A Hollywood bomb that made money, a cable hit with a future, and the perpetual love feast that is the Worldcon, all in today’s Scroll.
(1) James Earl Jones played B-52 bombardier Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove.
It was his seventh professional credit. In five of his first 10 roles he was cast as a doctor. That early typecasting wasn’t enough to get him the part of Dr. Strangelove himself, though… Jones first appears in this YouTube clip at :40.
James Earl Jones would establish his greatness as an actor a few years afterwards on Broadway, earning a Tony as the lead in The Great White Hope, and an Academy Award nomination in the film version of the play. Because of his prominence in mainstream entertainment, gigs like voicing Darth Vader or Mufasa in The Lion King seem like sidelines, however, Jones has often worked in genre, fantasy and offbeat productions.
He played alien abductee Barney Hill in a 1975 TV movie, Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian, the warrior Umslopogaas in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), reclusive author Terence Mann in Field of Dreams (1989), and also has been in many obscure genre and animated productions.
(2) J. Michael Straczynski, interviewed by Comic Book Resources, is cautiously optimistic about a second season of Sense8.
While the streaming service hasn’t officially given the green light to second season, a promising gesture occurred when Netflix hosted a “Sense8″ panel during the Television Critics Association summer press tour with cast and creators in attendance, including Straczynski who updated the status of a possible renewal. “We’re still awaiting word,” he said on stage. “We’re in the process. We’re waiting for a final determination. We’re cautiously optimistic, but ultimately it’s Netflix’s call.”
If the call does come, Straczynski said he and the Wachowskis have already given plenty of thought to the next phase of the “Sense8” universe. “We’re looking at expanding that as far as logic goes,” he said. “What’s kind of fun about the characters is that what they’re sharing are not necessarily [powered] – like, in other concepts, which might be superpowers, flight. They have ordinary abilities, and we’re trying to say that there is value and merit and power in [that] – whether you’re an actor or you are a martial arts person or a bus driver, you have something to contribute.”
(3) You have til tomorrow to bid on a copy of the American first edition of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Currently up to $2,400.
(4) “7 Science Fiction Publishers that Pay $750+ for Short Stories” seems to have valid info (I checked the Analog entry and it is good) even if the page itself is an ad for writing jobs.
(5) Today’s birthday boy – Clifford D. Simak, three-time Hugo winner, for “The Big Front Yard” (1959), “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” (1981), and one of my very favorite sf novels, Way Station (1964). He was named a SFWA Grand Master, received a Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement, and won the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award.
After the original Dean of Science Fiction, Murray Leinster, passed away, Isaac Asimov considered only two writers had earned the right to succeed to the unofficial title, saying in The Hugo Winners: 1980-1982 (1986) “the only writer who can possibly compete with [Clifford D. Simak] as ‘dean of science fiction’ is Jack Williamson, who is four years younger than Cliff but has been publishing three years longer.”
Clifford Simak
(6) Artist Bob Eggleton predicts the demise of the Worldcon art show in “We LOVE Worldcon….but here’s what happened…”
Back in the 1980s, it was commonplace for us Pro Artists to schlep or ship our work to the convention. The 80s was a great time, SF looked good, major authors were doing major works, the covers were the best they’d ever been. Costs were low. Even in the 90s it was still viable. I can remember in 1996 shipping 3 large boxes of artwork to the LACon of that year in Anaheim. It was a lot of fun, I won a Hugo in fact. The boxes cost me something like $300.00 each way for a total of $600 and change. I made something like $4500 in the show, so including everything, I still made money.
….It’s the shipping costs that it all comes down to vs the return in sales that are not always congruent. So while people ask “What happened to all the name artists?”….it’s simply cost that we can’t do this anymore. My personal view is also that, Worldcon has changed and few people are interested in the physical art like they used to be, with all the interest in digital media. And it has become a lot of work to prepare for these events. My memories are long and I will always remember the good times, but, they’ve passed. I see a future of an artshow-less Worldcon, due to insurance costs and lack of manpower and, as digital art becomes the mainstay, a lack of physical art.
(7) Dave Freer’s “Show me” at Mad Genius Club is a one-man roundup post.
