We now return you to those thrilling days of yesterscroll.
(1) Some anniversaries.
| August 29, 1997 Cyberdyne’s “Skynet“ intelligence system becomes self-aware. | September 1, 1922 Yvonne De Carlo (Lily Munster) is born in Canada. | September 3, 1969 The Valley of Gwangi opens in New York City. |
(2) The “17 places you won’t see on the official UCLA campus tour” include —
#1
On the second floor of Boelter Hall, home of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, there’s a seemingly random arrangement of dark and light gray floor tiles outside room 2714. The tiles actually spell out “Lo and behold” in binary code. The hidden message was secretly added to a renovation project in 2011 as a clever (and subtle) way to honor Internet pioneer and professor Leonard Kleinrock.
#4
Clayburn La Force, who received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA, was the Anderson dean who spearheaded the construction of the school’s contemporary building complex. To honor him, one of the exterior red brick pillars in the Anderson courtyard carries the inscription, “May La Force Be With You.”
#5
Among the campus’ little-known treasures is the largest collection of meteorites in California (and fifth-largest in the nation.) Assembled for years by cosmochemist John Wasson, researcher Alan Rubin and their colleagues, more than 1,500 space rocks rest in the UCLA Geology Building. About 100 of them are on display at the UCLA Meteorite Gallery,
#7
If you can find room 60 in the section of the basement of Powell Library Building housing the Office of Instructional Development, you’ll see a sign that commemorates the room where “Fahrenheit 451” took shape. In 1950 and 1953, author Ray Bradbury came supplied with a bag of dimes for the rental typewriters. He clacked out “The Fireman” in nine days (total cost $9.80) and returned to rework his story into “Fahrenheit 451.” You can still find a copy of his original work in UCLA Library Special Collections, which houses a rich treasure trove of Bradburyana.
(3) Eric Flint – “The Divergence Between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction”
[Another epic.]
Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.
And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.
With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.
But he’s the only one, out of twenty-two. In percentage terms, 4.5% of the total. (Or 4.8%, if we subtract Tolkien.)
There’s no way now to reconstruct exactly what the situation was forty years ago. But I know perfectly well—so does anyone my age (I’m sixty-one) with any familiarity with our genre—that if you’d checked bookstores in the 1960s and 1970s to see how shelf space correlated with awards, you’d have come up with radically different results. Instead of an overlap of less than five percent, you’d have found an overlap of at least sixty or seventy percent….
And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.
They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century. The problem came with what the Sad Puppies did next. First, they insisted that Someone Must Be To Blame—when the phenomenon mostly involves objective factors. Secondly, being themselves mostly right wing in their political views, they jumped to the conclusion—based on the flimsiest evidence; mostly that some people had been nasty to Larry Correia on some panels at the Reno Worldcon—that the bias against their fiction in the awards was due to political persecution. Neither proposition can stand up to scrutiny, as I have now demonstrated repeatedly in the course of these essays….
One more thing needs to be said. The biggest problem in all of this is that way, way too many people—authors and awards-bestowers alike—have a view of this issue which… ah…
I’m trying to figure out a polite way of saying they have their heads up their asses…
Okay, I’ll say it this way. The problem is that way too many people approach this issue subjectively and emotionally rather than using their brains. With some authors, regardless of what they say in public, there’s a nasty little imp somewhere deep in the inner recesses of their scribbler’s soul that chitters at them that if they’re not winning awards there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants. Or, if they don’t sell particularly well but do get recognition when it comes to awards, there’s a peevish little gremlin whining that they’re not selling well either because somebody—publisher, agent, editor, whoever except it’s not them—is not doing their job or it’s because the reading public are a pack of morons.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax. There are many factors that affect any author’s career and shape how well they sell and how often they get nominated for awards. Some of these factors are under an author’s control, but a lot of them aren’t. And, finally, there’s an inescapable element of chance involved in all of this.
