting this Scroll I learned, via Paul Weimer, that Deadline is reporting N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Fifth Season’ Book To Be Developed As TV Series At TNT.
N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning sci-fi fantasy novel The Fifth Season is getting the drama series treatment at TNT. The project is in early development at the cable network with Leigh Dana Jackson (24: Legacy, Sleepy Hollow) set to pen the adaptation and Imperative Entertainment’s (All the Money in the World) Dan Friedkin, Tim Kring and Justin Levy serving as executive producers.
Jackson brought the novel, the first in a three-book series, to Imperative, which secured the rights before the The Fifth Season‘s Hugo nomination. Jemisin went on to become the first black writer to win the Hugo Award for best novel. She followed that up last week by winning the prestigious science fiction award for the second consecutive year for the second book in the series, The Obelisk Gate. The third book was published Tuesday
(6) THE RECYCLE OF LIFE. NPR’s “All Tech Considered” asks, “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to … Interactive Biodegradable Funerary Urns?”
Earlier this summer, a modest little startup in Barcelona, Spain, unveiled its newest product — a biodegradable, Internet-connected funeral urn that turns the ashes of departed loved ones into an indoor tree. Just mix the cremains with soil and seedlings, and the digital-age urn will automatically water and care for your memorial sapling, sending constant updates to an app on your smartphone.
At first glance, the concept seems gimmicky — evidently, we’re running out of ideas for smart appliances. But the Bios Incube system can also be seen as the latest example of a gradual transformation in modern culture.
Technology is fundamentally changing how we deal with death and its attendant issues of funerals, memorials and human remains. Much of this change is for the good. Some developments are a little spooky. But one thing is for sure: You can do a lot of cool things with ashes these days.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
- Born August 16, 1991 — Evanna Lynch (actress; plays Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter films)
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born August 16, 1884 – Hugo Gernsback
- Born August 16, 1930 – Robert Culp. Fans probably know him best from The Outer Limits‘ episode “Demon With A Glass Hand,” written by Harlan Ellison.
(9) FROM HELL. New York City’s Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies relaunches in September with “Paperbacks from Hell”. The event takes place Tuesday, September 19 from 7-9:30 p.m. at Film Noir Cinema (122 Meserole Ave., Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY). Admission $12 advance / $15 door.
In the early ’70s, three books changed horror forever: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist,” and “The Other.” The first horror novels to hit bestseller lists since 1940, they opened the floodgates for an avalanche of horror paperbacks to flood supermarket and drugstore shelves throughout the ’70s and ’80s, before “Silence of the Lambs” slit the genre’s throat in the early ’90s.
Fresh off last year’s one-man show, SUMMERLAND LOST, Grady Hendrix delivers a mind-melting oral history of this wild and woolly world of Nazi leprechauns, skeleton doctors, killer crabs, killer jellyfish, and killer fetuses, featuring hair-raising readings, a William W. Johnstone quote-off, and more tales of terrifying tots, tricycles, clowns, puppets, and heavy metal bands than should be strictly legal. Prepare yourself for a tour of this long-lost universe of terror that lurked behind the lurid, foil-embossed, die-cut covers of… the Paperbacks from Hell!
Following Grady’s illustrated presentation will be a live round table discussion and Q+A with several artists who painted the book covers under discussion, including Jill Bauman, Lisa Falkenstern, and Thomas Hallman.
(10) BRADBURY BY ATWOOD. Yesterday the Paris Review posted Margaret Atwood’s “Voyage to the Otherworld: A New Eulogy for Ray Bradbury” with the outro –
This original essay by Margaret Atwood was composed specifically for the re-release of Sam Weller’s interview book companion to his authorized biography of Ray Bradbury. Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, in a new hardcover deluxe edition, will be released this October by Hat & Beard Press in Los Angeles.
….He ducked classification and genre corrals as much as he could: as far as he was concerned he was a tale teller, a writer of fiction, and as far as he was concerned, the tales and the fiction did not need to have labels.