In this case I’m talking about all those folk who have been telling us ‘we’re doing it wrong’. You know precisely the sort of individuals I’m talking about. They’ll tell me I’m an evil cruel man for killing a chicken or a wallaby… but they have never done it. They’ve never been faced with a choice of that, or no food (let alone meat). They buy a product in the supermarket… which magically makes it appear in the freezer. They’ll tell you that you did your book all wrong and that it is terrible and full of typos… but they haven’t written one. Or if they have, they didn’t have to survive the mill of the slush-pile as I did (or self-pub), but thanks to their ‘disadvantages’ and connections had a publisher pay an editor to help, and proof reader to clear some of those typos. They’ll tell you that the puppies efforts are dragging sf back in time (yes, JUST in time), yet they’ve done nothing to alter the catastrophic plunge of sf/fantasy sales from traditional publishers. If you force them to confront the figures showing they’ve been part of excluding anyone to the right of Lenin from traditional publishing and the various awards (which, it seems extremely likely, downgraded the sale-value of those awards, and the popularity of the genre… they’ll tell you there might be a problem (but of course nothing like as bad as you make it out to be) and we, the puppies just did it wrong.
(8) But never let it be said the Puppies haven’t left their noseprint on the field. Dave Hicks’s cover art for Novacon 45’s progress reports is themed for GoH Stan Nicholls’s Orcs fantasies. Here’s the topical #2.
Art by Dave Hicks.
[Thanks to David Langford and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Snowcrash.]
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Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
@Lorcan, really? My favourite Sun moment was “Is that all?” 🙂 . It’s hard for me to pick my favourite sensate, but Lito ***reallly*** picked up points towards the end.
To others, I said earlier that Sense8 is one of the best things on TV in recent times, and I stand by that. It’s not without it’s flaws of course – there’s one character who is utterly wasted in terms of development, and it shows. The other thing is that almost the first 2 to 3 eps are essentially setup. But when the payoffs start coming…it’s utterly glorious. It definitely benefits from the Netflix model as well, as episode-wise they tend to end weirdly. It’s better to just binge watch the whole thing, or to take it as an extended movie.
1. Beagle.
Hard choice, but going with Le Guin.
Simak’s Goblin Reservation was also nominated for a Hugo. It is certainly an . . . interesting read. To quote my own review:
Le Guin, to lose to Tolkein
I wonder if someone will soon eschew the episode format altogether and just put up all ten or twelve hours with only, say, chapter breaks for people to pause their binge-watching, making the whole experience even more like reading a novel.
@Nigel
Isn’t that defacto what Daredevil did? 12 episodes delivered simultaneously. Not seen it yet.
1. THE TOMBS OF THE LAST SMALL UNICORN GODS
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
This one hurt. I think ‘The Tombs of Atuan’ is a more substantial work. Le Guin’s prose is always masterful and her work well constructed. But when I think of fantasy, for myself, I want a fantastical element that is the real separator between it and sci-fi. I don’t get that from tToA, despite how good the rest of the work is. The Last Unicorn is lyrical and lovely, but it is a pretty thin work. Pratchett I think combines the sense of the fantastic (and whimsical and cynical, and bitingly sarcastic) in dealing with huge themes in religion and philosophy. ‘Small Gods’ essentially takes on the meaning of life in a fantasy world and flips it on its head. The sheer humanity of the book is really the dominant element.
Small Gods.
I know this was really yesterdays topic, but the BT piece really made me think he read Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth but stopped before the story Logic of Empire.
@NickPheas – Well, that’s what I mean. Between Sense8, Daredevil and House Of Cards putting complete seasons up in one go, I wonder if someone’s going to abandon even the pro forma use of discrete one-hour chunks of drama set off by opening and closing credits at some point.
@NickPheas
Daredevil is still structured in a traditional episodic format. I think Nigel is talking about losing the breaks and simply running the narrative for 10-12 hours without artificial climaxes and cliffhangers to fit the traditional structure. A little like the old saw about Jack Kerouac writing ‘On The Road’ on teletype paper because the pages ‘imposed an artificial structure on my stream of consciousness’.
The Tombs of Atuan, LeGuin.
And now I will crawl off to die, of Kyra-inflicted wounds. I hope you’re satisfied!
Oh, and Cally? Cen I get a bulk order on those cool, damp cloths?