The only intelligent thing for an author to do is, first, not take anything that happens (for good or ill) personally; secondly, try to build your career based on your strengths rather than fretting over your weaknesses.
(4) Craig Engler – “Dear Sad Puppies, I’d like to share some thoughts with you (Part 1)”
However, it’s possible to overdo it. The FAQ on the Hugo Awards site even has something to say about self promotional efforts: “Be careful. Excessively campaigning for a Hugo Award can be frowned upon by regular Hugo voters and has been known to backfire.” The words are italicized for emphasis not by me but by the person who wrote the FAQ. Note that the FAQ is addressed to the entire world, not to a specific group within fandom. In other words, anyone anywhere who excessively campaigns may face a backlash. It’s actually happened before….
That stance against campaigning has nothing to do with the personal beliefs or the politics of the campaigner, but rather their actions, i.e. campaigning to an excessive extent. And yes there was a lot more going on with Sad Puppies besides just campaigning, but even if that’s all that had ever happened, it was extremely doubtful voters would have responded favorably to Larry [Correia]’s campaign to get himself a Hugo….
I’ve been a Hugo voter off and on since 1988 when I attended my first Worldcon, and it’s always been widely known that voters react badly to campaigning. So had anyone done what Larry (and later on other Sad Puppies did), voters would have responded the same way. In fact, Larry isn’t even the first to try campaigning and have it not work. (Thus the reason it’s in a FAQ to begin with.)
So my thought to you is, while there was more going on around the vote than just Larry’s excessive campaigning (again, I’ll talk about that stuff in Part 2), we really never had to get past the campaigning issue to know that Larry’s tactics were simply not going to work. Not because of his politics, not because of his story telling ability, but because of his actions.
(5) What do we call this — a matho?
https://twitter.com/HermesMenusco/status/638418745145298945
(6) The Carl Brandon Society has issued a “Non-profit Status Update”.
Due to a misunderstanding between board members in the wake of a personnel transition, we did not ensure that our tax returns were filed properly for 2012 – 2014. (It is worth noting that tax returns for organizations as small as the Carl Brandon Society are done via a form called the e-postcard, which requires only basic information, and does not require any degree of complex accounting).
We discovered the oversight when the IRS administratively revoked our non-profit status and provided instructions to us on how to be reinstated. We have spent the time since then working toward reinstatement and taking steps to assure that this does not happen again. These steps include, but are not limited to: (1) doing a complete examination of our fiscal practices and financial controls, (2) getting a new treasurer with significant non-profit experience, as well as a legal background and experience tracking and analyzing financial records, and (3) doing a complete review of our bookkeeping and financial records for all the affected years. We are about to file detailed tax returns for the years in question along with an application for reinstatement as a non profit charitable organization. We expect to be reinstated without difficulty as soon as our paperwork is reviewed by the IRS. Charitable donations made during this time will be covered by that application.
The Carl Brandon Society Steering Committee apologizes to everyone concerned for not resolving this issue in a more timely manner. Though the revocation happened in 2013, it was retroactive to the date covered by the missed filing. The reinstatement, likewise, will be retroactive to the same date.
The public became aware that the Society had lost its 501(c)(3) status after donations were solicited in connection with John Scalzi’s offer to voice an audiobook — “Charity Drive for Con or Bust: An Audio Version of ‘John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular’ Read by Me”
(7) Aristotle!
https://twitter.com/MegDaLibrarian/status/638401877433040897
(8) Those E.T. the Extra Terrestrial Atari cartridges dug up in Alamogordo netted over $108,000 in an auction last year, Rolling Stone recalls:
Nearly 900 copies of the infamously terrible video game were sold on eBay after an April 2014 excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico confirmed the urban legend that thousands of the cartridges were buried following the game’s critical and commercial failure…. The most an E.T. cartridge sold for at auction was $1,535.
“There’s 297 we’re still holding in an archive that we’ll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them,” Lewandowski said. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we’re just holding them. The film company got 100 games, 23 went to museums and we had 881 that we actually sold.”