The term science fiction made him nervous: he did not want to? be shut up in a box. And he, in his turn, made science-fiction purists nervous, as well he might. Mars in his hands, for instance, is not a place described with scientific accuracy, or even much consistency, but a state of mind; he recycles it for whatever he needs at the moment. Spaceships are not miracles of technology but psychic conveyances, serving the same purpose as Dorothy’s whirlwind-borne house in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the trance of the traditional shaman: they get you to the 0therworld.
(11) CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP. John Scalzi’s latest op-ed for the LA Times: “During Trump’s present, it’s hard to write the future, says science fiction writer John Scalzi”.
The thing is, science fiction has its setting in the future, but the people writing it and reading it live now, and the stories they’re writing and reading reflect the hopes and fears of whatever age the story is written in. There’s a reason science fiction literature of the late ’60s and early ’70s was about overpopulation, why in the ’80s cyberpunk reflected the uncertainty about the accelerating computerization of our world, and why much of the best science fiction of the last decade, from Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl” to N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season,” is rooted in ecological disaster. Science fiction sees the world today and speculates out from there.
The secret, however, is to come at it from an angle. There’s a thin line between using contemporary themes to extrapolate from and entertain readers, and stepping up on a soapbox and using a political agenda to cudgel people. The least successful science fiction to me is the stuff that takes today’s political catfights and dumps it uncut into the deep future, hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. To have characters in far-flung times prattling on about issues clearly specific to our time would be like writing a novel where people in 2017 are having knock-down, drag-out fights about the Alien and Sedition Acts or the Boer War. Better that science fiction breathes life into today’s anxieties and aspirations in more clever and possibly subtler ways.
His article made me remember the experience of reading Doonesbury during the Watergate hearings, when cartoonist Garry Trudeau found it practically impossible to think up wilder stuff than was coming out in the daily news.
(12) RETRIEVAL. Beyond Skyline shows promise.
A tough-as-nails detective embarks on a relentless pursuit to free his son from a nightmarish alien warship.
(13) ONE OF THE FIRST OF ITS KIND. The BBC says “‘Frankenstein dinosaur’ mystery solved”.
Matthew Baron, a PhD student at Cambridge University, told BBC News that his assessment indicated that the Frankenstein dinosaur was one of the very first ornithischians, a group that included familiar beasts such as the horned Triceratops, and Stegosaurus which sported an array of bony plates along its back.
“We had absolutely no idea how the ornithischian body plan started to develop because they look so different to all the other dinosaurs. They have so many unusual features,” the Cambridge scientist said.
“In the 130 years since the ornithischian group was first recognised, we have never had any concept of how the first ones could have looked until now.”
(14) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Connecting to a past discussion of chocolate in various climates: “Truck With 20 Tons Of Nutella And Chocolate Vanishes; Police Hunt For Semi’s Sweets”.
“Anyone offered large quantities [of chocolate] via unconventional channels should report it to the police immediately.”
We trust you’ll abide by those instructions from law enforcement in Germany, where more than 20 tons of chocolate treats have gone missing after thieves stole a refrigerated trailer packed with Nutella, Kinder Surprise eggs and other sweets.
(15) REQUEST FROM TYRION. Gina Ippolito of Yahoo!, in “Peter Dinklage Urges ‘Game of Thrones’ Fans To Stop Buying Huskies Just because They Look Like Direwolves”, says that Dinklage and PETA are combining to urge people not to buy huskies if they can’t handle big dogs just because they want a “direwolf” at home.
“Please, please, if you’re going to bring a dog into your family, make sure that you’re prepared for such a tremendous responsibility and remember to always, always, adopt from a shelter,” Dinklage said in an official statement.
So if Game of Thrones has you itching for a Ghost, Nymeria, Summer, Shaggydog, Lady, or Grey Wind of your own, but you’re not sure you can commit to taking care of a live one, maybe consider an adorable stuffed animal instead?
(16) THOR INTERNATIONAL TRAILER #2. I’ve always been a strong believer that movie trailers are much better with Japanese subtitles.
(17) GODZILLA: MONSTER PLANET. The drawback with TOHO’s own trailer for this animated Godzilla picture is that it doesn’t need subtitles.