And now for something completely different, Peter Berryman on the Curiosities of Street Literature circa 1871, as preserved by Project Guttenberg:
Whither Zither, August 2015
An excerpt:
I substitute Lords and Ladies by Pratchett, which is where I think Pratchett made the real switch from merely very good humourous fantasy to excellent fantasy that didn’t need the “humourous” qualifier. But, since I know that it will get eliminated almost immediately, I would like to cast a Hugo-style preferential ballot with Small Gods as my second choice.
The Tombs of Atuan, LeGuin.
By the writer who has had the longest and most sustained influence on my choices and style.
Long form TV: it’s pretty much the way we got things on the BBC for decades. However the best implementation of it recently has been Amazon’s Bosch, which dramatized two of Michael Connelly’s modern LA noir – much like the way Fox took its Elmore Leonard and gave us Kentucky cowboy movies in Justified – treating the show as a 12 hour film delivered in 1 hour chunks.
(Did anyone else play the Justified game, trying to identify the classic western each season was based on? Took me ages to realise season 4 was “3:10 to Yuma”)
While they did it backwards (and the run time is much lower), each series of Felicia Day’s web show The Guild was compiled into a movie-length compilation after the initial release.
@Nigel
Well that’s an interesting thought. I am sure the discreet one hour periods with credits have something to do the various guilds involved in making TV episodes. I read somewhere that the Director credits in Sense8 were determined by which location showed up the most in an episode since the various locations used different directors . So far Sense8 is closer to reading a novel than reading a discrete chucks of a story and as a viewer that certainly alters your perception of the work or it did mind at least.
@ Simon Bisson wait what? How did I not know about this? Thanks for bringing Bosch to my attention.
….
Shit. This is a thing? Where can I read more on this? That’s effin awesome!
Justified was a delight, and I’ll always love it for many many things, but especially for the introducing the following Leonard-ism to me:
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
“Is that all?” was in the last episode, right? I was fully on Team Sun by that point.
I remember back in the day a lot of people saying that Babylon 5 was a novel for TV, but most episodes had a discreet beginning, middle and end. Sense8, even moreso than other Netflix shows really is one extended narrative over it’s 13-odd hour run.
Ed on August 4, 2015 at 3:15 am said:
They do seem to have this idea that there is some conspiracy of leftists/Marxists/feminists/social justice warriors which is somehow separate from fans, and it is this conspiracy that is trying to make SF be a certain thing — that it’s top down — that FANS (you know, us) don’t want things that way. Who is financing this conspiracy, and what ultimate aim they could possibly have? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.
From my perspective, it’s obvious that they’ve simply borrowed cold war anti-Communist rhetoric, which was a bit ridiculous even when there was a functioning USSR that could, at least hypothetically, be pulling the strings on such a conspiracy. Nowadays, it just sounds delusional.
Nicholas Whyte on August 4, 2015 at 6:28 am said:
I think you’re right. By drawing such a rigid and hostile line between their own crowd and everyone else, they’ve done an excellent job alienating everyone else — a much, much larger group than their own crowd.
That’s also my assumption. He’ll try it next year, but there will be a significant drop-off in support. Part of his problem is that the crowd he’s playing to has a bit of a short attention span. At some point he has to throw a different ball for them to chase after.
The thing I love most about being an SJW destroying the SF genre is how effortless it is. I go the store and I buy a book I think I’ll like–heck, sometime I buy one on my Kindle in the bathtub with a mojito!–and WHAM! Somewhere a slush pile belches as it consumes the next great work of Manly Fiction. A masked figure whispers homophones into Freer’s manuscript, while gently stroking a dead wallaby. A bookstore clerk slaps a Heinlein juvenile from the hands of an eager teenager (who almost certainly would not have thought Podkayne was too stupid to live) and forces a YA novel with a female protagonist into their hands.* Another Usenet discussion of guns and physics is suddenly wiped clean, and a Tumblr full of gifs of Chris Helmsworth’s torso takes its place.
But I must say, I am still curious as to the mechanism. How do they know where to send my filthy SJW money, to do the most damage to Manly SF?
It’s Bookscan, isn’t it? Gotta be. But Bookscan doesn’t track Walmart sales…or Amazon…
*strokes dead wallaby thoughtfully*
*My money is earmarked for it to be God Stalk.
Yeah, format and structure have been changing for a while now and long-form narratives are replacing more episodic content as the norm. It’s the transitions I’m curious about. Will they ever just abandon them? Guild rights and contracts might make it difficult, for sure. They could have done it, theoretically, with Sense8. I wonder if it would have affected the pacing?
Old-school long-form BBC stuff can stand up to the best today’s television has to offer. I rewatch Edge Of Darkness and The Jewel In The Crown semi-regularly.
@Alain Bosch really got the noir vibe right for me, and while it conflated two novels it did it well – and using an actor well known for playing bad guys as the hero worked even better.
Okay I’m 4 episodes into Sense8 and still not seeing what all the fuss is about. Against my better judgement I’m going to stick with it for a couple more episodes, just in case.
Also in bracket news: oh sweet Jesus Kyra! How am I meant to choose between Small Gods and Tombs of Atuan?! I want both to win 🙁
Okay… Here goes… arrrrrrrggghhhhhh… Small Gods!
Don’t count on it, at least not for the nomination phase. Every puppy that paid for their Spokane attending membership gets to nominate again. But will they pay another $40 so they can vote in the final round?
Freer is making it really easy for me to avoid his books like the plague. He is really whinging that he has to make an effort to put out a quality product because ****gasped**** some of his intended customers complain when it’s not up to snuff. I thought only Marxist imposed their choices on the people without them having any recourse. A capitalist system implies a give and take between the goods provider and the potential client of said provider. In a capitalist system if you don’t meet your clients wants or needs than you’ll go out of business. Obviously none of the puppies can be doing this very since none of them number among the bestselling SF authors.
1. THE TOMBS OF THE LAST SMALL UNICORN GODS
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
How did it come to this. *cue Rohirrim music*
First contender down: Small Gods. It’s the American Gods of Discworld, the book I respect rather than love. I think it speaks most strongly to those wounded by organized religion and as a lifelong happy apatheist that’s not my sore spot. If the dice had dealt us Night Watch instead…
So between the two books I read and reread as a teen, straight off the ‘New Fiction’ shelf at the library, I have to go with the one I memorized long passages from, set its songs to music (and the greatest crime of the movie was replacing Beagle’s wry witty lyrics with that sentimental glurge, ugh) and loved so unreservedly I will have no problem seeing it second to LotR in the voting, as it’s always been (barely) in my heart.
tl;dr – The Last Unicorn
(I will kill you if you set me free, the eyes said. Set me free.)
From my perspective, it’s obvious that they’ve simply borrowed cold war anti-Communist rhetoric, which was a bit ridiculous even when there was a functioning USSR that could, at least hypothetically, be pulling the strings on such a conspiracy.
I am not the sort of wild-eyed conspiracy nut who uses someone’s youthful affiliations against them but Jerry Pournelle says he used to be a card carrying communist; notice how well after he supposedly severed his ties to the Kremlin, his most famous series involved the Soviets and a thoroughly corrupt America dominating the Earth. And there are a lot of SF authors a handshake away from Pournelle, who as I say says he is a former communist. Could a Leckie or god help us, a Le Guin do half the damage to the image of SF that SIGMA has?
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2008/March/Pages/ScienceFictionMavensOfferFarOutHomelandSecurityAdvice.aspx
@Nigel: The Jewel in the Crown was an ITV programme, produced by Granada TV – not BBC. Seems hard to believe, these days, when ITV drama seems to run to nothing but soaps and crime series, but ’tis so.
@Nick
Netflix released the whole first series of Daredevil in one batch, and its been made as if it’s a 12 hour single story crime epic.
No filler or weak ‘villain of the week’ episodes.
It’s awesome, both Cox and D’Onofrio are spot on as Murdoch and Kingpin, and the fight/ action scenes are the best I’ve seen for a tv show, there is a fight scene in ep 2 that is like something out of Oldboy.
@Ed: that fight scene you speak of is in pretty much my top 3 tv scenes of this year. It’s absolutely immense. I so badly want to nominate it for a Hugo (and all the awards ever, actually) but it’s probably one of the least SFF episodes of the series… I might be better off voting for the series as a whole in long form.
Yeah, sorry, I tend to lump them all in together.
At the end of the first quarter, with more than 30 votes in (probably somewhere around half of what the total votes will be):
Small Gods and The Tomb of Atuan are effectively tied.
The Last Unicorn is the same small margin behind them that it was behind Nine Princes in Amber just before it turned around and beat Nine Princes in Amber.
Whoever wins this one, it’s not looking likely to be a blowout.
@RedWombat on August 4, 2015 at 7:38 am
Well done!
@KestrelHill on August 4, 2015 at 7:50 am
I almost forgot to vote:
Small Gods.
@ Oneiros: A friend of mine is blogging in detail about Sense8, and encouraging people to watch it, but the more she says, the less I want to see it.
@ Peter J: I just watched The Jewel In The Crown last week on Netflix streaming. Absolutely loved it. Apart from being very good, it doesn’t come across at all like something made for TV 30 years ago. Very high quality level in all respects.
@RedWombat
Glorious !!! Thank you for that piece of investigative journalism – now we know the awful truth.
@Kyra
I will think on this a bit before voting.
ETA: I choose Le Guin
@ Simon Bisson
Thanks that’s good to hear. It’ll be on September viewing schedule.
Small Gods <Blurts it out and runs away before being able to change my mind.>
haven’t finished Daredevil yet, but it will be going on my Long Form nominations list for next year. (and thanks to Jim Henley for the recommendation)
Ah, here is Freer’s earlier article. http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/06/15/the-plucky-bots/
I’d pull out some quotes, but I’m confined to my phone. Briefly, he cites Publishers Weekly, who are quoting BookStats. I don’t know the reliability of BookStats, but there’s a only long term fall if you include Educational and Professional textbooks (and I am shocked – shocked! to hear that those sales fell in a recession). Trade sales (where fiction lives) actually rose long term. There’s a short term drop which PW attribute to the previous year seeing bumper sales of couple of major series with Hollywood movies released.
So, yes, librul fiction trad pub is in freefall…upwards.
Anyway, reading the rest of his article I see Freer has issued a ridiculous challenge, which boils down to him refusing to listen to anyone who hasn’t successfully self-pubbed. Isn’t discrediting your critics one of those Alinsky tactics I’m supposed to have learnt at birth?
1. THE TOMBS OF THE LAST SMALL UNICORN GODS
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Because unicorns are the ultimate fantasy symbols and turtles are too mundane. And, this, after all, is a FANTASY contest,
I suspect the “evidence” for the slow death of SFF that Freer has in mind is simply that every year, fewer and fewer people buy his books and fewer and fewer people show up at the events he’s invited to, and the people he’s still on speaking terms with all report exactly the same thing! Clearly, this must mean that the audience for SFF is shrinking. The fact that all the SJWs say this doesn’t tally with their experience is just another example of how SJWs lie.
(Basically, if anyone remembers the ‘Cheers’ episode where the guy was convinced that every woman in Boston was a lesbian because they all turned him down for sex, it’s like that.)
…also, does anyone really believe his apparent claim that at some point, he was reduced to killing wallabies to survive?
1. THE TOMBS OF THE LAST SMALL UNICORN GODS
The Tombs of Atuan, LeGuin
Almost gave it to Pratchett, but I’m not convinced that any man can defeat the Great Eye of Tolkien.
@John Seavey – yes, I do. He has the air of a seasoned wallaby-killer about him.
Last Unicorn. *crying*
NelC, Witchking of Endor: “No man can slay me!” Eowyn: “I am no man.”
(Still love that line…)
Tintinaus: BT made me think of “Logic of Empire”, too. Probably no plantations on Pluto though.
Dave “Wallaby-killer” Freer sure has had some hard times. What he didn’t tell us was that he had to eat koala to survive.
I guess I’m going to go with ….
The Last Unicorn
and no … it won’t beat JRRT
@Noah Body
That was one of the things that struck me most when I was reading his Campbell packet from years ago. He can write a gripping action sequence. Much as I disagree with Correia on a lot of his other points, him write good fight scene.
For my bracket vote? Oh, Brutha. I think Pratchett has the best chance of topping the lidless eye, but I will split my vote between The Last Unicorn and Small Gods.