The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,000 from the sale, while the Tularosa Basin Historical Society gets over $16,000. The remainder of the money went towards shipping fees as buyers in 45 states and 14 countries scooped up copies of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
(9) Coincidentally, the E.T. movie will be back in theaters for one day this October.
In conjunction with the Blu-ray release on October 9th and the film’s 30th anniversary, Fathom Events has announced that E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial will return to the big screen for one night only on October 3 at 7:00 p.m. local time with special matinee screenings in select theaters at 2:00 p.m. local time.
(10) Eric R. Sterner in “The Martian Message” says he thinks movies do nothing to encourage space exploration.
Surely, several interests want to capitalize on the melding of film and speculative reality. Damon recently visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he talked about his role, and NASA’s website proudly uses the opportunity to explain the real NASA-developed technologies portrayed in the movie. It can only do a space advocate’s heart good when Hollywood seems to discover the same sense of excitement in space that we see and experience every day.
Sadly, if the space community seeks to turn The Martian into a commercial for sending people to Mars, we will fail miserably. The 2000 movie Castaway was nominated for multiple awards, including an Academy Award for Tom Hanks. It did not increase public support for sending people to deserted islands. Neither will The Martian bring them closer to Mars.
(11) Nerd Approved shows how you can get Serenity on your GPS.
You are seeing the Serenity instead of a car on this Garmin GPS image tweeted by Nathan Fillion. The picture was sent to him by Browncoat Greg H. and you can have it, too. All you need to do is download the image and then add it to your Garmin’s vehicles folder and you’ll be driving through the ‘verse. As far as finding a way to avoid the Reavers and outsmart the Alliance, you’re on your own.
(12) NPR interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin who has a new book coming out — Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.
Interview Highlights
On the importance of “crowding” and “leaping”
Crowding is what Keats said when he said, “Load every rift with ore.” In other words, pack in all the richness you can. All great books are incredibly rich; each sentence can sort of be unpacked. But then also in telling a story, you’ve got to leap, you’ve got to leave out so much. And you’ve got to know which crag to leap to.
(12) Marc Scott Zicree posted a Special Space Command Update on his birthday, which included showing the birthday present he was given by John King Tarpinian (at :27).
(13) George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog — “Next Year’s Hugos”
Let’s make it about the work. Let’s argue about the BOOKS. And yes, of course, it will be an argument. I may not like the stories you like. You may not like the stories I like. We can all live with that, I think. I survived the Old Wave/ New Wave debate. Hell, I enjoyed parts of it… because it was about literature, about prose style, characterization, storytelling. Some of the stuff that Jo Walton explores in her Alfie-winning Best Related Work, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT? That’s the sort of debate we should be having.
The elimination of slates will be a huge step toward the end of hostilities.
But there’s a second step that’s also necessary. One I have touched on many times before. We have to put an end to the name-calling. To the stupid epithets.
I have seen some hopeful signs on that front in some of the Hugo round-ups I’ve read. Puppies and Puppy sympathizers using terms like Fan (with a capital), or trufan, or anti-Puppy, all of which I am fine with. I am not fine with CHORF, ASP, Puppy-kicker, Morlock, SJW, Social Justice Bully, and some of the other stupid, offensive labels that some Pups (please note, I said SOME) have repeatedly used for describe their opponents since this whole thing began. I am REALLY not fine with the loonies on the Puppy side who find even those insults too mild, and prefer to call us Marxists, Maoists, feminazis, Nazis, Christ-hating Sodomites, and the like. There have been some truly insane analogies coming from the kennels too — comparisons to World War II, to the Nazi death camps, to ethnic cleansing. Guy, come on, cool down. WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT A LITERARY AWARD THAT BEGAN AS AN OLDSMOBILE HOOD ORNAMENT. Even getting voted below No Award is NOT the same as being put on a train to Auschwitz, and when you type shit like that, well…
The Pups have often complained that they don’t get no respect… which has never actually been true, as the pre-Puppy awards nominations of Correia and Torgersen have proved… but never mind, the point here is that to get respect, you need to give respect.
[Thanks to Craig Engler, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist.]
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Whoa.
We need to set up a convention panel buddy system for the members of File 770.
Never let one of us appear alone.
Unpossible! He’s a working class hero, and the Puppies keep insisting gin is a symbol of the working classes!
@Laura Resnick
I don’t suppose you could hint at your UK distributor that your Esther Diamond books really ought to have an ebook release? I’d like very much to be a fan of your work, but I’m having trouble accessing it. (Paper books, while lovely, are rather hard on my hands, one of which is currently trying to do an impression of a dalmatian via teeny bruises even without me inflicting holding books on it.)
Meredith, working on it. I agree!
@Viverrine,
I know what you mean about ereaderIQ, not sure if its a good idea to know about every great reduction available for the kindle, I had to stop myself from buying 3 books this morning.
The price graphs are useful , its helps gauge if the price is likely to get any lower.
We need to set up a convention panel buddy system for the members of File 770.
I’m in.
I can’t find this link in either today’s comments or yesterday’s, so my apologies for missing whoever posted it:
https://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/rebecca-rowena-puppies-fanfic/
But this, plus the person talking about Seattle’s demographics made me realize something. Statistically, most white people have very few, if any, friends of color. I also suspect, given the socially conservative settings that the puppies live in, they do not have many, if any, LGBT people who are out in their group of friends. (Given Brad’s attempt to insult Scalzi by declaring him gay, if I was not straight and friends with Brad, I would be doing my best to distance myself, but that’s me.) So when they look around, what do they see? Straight white people. This is normal, this is what the world looks like. So when they see books featuring people of other races and sexual orientations, this is a message. These people do not exist in the real world, so if someone put them into a book, they are trying to drive home a message, shame the white male readers, etc.
That’s where the comment about the books being affirmative action winners comes from. People of color, feminists and queer people do not exist in real life (I suspect it’s why Hoyt is now their poster child as a WOC). So if awards are going to books about people in these categories, then it is because white liberals have a guilty conscience. It cannot be because they enjoy the books or are glad to see another perspective, because the real world does not have this sort of people in it. And while SF is about the future, this part of the real world is not about to change. (Or something like that. These are the people who don’t care when Thor is a frog, but care when Thor is a woman.)
If they weren’t such assholes, I’d feel sorry for them. It’s a weird Dunning-Krueger, where they don’t know what they don’t know (Unknown Unknowns) because of their limited experience.
Or maybe they have really diverse groups of friends and just are complete assholes.
Translating “I will walk with you” to “I will audience for you”?
Found an unlocked article by the same author I was curious about; doesn’t look like it’s been rounded up yet. And it is exactly what I expected: http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/28/no-award-the-hugo-awards-and-the-nihilism-of-the-cultural-left/
Laura Resnick, if you ever come to Windycon (I know your father does on a regular basis) I will cheerfully go to any panel you’re on, (provided it doesn’t conflict with any of my con-runner duties).
Unless it’s at 0-dark-thirty on Sunday morning. Friendship has limits….
@Jamoche: Thanks for linking that piece. I’d have missed it otherwise. It’s an excellent and even-handed summary of the whole affair, and while it’s coming from someone who doesn’t share my point of view, I feel like the writer has really taken the time to understand where people who share my views are coming from. It reads like a thoughtful, searching, and above all honest attempt to engage with the other side.
Thanks for linking that piece. I’d have missed it otherwise.
I would have too, which wouldn’t have been any real loss. It was just a rehash of the various Puppy talking points.
I’m up for “I will audience for you”, if in a fairly limited way (health & geographical location). 🙂
Re: ereaderIQ
I didn’t know about this website! And there’s a UK version! *wallet quietly screams in the background*
@Laura Resnick
Yay! *patiently refreshes Amazon* 😉
So I vanished down a hole of “every single Strong Female Protagonist strip and oh my god why did I not pay more attention to the people promoting this because it is absolutely brilliant and the best thing ever” for a few hours…
But I’m back to say that if Laura Resnick goes to CONvergence, I’ll attend any panel she’s on unless I have a conflicting panel at the same time. And if we’re the only people there, she can hijack it to show cat pictures and I will cheer her on. 🙂
@Zil:
I think he was still meant to be a sad little man, but he did have a sort of puppyish (but not Puppyish) bafflement that, while he was good, he wasn’t as good as he thought he was. I could sympathize while still not liking him; in the book my response was just “get over yourself, there’s a more interesting story here and you’re just in the way”
Oh! Webcomics! This is an excellent time to be into webcomics. A few that haven’t been mentioned that might be Hugo worthy…
Namesake: a beautiful, complex urban fantasy. Emma, a modern day women is shocked to be swept away into Oz. The ingredients of Oz are shocked as well- because she’s not a Dorothy. Some women, Namesakes with the right names, can travel into worlds of fantasy, and they in turn are linked to Writers who can alter the reality they go into. There’s more of course- multiple conspiracies of those who would user or destroy Namesakes, ghosts, Cheshire Cats…and I haven’t even gotten into the wonderful complexity of this revisionary look at classic stories.
Blindsprings: Princess Tamura is quite content to serve the spirits in their magical wood, while waiting for her sister to grow up. Then she meets a boy, who views he will study magic and rescue her. Eventually, he does, against her will. She finds herself alone in the city of Kirkhall, 300 years after the Academic mages rebelled and killed the Orphic ruling family. Now she’s tasked with helping the spirits of the city, while revolutionaries want to bring back the old magic…
Blindsprings is described as the opposite of a Disney story- it’s got wonderfully detailed worldbuilding, engaging characters, and a political situation that is both stark and in shades of grey. All contrasted with the spirits with their insistence on contracts and ambiguous motives.
@Jamoche: But *not*? Well, I dunno about that, “not as good as he thought he was” sounds familiar 😛
I definitely agree that his part wasn’t particularly exciting, really — I know it was pretty slow going my first read (even slower than usual, I mean; it’s a naturally slow book to begin with, which I don’t begrudge). I guess I just feel it provides the right… contrast? Context? And I was, on subsequent readings, sufficiently amused by the commentaries on Society.
ed: @Rose Embolism: You know, I don’t think I’ve read a proper summary/rec for Namesake before, even though I’ve seen it floating around as a general “this is good, read it” before. That sounds rather appealing.
@Cat
I discovered that back in the days when I was more likely to be discussing things on forums (phpbb-based, etc.). So many flounces that I didn’t stick. I learned that flouncing means someone’s going to say something you really, really, really need to refute and then you’re going to look silly. I’d have some sympathy, but I think Torgersen and I are approximately the same age.
Laura Resnick said:
That is… not only beyond parody, it’s getting into seriously disturbing territory.
A though experiment: If you, dear reader, were a parent of a high-school student, and one of his or her classmates were to post on social media something along the lines quoted above, what would you think?
Or, if you were going to attend an event next week where you knew John C. Wright would also be, would you go with a light heart?
@Tasha Turner:
I am just starting Huff’s The Silvered, which I had no idea existed! I devoured her Blood (Noun) books, and really enjoyed the spin off Smoke and (Noun) series. This one looks like a full-bore fantasy series rather than urban. I’m really looking forward to it!
Finished VanderMeer’s Finch which was a very interesting noir. It subverted my expectations and took me on a great journey. I only discovered the Ambergris books this year, and loved all three in very different ways. Should I go on to the Southern Reach books, or look for his older works first?
ETA: yep, the hyperbole from JCW is getting pretty terrifying. I think I’m going to stick to book recs and skip apocalyptic bluster.
Those who snuffed that light, hating a brightness they could not ignite themselves, must pay.
I find it interesting and somewhat amazing that, given how terrible his writing is, JCW could write this phrase unironically.
OK, I have just read several pages of comments. Lumping my different thoughts in one comment:
Popularity and awards: Not many science fiction novels have sold as many copies as Dhalgren; it never had a huge amount of shelf space, but it sold steadily and widely for years, largely to people who weren’t connected to organized sf fandom. (It would be amusing to ask some of the “but this book sold a lot of copies, where’s its award?” people to explain why their pet novel is more deserving than one that sold over a million copies.)
Series: This discussion led me to ask my library for the latest Sue Grafton mystery, X, number 24 in a series that started with A Is for Alibi. When I look in bookstores, they tend to have the most recent few volumes (so when the latest was O Is for Outlaw, it would have been easy to find the L, M, and N volumes, but not C or F. (I rarely reread mysteries, so tend to get them from the library even when I have both a book-buying budget and room on the shelves.)
Pratchett and the Hugo: If enough people nominate Pratchett’s last novel for a Hugo, his daughter will be asked to accept or decline the nomination on his behalf. The rule about asking nominees to accept was made after Judy Lynn del Rey won her only Hugo, posthumously, and Lester del Rey used the acceptance speech to cricitize the people who hadn’t nominated/voted for her when she was alive to appreciate it.
Wright is a little bit sneaky. His posts start out as ordinary blog posts, but somewhere along the way it gently turns into a sermon, and I find myself carried along by his warm, deeply and urgently human voice, eager to see where he’ll lead me.
The subject varies, of course. Different starting points will take him down different paths, exploring different virtues, but it’s always, ultimately, grounded in love.
he penalties include being buried in excrement, forced marching in lead robes, burning with tongue of fire, and being severed eternally by a demonic swordblade
JCW really needs to get his reading sorted out. Those are all from Dante’s Inferno.
The contrast between Laura Resnick’s comments here the last few pages and that one of Wright’s she links to is startling. Wright reads like a very articulate two-year-old, emotionally. Adults shouldn’t think that way. When we do, we owe it to our own better selves and to the world not to indulge in it, to note the feeling of hurt and move on. I don’t like reading things that make me genuinely worry someone might hurt themselves or someone else. Feeding that kind of hatred is dangerous to the soul, and (since we’re indivisible entities, ha ha on you, lurking dualists) to the body. It wears down the immune system, stresses the whole cardiovascular system, and more. My idea of a good world includes nobody spending their life in the grip of anything like that.
Laura’s comments illustrate exactly what I think of as mature response: not denying any of the bad, nor downplaying how unwelcome it can be, but capable of getting on with life, and giving much more attention to what’s good.
But I have a feeling that “they must pay” means, in real world terms, he just wants the Puppies to put him on more Hugo ballots.
Bruce Baugh–and yet I am a MORLOCK. (At least according to His Wrightness.)
Laura, you may well be right, about what he wants. Some of this is my PTSD speaking.
And who knew Morlocks had such great safari stories? Fodder there for a Wells sequel.
I think JCW fondly imagines that only he and a few favoured fellow intellectuals are familiar with the Divine Comedy.
(I admit, I haven’t read it in the original Italian. Slack of me, I know.)
I would regard any event which invited JCW as sending a pretty clear signal that they didn’t want me to go.
Laura Resnick –
There might be Geneva convention rules about putting him in another reader packet.
OK, has anyone here ever met JCW? Does he speak the same way he writes?
You mean, “Three time Hugo nominee John C. Wright”, right?
I heard him speak once. He’s a skilled speaker, one of the finest speaking today.
He’s got a soft, gentle voice and a mild demeanor. When you’re speaking to him, his eyes lock onto you like nothing else in the world exists, and when you’re done, he does this funny thing–he pauses for several seconds, as if he’s carefully thinking over everything you’ve said, before he responds with some wise and gentle remark that suggests that he understood you better than you understood yourself. It’s an amazing experience. He’s the most attentive and gentle listener I’ve ever met.
This moose was at a .uk convention where spare gophers and tech crew were hastily rounded up to provide an audience for one guest speaker. (The speaker was neither bad nor unpopular but merely had the misfortune to be scheduled against a spectacularly attractive programme item.) They gave a very good talk, too , and the audience gradually increased as time went on.
On the other hoof, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was somewhat surprised at the packed state of her GoH talk at the 2014 Glasgow Eastercon, and I suspect even more surprised at the questions from the floor at the end. We may be SF and Fantasy fans, but there are a lot of scientists squirrelled away in the membership and I don’t think any of the questions were stupid ones.
YES! Thank you for posting this! I found this amazing comic several years ago from a random link somewhere and it is part of my daily ritual!
I love Florence!
It’s saved me lots of money… On individual books but it’s destroyed anything I had resembling a book budget. Last time I checked I was following ~300 authors and tracking over 500 books…
Teemu wrote:
That’s not hyperbole, it’s hyperbollocks. He really does need to take a break from the internet for a couple of months and calm down. Vox won’t let him, of course.
@Laura do you make it a habit to threaten to kill people on Whatever? Earlier this year on a thread about the Hugos you threatened my life if I put you on the 2016 ballot. I felt special that day. Now I’m feeling like part of a nameless crowd. *goes to corner & sobs*
Disclaimer: I knew she wasn’t threatening me at the time – we’d been joking around.
@Mark:
I’ve been pushing Kill Six Billion Demons for a while now. It’s truly outstanding, and the supplementary material the author creates for most pages is frequently astonishing. At the rate it’s going, there will be an fully realized religion or three described in full detail with complete books of teachings by the time it’s all over.
Book One finished this year, so it is definitely going at the very top of my Hugo nomination list for Mid-Americon II.
The language it’s written in is not exactly Italian. A well educated high school Italian (like me at the time) would not be able to understand it withoit footnotes. A lot of footnotes. Mind you – nobody in Italy graduates from high school without having read large parts of it.
My favourite part of the JCW post is in the comments where he and his wife debate whether they are the Rebel Alliance ( hardy few fighting the monolith of received wisdom) or the Empire (source of all that is right and good because we blow up everyone who doesn’t agree). Guess which side JCW says they are?
Inside every fundamentalist is an authoritarian who wants justification to demand we do everything his way.
Anna would you say it’s more like modern English students trying to read Shakespeare or Chaucer?
Does anyone know a good way of getting exact (preferably) or ballpark (good enough) word counts for published works? *sorting 1940s recs*
Meredith
Speaking of gin, due to a series of memory lapses, I recently found my cabinet stocked with two bottles of Monkey 47 and one bottle of Hendrick’s. Despite being removed two generations from the working class, I suppose I’ll have to buckle down (in a Dinosaur safe way, of course).
This strikes me as by far the least likely reason for Antonelli’s issues.
Brad J on September 1, 2015 at 8:58 am said:
He probably held out for the award being renamed “Hugor”.
@Meredith:
Amazon have word counts: http://alexisgrant.com/2010/01/18/word-count-with-a-little-help-from-amazon/
(And worldcat’s got page counts in most cases and you could guesstimate wordcount from that if you don’t mind 5-10% error bars)
I suspect closer to Shakespeare than Chaucer.
When I was in college in the 70s I had a philosophy professor who spent her summers in Italy. She said she used to discuss Dante with the local butcher(?) who had been made to memorize most of it due to misbehavior at school.
I can imagine an English speaker being able to discuss Shakespeare (or Milton?) after memorizing it during detention but I think Chaucer in the original would be trickier.
That was me, suggesting Mike put it in the roundup today. But I posted it at some ungodly hour, so I’m glad you pulled it out of the slushpile.