[Thanks to Paul Weimer, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mark-kitteh, Andrew Porter, and Kenneth James for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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First maybe,
4) ALL RISE. Walter Jon Williams alerts the media to “Stand By for Greatness”.
I read and reviewed all three of these novels from the ebooks he sent. It’s some of the best Twenty Minutes into the Future writing I’ve had the pleasure to read.
Oh and there’s a short story as well that tells the story from a different viewpoint.
Second
[godstalk]
(15) REQUEST FROM TYRION.
Sensible advice.
14) I didn’t do it and I have an alibi!
(Hides chocolate-stained fingers)
(15) First, it’s important to point out, Fuck PETA. They’re not an animal welfare organization, and if they had their way, we’d have no pets, mandatory vegan diets, and no contact with any animals at all, under any circumstances.
That said–Yeah, the advice to make sure you’re ready for a large, active, powerful dog before you get one is important advice that should be heeded.
Nevertheless, fuck PETA. They are not the friend of anyone who has or plans to ever have an SJW credential or a pet of any kind, or to eat food of anything but the strictest version of vegan diet.
They advocate killing community cats, and all pit bulls, and actively go after the pets of anyone they deem too poor and/or too brown. They take in healthy, adoptable pets promising to find them goid new homes, and kill them immediately.
They are an active force for evil in the world. That they occasionally say things that aren’t lies doesn’t change that.
@4: I also liked the Dagmar Shaw novels; I’m surprised Orbit didn’t get behind them since it went to the expense of hardcover editions, but I’ve never claimed to understand publishing.
edit:
@Lis: PETA immediately kills pets? Citation?
2nd fifth!
That Scalzi piece in LAT is right on point.
@Lis: Yes, my first response was YAY PETER!
Then, OH FUCK NOT PETA!
I wish he had coordinated with the various Husky breed specific rescue groups to put out the same message–I saw an article somewhere–cannot remember where and may even have been here–about the leap in numbers of abandoned Huskies because as always people see a show, think oh boy, dash out the get an animal and then are shocked shocked that it does not behave like the fictional critter does in the show.
I was involved in an animal rescue group (small and local) for a while. I ended up with 13 rescue cats and four ditto dogs and a major hatred of people before I burned out and left.
(14). I find it suspicious that a truck full of Kinder eggs has gone missing right after Worldcon. Has anyone checked to see if any American fans went to Germany after the convention?
(4) The Dagmar Shaw books are excellent and highly recommended. Shame on Orbit for blowing it, and best wishes to Williams with his plans for them. I’ll certainly notify my friends when the time comes.
(6) Awesome, and congrats to Jemisin, who totally deserves it. There have been an amazing number of excellent works getting adapted recently, and even more shocking: many of the adaptations have been well done! All my fingers and toes crossed that this is another one. (But I’ll be happy for Jemisin no matter what.)
(15) Ugh, I’m with Lis Carey on PETA. Nevertheless, this seems like a pretty good thing for them to be spending some of their efforts on. Even dicks can do the right thing once in a while. And, boy oh boy, people buying live animals they aren’t equipped to deal with because they saw something on TV or movies is just a nasty problem that doesn’t seem to go away.
NC Counties Accuse PETA of Killing Animals
PETA’s Secret Slaughter of Kittens, Puppies
I’m too tired right now to dig up the links to the NC court case, or the VA Dept. of Agriculture reports, or the case of the Chihuahua that was lured off its owner’s porch, “rescued,” and then killed before the owner, using security camera footage, tracked down where the dog had been taken.
There aren’t many people in animal welfare/animal rescue who have anything good to say about PETA.
Dear PETA You’re in a Hole; You Might Want to Stop Digging
Not directly responsive to Chip’s question, but worth reading.
5) Jirel of Joiry was one of my favorite characters growing up. I was delighted to discover the book is $2.99 at amazon.com and I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that I am still enchanted.
15) Ah, PETA. I don’t hate them quite as much as I, say, hate the KKK, but they’re in the neighborhood. But, yes, huskies are wonderful dogs, if you don’t mind the clouds of fur, the hours of grooming, and the miles and miles of walking you need to do to keep them from misbehaving out of boredom and lack of exercise.
(8) To me, Robert Culp is and will always be Bill Maxwell, from The Greatest American Hero.
(9) There remains a special place in my heart for a certain subset of horror paperbacks – about 350 pages each, $3.95 cover price, available by the bucketload in the local used book store for half that. Generally forgettable tomes, but entertaining while I was reading them, and that was good enough. Many of them would fit this description nicely.
(12) Seriously, a sequel to Skyline?! Oi.
Yay, Scroll credit!
I did have a Kinder Egg while in Helsinki, but I am not a Kinder Egg Hijacker…
4) I hope that Williams can help bring the Dagmar books to a better audience. I got to meet him at Worldcon (squee!) but did not manage to get an early copy of his next novel. I saw a few people toting them around the con…
I wish all the people financially supporting PETA actually understood their positions. All pet owners should be against them to start, and even if you philosophically agree with their equation that pets are slaves, their own shelters show they have no interest in animal welfare.
Here’s the first article I read on the subject.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/05/pets-shelter-euthanization-rate_n_6612490.html
Ah, should have checked Lis’ links first! Didn’t realize that she had already linked to this same article.
Agree with all the above on PETA, although @Robinareid your post made me smile – I wonder how impulsive, irresponsible pet owners would feel about their huskies if they DID behave like direwolves? (Of course, the way they expect them to behave is as invisible except at specific, plot relevant moments where the CGI budget allows.)
Really excited for a Fifth Season adaptation! Or at least, that’s what I want you to think, in order to play my part in the top secret conspiracy to make N.K. Jemisin a ground breaking, history-making author. Oh wait, looks like she doesn’t need my help with that. Cool.
12: Why does everyone want to depict aliens and robots with glowing eyes? That makes as much sense as screaming ears or smelly noses or tongues that ooze flavor.
10. Yes, but…Ray was a Fan first, and I don’t recall his ever denouncing the genre. Margaret sure does know how to retcon her bibliographic history. Next she’ll try to convince us that Asimov was a writer of science text books who occasionally fictionalized some of his lessons to make a quick buck selling to the pulps…
I sure hope she knows where she can put her “talking squids”
Here’s to WJW – I loved the Dagmar books, and hope he has great success now that the rights have reverted.
P.S.
Mention of the Greatest American Hero above prompts the following:
“The Rockford Filers”
“Kolshak, the Godstalker”
steve davidson on August 17, 2017 at 6:08 am said, of Margaret Atwood: I sure hope she knows where she can put her “talking squids”
This is where: http://www.talkingsquidsinouterspace.com/
(Link probably posted here before, but I think not recently.)
Come on, folks, Margaret Atwood has apologized for the talking squid comment over and over, so let’s cut her some slack.
Though I wish the BBC would put the interview in question online, so we can hear the whole thing in context.
5) I wonder what five SFF works we might all come up with? I can think of a few possibly-neglected semi-classics, myself….
2nd 5) And I wonder who the studio execs have in mind to play Essun? Gemma Arterton? Carey Mulligan? Karen Gillan? (I’m joking. Well, I sincerely hope I’m joking.)
@ Steve Wright
5) I wonder what five SFF works we might all come up with? I can think of a few possibly-neglected semi-classics, myself….
Actually, I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while, so here goes (off the cuff so four not five):
1. Carve the Sky by Alexander Jabolokov – One of my favorite first novels. Set in a near far-future with humans scattered across the solar system, it mixes mystery, intrigue and (dare I say it) romance expertly in a world that is wonderfully crafted. Jablokov gets a great sense of depth with the Zelazny technique of building info dumps and hiding parts of them from the reader.
2. Moonwise by Greer Gilman – A brilliant Joyce-influenced fantasy with wonderful female characters and truly wyrd-Celtic lands. It can be a tough read and I have had friends bounce off of Moonwise before, but as Alton Brown might say, “your persistence will be rewarded.”
3. Burning Bright by Melissa Scott – A very fine interstellar SF novel with (again) plenty of intrigue and a fair amount of same-sex togetherness It also features the best use of RPGs in a novel. It is just well-written and has really good characters–everybody comes alive. Very very solid book.
4. Nobody’s Son by Sean Stewart – A real, honest, and insightful attempt to answer the question “what happens after the end of the fairy tale”? Here, Stewart breathes new life into a old trope and makes you wonder how he did it so much better than the rest. From what I know, Stewart definitely deserves more recognition.
There you go.
@Darren Garrison: 12: Why does everyone want to depict aliens and robots with glowing eyes? That makes as much sense as screaming ears or smelly noses or tongues that ooze flavor.
It’s like how in films spacesuits always have lights inside the helmet to illuminate the wearer’s face, which in reality would simply blind them to everything outside the visor.
Dream Fifth Season casting:
Essun: Angela Bassett
Syenite: Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Damaya: Sennia Nanua (from The Girl With All the Gifts, a fungi-zombie movie I really liked. I started to say Quvenzhane Wallis, from Beasts of the Southern Wild, but unfortunately she’s a teenager now and too old.)
Seriously, is the proposed writer and showrunner African-American? Because I sure as heck wouldn’t trust The Fifth Season to a white guy.
Bonnie McDaniel on August 17, 2017 at 7:17 am said:
My firs thought was “Do they understand that no one in these books is white?”
Re: Oor Wombat wearing a chicken hat at GRRM’s Hugo Loser’s Party —
I’m listening to the back episodes of Kevin & Ursula Eat Cheap, and ‘way back on December 23, 2012, episode 102, there was this exchange between Kevin and a slightly drunk Ursula at 34:20 —
It’s almost like she had access to the shoggoth’s time machine…. <grin>
Just checking out Youtube to see if the Hugo Awards ceremony video was up yet and found this video of one Finnish fan’s experience of Worldcon. It was her first ever con and she seems to have had fun. I think I spotted Hampus’s exhibit at around the 3 minute mark.
@Rob Thornton
All of Stewart’s work is well worth reading.
@Rob Thornton: I haven’t read any of those… they will have to be added to the Long List of Stuff to Read.
I think my problem is, I’m not sure what’s obscure – I mean, I know what I’ve read, but I don’t know how much of it falls under the heading of “oh, everyone’s heard of that one”. Maybe I should make a list and then cross-check to see how many of them have recently been reissued as Fantasy or SF Masterworks….
Yep, my exhibition alright! I lost count on how many people photographed that mask. I have my own video that I will upload later on that shows the exhibit in more detail. Only have to add some nifty music to it.
Those were really cool masks and sculptures and things at 3:00; Hampus, was that your exhibit?
<ninja’d by Hampus>
Seriously cool; I look forward to your video with or without nifty music.
Also looking forward to the nifty video. Don’t forget to let us know when it’s up.
@Rob Thornton: IMO, Sean Stewart certainly deserves more general recognition; I don’t know whether he was a direct victim of the book-order death spiral, but his drop from Ace to a small press was … unwelcome. I’ve never had the nerve to start Moonwise, but maybe some day I will. However, I note that you’re listing (IIRC) entirely living authors; dead authors, as in the original list, are much more likely to disappear (possibly more so now that even SF publishers are producing more series books and fewer standalones, as if they want authors who can keep cranking out the-same-only-different). My first revival choice would be Ford, who was listed in the comments; we’re coming up on the 11th anniversary of his death. Mike was heavily into both RPG and strategic gaming (as shown by several of his books — including the unfinished Aspects, which I understand is unlikely to be finished); have you read Growing Up Weightless and if so do you think Scott’s use of RPGs is better?
@Bonnie McDaniel Leigh Dana Jackson is a black man. Dan Friedkin and Tim Kring both appear to be white men; can’t find Justin Levy from a basic google search, and I feel weird digging further than that at this stage. Jemisin has specifically said on Twitter that she trusts the team, although obviously she can’t guarantee they won’t eff it up.
I feel the concern too, though – would be a terrible shame to erase the characters races or the LGBT and poly representation across all three books. Fingers crossed they get it right and we get the show full of queer PoC throwing mountains at each other that the world so badly needs.
@ Chip Hitchcock
Sorry, I missed Growing Up Weightless one way or another. I will definitely promote it to the top of the reading list since I have heard so many good things about Weightless. However, if you haven’t read Burning Bright and you like RPGs, definitely give it a try.
Love today’s Scroll title, nice one @Daniel Dern
I breezed past Hampus’ exhibit too quickly to take photos! Alas!
@Lis et al: I never thought well of PETA, but this is bizarre; I wonder how many of the people who attack farming under the PETA banner know this.
Here we go, one Halloween Exhibit coming up!
Wow, that’s some great stuff. Particularly like the creepy maneki-neko (is that how you spell it?) waving cat…
Pingback: Five from the Forests of my Memory | stevejwright
OK, my five picks.
(tl;dr version: Chris Boyce’s Catchworld, Christopher Hodder-Williams’s Fistful of Digits, Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, Elizabeth Lynn’s A Different Light and Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Tomoe Gozen.)
@ Steve Wright
Your five picks got me for the most part. I’ve heard of the Lynn and the Hughart but not read them, and the others are beyond me. Thanks!
What was the music on your video Hampus? I’m not into heavy metal type stuff, but that was quite catchy.
Bloodjunkies – All Hallows Eve.
GUYS GUYS GUYS “The Stone Sky” finally downloaded to my Kindle about 6 last night and I finished it at 11:30 and my socks are still in unspecified orbit!!!
Obviously that’s why I didn’t comment here last night.
(5.1) Yes. Although “How Much For Just the Planet?” is in fact the greatest “Star Trek” book ever written, also by John M. Ford. He lives on, under his real name of Mike Ford, in Stross’ Laundry novels.
(5.2) Man, last night while I was reading, I was thinking “I’d like to see this as movie/TV but there’s no way they can do it.” I guess someone can. Going to have to lose that lovely second-person voice, though. And probably gonna need lots of wigs to give everyone ashblow hair. But wow. So many acting jobs for PoC. Angela Bassett would be a great Essun.
(8) Uh, “I Spy” and “Greatest American Hero” is where I know Culp from (And am annoyed that on top of all the other Cosby evil, I can’t enjoy “I Spy” any more).
(10) Ray sure didn’t have problems in belonging to the LA Science Fiction Society, or going to cons, or being considered an SF writer. Sure, he was a fantasy writer too, but also a mystery writer. Atwood still does not quite get it, does she?
(11) Geez, Scalzi is always good, but that’s frigging great. Must share.
Stephen Colbert has commented on how hard it is to keep up with jokes about the news, and his show’s on every weeknight! Less than 24 hours lead time; absolutely impossible for novelists working 18 months-2 years out.
(14) The US government can attest that I wasn’t out of the country then. They’d know it, after all. My passport’s even expired, sigh.
(15) FUCK PETA. They kill animals. They’d take away and kill my cats if they could, and those are my babies, who I spend more on their healthcare than mine, and worry about more. They’d probably like to kill off every carnivore on earth if they could. They don’t actually love animals, and they’re happy to use plenty of medical products that were tested on lab critters.
We don’t need them to tell people not to get any dog without researching it.
Peter Dinklage, I am disappoint. Have lost much esteem for him.
(16) I didn’t care about this Thor movie when I first heard about it, but the subsequent trailers and clips have piqued my interest. A Thor-Hulk buddy movie with ‘splosions and beasties and Goldblum? Might be worth matinee.
@David Langford: A delightful site I hadn’t seen before. Bonus: the site owner.
@Cheryl S: I re-read a Jirel story not more than 5 years ago; the Suck Fairy had stayed away. Fear not.
@Andrew: that’s Kolchak. He would wear the same suit and hat while stalking gods, though. It’s him. Back in the day when lead characters like him and Columbo didn’t need an expansive wardrobe.
@Rob Thornton: I would recommend Melissa Scott to anyone, I love her work in various subgenres. Particularly would hand her books to young LGBT folk.
@Cassy B: The chicken hat was prophesied! The hound knew!
Thanks, Hampus. I’ll go have a listen.