(1) A CENTURY OF TITLES FROM OUR CENTURY. The Guardian says it’s time for another clickworthy list! “The 100 best books of the 21st century” includes both fiction and nonfiction – I count about 16 sff works on it, with Jemisin, Gaiman, and Pullman among the authors.
Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs … Read our pick of the best books since 2000
(2) SPACE ACE. Leonard Maltin delivers his verdict: “Ad Astra: On Man’s Destiny in Outer Space”
Writer-director James Gray is nothing if not bold. He dared to tackle a non-cynical romantic triangle in Two Lovers and a return to “high adventure” in The Lost City of Z. Neither film found the audience it deserved. With Ad Astra he has ventured into outer space, fully aware of the pitfalls: being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or, more recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. He needn’t have worried.
In fashioning an intelligent space drama for grownups he found inspiration and a through-line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its modern-day equivalent, Apocalypse Now. He also found theperfect actor to serve as his space traveler. The part fits Brad Pitt like a glove, and he delivers one of his finest, most nuanced performances.
(3) DATLOW QUOTES. “’Horror is Everywhere’: A Conversation with Editor Ellen Datlow” with interlocutor John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews.
When asked what motivates her to keep editing anthologies, Datlow’s genuine love of reading and sharing shines through. “I love being the person who sometimes initiates the process of the creation of a brilliant new story (by soliciting new stories by writers whose work I love) and I love rediscovering/pushing stories that I think are amazing. I want everyone to discover stories they will love and admire as much as I do. I also enjoy working with all my authors.”
(4) A POURNELLE REDISCOVERY. Paperback Warrior, a blog that reviews old thrillers, mysteries, westerns, etc. just reviewed Red Heroin, a 1969 spy thriller that also happened to be Jerry Pournelle’s debut novel, written under the pen name Wade Curtis.
“Red Heroin” is a thinking-man’s espionage novel rather than a high-speed action killfest, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The sequel “Red Dragon” (unrelated to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lector novel) came out in 1970, and I will definitely check it out.
(5) WARMING UP FOR THE ABDICATION. On Facebook, Walter Jon Williams shares what he thinks would be a much better story line for the Downton Abbey movie. The idea may explain why they haven’t already lined him up to do a media tie-In novel…
(6) TODAY’S DAY.
September 21 – CNN is there when “Cities across the world flash the Bat Signal on Batman Day”.
Cities across the world on Saturday marked Batman Day by flashing the Bat Signal across buildings and into the night sky, a nod to the Caped Crusader on his 80th birthday.
Fans of the DC Comics superhero spotted his famous distress call at 8 p.m. local time in Melbourne, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Berlin, Rome and London, among other major cities.
Here’s what it looked like:
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- September 21, 1937 — J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit published.
- September 21, 1996 — The Dark Skies series premiered as part of the NBC lineup. A “what if aliens were manipulating all of History” premise didn’t help it last past twenty episodes.
- September 21, 2012 — The character of Judge Dredd returned with Dredd. Karl Urban played Dredd and Olivia Thirlby played Judge Anderson. To date, it’s not broken even. The Stallone Judge Dredd barely broke even
- September 21, 2015 — Fox Television debuted their Minority Report series based off of the Philip K. Dick work. It lasted a scant ten episodes.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 21, 1866 — H. G. Wells. I really don’t need to tell y’all that he’s called the “father of science fiction” along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. I’m not sure how much of his fiction beyond The War of the Worlds the reading world beyond fandom remembers these days. (Died 1946.)
- Born September 21, 1895 — Norman Louis Knight. His most-remembered work is A Torrent of Faces, a novel co-written with James Blish and reprinted in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line. His only other writing is a handful of short fiction. Not surprisingly his short fiction isn’t available at iBooks or Kindle but neither A Torrent of Faces. (Died 1972.)
- Born September 21, 1912 — Chuck Jones. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies creator (think Bugs Bunny). His work won three Oscars, and the Academy also gave him an honorary one in 1996. (Died 2002.)
- Born September 21, 1935 — Henry Gibson. I’m going confess upfront that I remember best him as a cast member of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. In regards to his genre work, he showed up on the My Favorite Martian series as Homer P. Gibson, he was in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as an uncredited dancer, in Bewitched twice, once as Napoleon Bonaparte, once as Tim O’ Shanter, he was the voice of Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, in The Incredible Shrinking Woman as Dr. Eugene Nortz, and even in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the “Profit and Lace” episode to be exact in which he was Nilva, a ferengi. (Died 2009.)
- Born September 21, 1947 — Nick Castle, 72. He co-wrote with John Carpenter the scripts for Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., and he’s the director of The Last Starfighter. He also wrote the Hook script. He was Michael Myers in both 1978 Halloween and the later remake of that film, plus the forthcoming Halloween Kills. He also was the pianist in Escape from New York.
- Born September 21, 1947 — Stephen King, 72. I once saw him leaning up against a wall in Bangor outside his favorite breakfast spot nose deep in a paperback novel. That’s how his native city treated him. Favorite by him? I’m not fond of his novels but I love his novellas and shorter fiction, so Different Seasons, Four past Midnight and Skeleton Crew are my picks.
- Born September 21, 1950 — Bill Murray, 69. Scrooged is my favorite film by him by a long shot followed by the first Ghostbusters film. I’m also fond of his voicing of Clive the Badger in Fantastic Mr. Fox.
- Born September 21, 1983 — Cassandra Rose Clarke, 36. I strongly recommend The Witch Who Came in from the Cold, a serial fiction story she coauthored with Max Gladstone, Lindsay Smith, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick. It’s quite brilliant. And The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, is equally brilliant.
- Born September 21, 1990 — Allison Scagliotti, 29. One of the primary cast of Warehouse 13, a show that I really, really loved. Her first genre role was as Jayna, one of the Wonder Twins, on the Smallville series. And she showed in a crossover episode of Eureka, “Crossing Over”. Her current gig is as Camille Engelson on Stitchers which to my surprise is getting ratings.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Fashion advice at Boing Boing: “Cthulhu: the neck-tie edition”.
(10) AREA 51 EVENT. Unilad reports something seen on TV news: “First Naruto Runner Spotted Naruto Running At Area 51 Behind Live News Broadcast”.
The first Naruto runner has been spotted Naruto running towards Area 51 during a live news report.
… But just as he closed his news segment on KTNV, he was upstaged by the perfectly timed runner, which is a hilarious reference to the original event’s satirical description which said, ‘if we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let’s see them aliens.’
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald has a headcount of the participants: “About 75 people gather at Area 51 gate in Nevada”.
About 75 people arrived early Friday at a gate at the once-secret Area 51 military base in Nevada — at the time appointed by an internet hoaxster to “storm” the facility to see space aliens — and one person was arrested, authorities said.
The “Storm Area 51” invitation spawned festivals in the tiny Nevada towns of Rachel and Hiko nearest the military site, and a more than two-hour drive from Las Vegas.
Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee estimated late Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites and said more than 150 people also made the rugged trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.
(11) CASTING SHADOWS. The Old Farmer’s Almanac visits some very old stones in “5 Ancient Sites Aligned With the Solstice and Equinox”.
Ever been to Stonehenge? Machu Picchu? Across time, people have marked the changes of seasons—sometimes in dramatic ways! Here are five amazing ancient sites aligned with the solstices and equinoxes.
Did you know that the equinoxes and solstices happens at the same moment around the world? Even though we all have different time zones, this is an astronoimical event, based on our planet’s orbit around the Sun and tilt on its axis.
Our ancestors lived amidst nature more than most of us do today. They observed the universe, marveling in its rhythms. They used the Sun and the Moon as a sort of calendar, tracking the Sun’s path across the sky. Here are some examples of the ancient sites and monuments that aligned with the solstice and equinox.
Our ancestors built the first observatories to track the sun’s progress…
(12) “YELLOW RAIN” REDUX. An unfortunate emission: “Cuba’s ‘sonic weapon’ may have been mosquito gas”.
Canadian researchers say they may have identified the cause of a mystery illness which plagued diplomatic staff in Cuba in 2016.
Some reports in the US suggested an “acoustic attack” caused US staff similar symptoms, sparking speculation about a secret sonic weapon.
But the Canadian team suggests that neurotoxins from mosquito fumigation are the more likely cause.
The Zika virus, carried by mosquitoes, was a major health concern at the time.
So-called “Havana syndrome” caused symptoms including headaches, blurred vision, dizziness and tinnitus.
It made international headlines when the US announced more than a dozen staff from its Cuban embassy were being treated.
Cuba denied any suggestion of “attacks”, and the reports led to increased tension between the two nations.
(13) FACING THE PAST. “Denisovans: Face of long-lost human relative unveiled” – BBC has the story.
Researchers have provided the first glimpse of what an ancient group of humans looked like.
Denisovan remains were discovered in 2008 and human evolution experts have become fascinated with the group that went extinct around 50,000 years ago.
One of the biggest questions had been over their appearance, with no full sketches of the Denisovan drawn up.
But now a team of researchers have produced reconstructions of our long-lost relatives.
(14) ICON WILL VISIT THE ARROWVERSE. Yahoo! Lifestyle restrains its enthusiasm: “Welp, Another Superman Actor You Liked In Your 20s Is Playing Superman Again”.
Remember October 2001? If you’re around my age, this was the time when the new Superman refused to wear a cape and existed in a Dawson’s Creek-esque TV series called Smallville, which originally aired on a network called The WB. (Annoying frog mascot with a top hat.) But now, