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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Sasquan’s reporting vote totals now and it’s a whopping huge number:
http://sasquan.org/2015/08/sasquan-announces-record-participation-in-the-2015-hugo-awards-voting/
@Abi — *applause*
and yes, I sang it to the little tune I devised at 14 or so.
Oh Dave Freer has dined on wallaby
And devoured every koala he caught
But would he punctuate his dining
By hunting the Tank Marmot?
Abi wins.
The Last Unicorn
Oh wow, yeah. Weird, I thought I checked and found it was Baen. Well, sorry to miscast aspersions on Baen for Tor’s editing of that book.
Richard Brandt, that’xs a hell of an analysis.
And I think it showcasese one of the biggest points. YA SFF is kicking ass and taking names. It’s hard to point to SFF dying as a genre when some of the biggest names in books in the last fifteen years have been SFF (Harry Potter, Divergent, Mortal INstruments, Twilight, etc. etc)
Oh, and if anyone is ever in need of a beta reader — I have 33 years of experience proofreading and doing some minor editing as an administrative clerk for the Federal government, and I’m retired…so I have the time.
I read the first book of his fantasy series and found it… competent. The action scenes were alright, but the book was pretty derivative and there wasn’t anything compelling with any of the characters for me. I can sort of guess why some people like it a lot but most fantasy is not to my taste in general.
On the other hand, I think I was about fifty pages into MHI when I ran into his twelfth insert about how gun laws were being proved stupid again before putting it down for good. There’s only so much ammo-humping based on clumsy contrived situations that I can tolerate .
With regards to eschewing episode format altogether, Babylon 5 being a ‘novel for TV’, and so on…
While obviously the British were doing that sort of thing well before the Americans did, I’d say that Babylon 5 wasn’t even the first major attempt on American TV. While it wasn’t SF, anybody else remember ‘Wiseguy’ from the late 1980s, with its focus on a multi-episode ‘arc’ structure? The first season was pretty much just two stories, one taking up 10 episodes and the other 12.
What’s actually gonna happen is…well, it’ll be interesting. Short of Nate Silver doing the handicapping, most of it is speculation at this point, though.
I hope that No Award makes a strong showing, but I won’t be all that surprised if English pulls it out in Short Story. But obviously it’s possible that there are a thousand thousand puppies baying their results, and John C. Wright will walk away with enough rockets to make an end table.
And I still won’t like him, or respect him, or think he’s a good writer. But it’ll be a cool end table.
Assuming that there ARE a bunch of No Awards, though, I’m very curious about how it will be stage managed. Some people, in the next few days, are going to know if there’s gonna be No Awards. And this is an interesting thing to orchestrate.
If there’s NONE–no change.
If there’s ONE–then yes, okay, go ahead as normal, have that awkward moment when David Gerrold reads the ballot, listen to murmurs that build to thunderous applause and/or boos, depending on audience makeup?
If there’s TWO–okay, now we’re getting tricky. How awkward are the organizers willing to let it be? Gerrold says “Again, No Award!” and there are fewer murmurs and more applause?
If there’s THREE–or more–well, at what point do you start to make changes? Announce an hour beforehand that owing to time constraints, no award will be given in X, Y, & Z? All the screaming happens on Twitter. Plow ahead and hope Gerrold has a good set of jokes for reading that line again and again, and that the crowd is friendly?
At the very least, we’ll likely KNOW if there’s a bunch of No Awards, just by counting the rockets on stage and dividing by categories. I’ll be very curious to see what Sasquan does with the ceremony, and whether they let it just BE awkward, or whether they actively work to curtail the weirdness.
Wombat,
I think at some point the spouse of the person designing the rockets stopped by here, and said that the artist was going to be very upset if they did all that work on the bases for nothing.
I thought that added a little sense of the hurt this crap is doing to the community
And I still won’t like him, or respect him, or think he’s a good writer. But it’ll be a cool end table.
I’ve made this point before, but even if they win, the Pups won’t ever get what they want. Because what they want is the adulation that comes from winning a Hugo, and they will never get that. I spoke with an author at Gen Con, and they said they were considering getting dressed up for the Hugo ceremony and going, but then planning on leaving right after the Campbell Award results are announced. If JCW does win a Hugo by some odd turn of events, it is likely he will accept it in front of an empty room.
I think at some point the spouse of the person designing the rockets stopped by here, and said that the artist was going to be very upset if they did all that work on the bases for nothing.
Well, there will certainly be some Hugos awarded. It seems reasonably certain that there will be Hugos awarded in the Novel, Graphic Story, Fan Artist, and both Dramatic Presentation categories. It seems like there is a decent chance that Fan Writer and Professional Artist will be awarded. So their work won’t be entirely wasted.
Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, and the two Editor categories seem reasonably likely to be No Awarded.
I like this “happy kittens” idea. It will be a movement that promotes reading a lot, recommending a lot, and voting for what you think was really good. So, like, normal Hugos, just with the involvement level turned up.
Just two quick things, sort of off topic.
1. On Friday I start a new temp job that is possibly temp to perm. You know what that means–money to BUY MORE BOOKS!!!
2. I’m submitting my short play about time travel to Talos Science Fiction Theatre Festival in London.
(eeeeeee)
@aaron
But never forget. No matter what categories receive an award or receive no award, super genius Theodore Beale, a +2 sigma intelligence, planned and predicted it that way. That’s what we all need to understand.
Oh, the Semi-Prozine, Fanzine, and Fancast categories seem like they are probable to be awarded too.
That’s what we all need to understand.
I’ve seen Beale’s prose in novel form via Natalie Luhrs. I’m thinking “genius” is the wrong word for him.
I think the best way to handle No Awards would be to announce them all at once before the first rocket is given out. Say “the following categories will not be awarded tonight” and list them. The crowd could dispense with the required murmurs and hullabaloo in one swell foop and then everyone would move on to the more fun part and see people get rockets.
I think Freer and the puppies are whinging about are things like this iO9 article about a decline in SF/fantasy book sales. Of course, that doesn’t include ebooks, so of course this article argues-or at least passes along rumours- that their sales are flat or declining as well. So um, DOOM! DOOM? DOOM.
Of course it ALSO said that juvenile/YA sales increased by 38%. Which makes me wonder how many books we consider adult are also being sold in the YA category. Or of I should switch to trying to write YA books.
@Paul
He also knew you were going to post what you did.
@Rose Embolism any statistics that exclude ebooks are next to useless. although I love physical books I buy more ebooks than physical copies. I also buy more books than I did a decade ago so yeah I know my personal circumstances don’t necessarily reflect anyone else but me but its hard to believe that I am unique.
They think that the Hugo is some kind of plot coupon that can be exchanged for adulation. If anything, the causality (in non-Puppy-dominated years) goes the other way: first you get the adulation, and then you are a contender for the Hugo.
Well, I guess I’ll give Sense8 a shot. Tying it back to Cloud Atlas interests me, as that was almost a good movie IMO – the cross-gender/cross-race makeup idea really drags it down(pun not intended, also really more the cross-race makeup, it’s garish at times).
Also all Netflix shows get dumped all at once. Spent last weekend watching the Wet Hot American Show(which was hilarious if you’re a fan of the movie). I suspect it’d be counterproductive to do that on cable and network tv. Some people save things on their DVR to binge watch but a lot of tv shows rely on the word of mouth between episodes to give their episodes a boost. Game of Thrones relies on this, look at the discussion after it’s various episodes where the audience realizes once again that George R.R. Martin is a gleeful sadist of a writer.
It would be interesting if one of the channels like HBO would do a SF show and give it a proper budget. They are probably the only ones who could do Dune justice, though they’d probably end up adapting all the novels which would get very weird. Supposedly Jonathan Nolan is working on Foundation for them, but I can’t really see how that will become a tv series without heavy modification.
Freer and the Puppies are mostly wrong that “trad SF is killing itself and being swallowed by indies,” but they do have a valid point or two. First, trad SFF is certainly not collapsing. Its unit sales appear to be down somewhat from last year, but that’s most likely because publishers returned to the agency model on ebooks, meaning prices went up while unit sales went down. (However, by doing this, publishers’ overall revenues increased very slightly, so it’s hard to say they were “wrong” to raise prices.)
So: trad SFF is absolutely not dying. Where Freer’s right, though, is that, judging by the staggering number of indie SF bestsellers, trad is drastically underserving a specific SF subgenre: military SF.
And I’m talking hard military SF. Tech, tactics, non-stop action. Exactly the kind of thing the Puppies have been championing. Nick Webb’s Constitution would be the latest example. It came out in late June, spent all of July camped in the #30s on Amazon, and is only starting to slide now that Amazon’s new release honeymoon is over. Nick wasn’t an author with a giant audience before this, either. The book took off because the readership for these works is HUGE and trad apparently isn’t offering nearly enough of it.
For the record, I’m not sympathetic to the Puppies and I don’t think this validates their many other claims. But I’m an indie SFF author who spends countless hours watching Amazon ranks, reading up on industry news, blabbing with other indies, etc., so I find it terribly interesting when you can spot a market inefficiency as glaring as this one.
Hope that sheds a little light on the issue. First-time poster, but I’ve been lurking here since the Hugo thing happened. (By the way, the fantasy bracket forced me into buying Small Gods yesterday. Been a long time since I read any Discworld!)
> “Sasquan’s reporting vote totals now and it’s a whopping huge number:”
Almost 6,000. I guess everybody *did* vote at the last minute, after all.
A question: I’m not a gambling man, but is anyone making book on this year’s Hugo Awards? I’d be curious about what the odds-makers might make of it all.
There is a con in Spokane town called the Sasquan Worldcon
It’s been the ruin of many a poor fan, and Ghu, I know, I’m one
@Rose Embolism (cool name btw)
I think Freer and the puppies are whinging about are things like this iO9 article about a decline in SF/fantasy book sales. Of course, that doesn’t include ebooks, so of course this article argues-or at least passes along rumours- that their sales are flat or declining as well. So um, DOOM! DOOM? DOOM.
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if e-readers had even wider support amongst SFF fans than fans of most other genres. Being open to new technologies and all that.
I know I’m very reluctant to buy books that aren’t available on Kindle or another ebook format at this point. I have a storage unit filled with boxes of paper books that follow me around like a drag weight, and I don’t want to add to the burden.
EDIT: Ran out of time to edit my post above, I meant Wet Hot American Summer the show not ‘Wet Hot American Show.’
I have a record Hugo vote post up.
I could believe that SFF fans, of all people, may be quick and enthusiastic adopters of a convenient technology which allows them to purchase books almost effortlessly.
Re: Visible stacks of Hugos on stage at the Awards. Alas, my suggestion for how to do this without revealing how many, if any, were No Awards was rejected.
Instead of, call it 15 (whatever the number of categories we’re at these days), Hugos on stage, you have 15 salmon. If something wins a Hugo, the accepter is tossed the salmon which contains the actual Hugo award. If No Award wins a category, an empty salmon is tossed to the audience for an impromptu sashimi party.
There’s The Expanse, coming from SyFy, which shows promise.
Making this easy for myself, and voting for the specific work:
1. The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
(But really, Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny!)
Jon, thanks for the spelling correction. (Although now I have this vision of Nazgul leading hordes of terrifying teddy-bears to war. Anyone have any spare brain-bleach…?)
Kyra: with all of the kerfuffle about the Puppies nominating fragments drawn from larger works, how could you put the Princess Bride in your previous bracket? “Good Parts Version” my fanny. I want the whole thing!
I personally can’t believe that the Sad Puppies had the bad judgement to get Beale involved. Anybody who couldn’t see that as a bad idea shouldn’t be allowed to play with scissors. Which of course they compounded by soliciting the support of GamerGaters.
I can also see as a result of this mess John Wright both walking away with a Hugo and hurting his own sales at the same time.
Edited to add that my vote is for LeGuin.
@ Beth in MA
Good luck with 1 and 2!
I personally can’t believe that the Sad Puppies had the bad judgement to get Beale involved.
Bad judgment is one of the core personality traits that defines the authors who signed on to the Puppy campaigns.
I find it hard to believe that trad pub is overlooking a HUGE paying market. The market may be HUGE for free or close to free books, but I doubt there is enough money there for all the sunk costs associated with trad pub.
> “‘Good Parts Version’ my fanny. I want the whole thing!”
You don’t get much call for Morgenstern nowadays. I don’t know anymore what I got back there. You come in tomorrow, you look around.
Beth in MA, the problem with jobs that give you more money to buy books is that being employed then gives you less time to read books. Being unemployed/retired gives me more time to borrow books from the library, with the added advantage that the library keeps them organized so that I can find what I’m looking for. I know that I own a copy of Slan, which is probably in a box in my attic, possibly packed when I moved out of my parents’ house, or when my wife and I bought our house, or when we packed up the book collection before our son was born, so that he would have a room to live in. I’m going to reread Slan in the next week or two, in preparation for the “Classics of SF” discussions at Worldcon, but rather than trying to find my copy, I just picked one up at the library (a book plate inside the front cover says, “Watertown Public LIbrary/In Memory of Charles Brown”, but it was acquired in 1998, so it’s almost certainly not “our” Charles Brown).
The last time I was involved in a Hugo Award ceremony as other than a stagehand, we had all of the rocket ships on a table backstage, out of view of the audience, and brought each one on stage as it was announced.
ETA: There were no “No Award” winners that year, but at least one award went to two people, with two rocketships. Having the statues out of view made it impossible for the audience to count them and figure this out in advance.
@alexvdl
I believe she said that she’d be upset if they were awarded for crap work as opposed to not awarded at all. I could be wrong, but my takeaway had been that if all the work he did was for them being awarded as a prize to unethical voting blocs, it would feel like a waste.
Fantasy bracket, Round the Fifth, my choice:
I typically don’t vote in brackets where I haven’t read every book. But with two books here which I’ve read, I’m breaking the last rule I had left unbroken (drat it!).
I fear the net result of having three go head to head to head will be that the Prachett will eke out a win, because I suspect the fan bases for the Le Guin and the Beagle more closely correspond and they’ll knock each other off. Most of the Prachett fans will vote for Prachett regardless. I’d have loved to see the results of a Prachett-Le Guin match one on one, but that’s not to be.
1)-The Tombs of Atuan-Le Guin, because I’d love to see Le Guin up against JRRT.
As far as I can tell, they didn’t want him involved this year. They didn’t nominate him for anything. But they couldn’t stop him from being him.
Oh yeah, the vote… What a list!
I love The Last Unicorn. For a story with a lot of grim to it, it also has plenty of humor. It has a magical, mystic feel to it while also seeming very contemporary (of the time it was written). All of that blew my mind when I first read it and makes re-reading it a pleasure.
LeGuin’s Earthsea novels also have a mythic feel to me. They don’t grab me quite as much emotionally, though. I haven’t read them in a while, so my feelings about them are a little too vague.
Small Gods I just read for the first time a few months ago (been working through Discworld). I’m one of those people a previous poster here identified as the primary target for “Small Gods” – raised amongst fundies. I would happily have voted for “Lords and Ladies”, as well, or honestly almost any of the witches novels.
Ultimately, the entirety of (what I’ve read of) Discworld weighs too heavily for me to vote for anything but Small Gods. Pratchett took a little whisp of a fun parody and turned it into an amazing lifetime’s work. From his goofy uncle/dad-type jokes to the subtleties of his character building over the many novels, to the sense of humanity that shines through his works starting around maybe the third(?) novel, he’s one of the few authors who make me want to have hope in humanity.
As far as I can tell, they didn’t want him involved this year.
Well, other than putting three works published by Castalia House on the Sad Puppy slate. The claim from the Puppies that Beale had nothing to do with the Sad Puppy slate rings a bit hollow in the face of the fact that they put three works by his pet publishing project onto the ballot.
1. THE TOMBS OF THE LAST SMALL UNICORN GODS
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
ouch…
And I will vote for a … um … urgh … errrrrr tie between The Tombs of Atuan and The Last Unicorn.
“As to whether Teddy can bring people back for another year”
Oh, some talented soul, please draw a picture of a fat, fluffy teddy bear holding a flaming sword.
@Aaron:
Is it ever. I just wish they’d stop pretending to be poorly written supervillains.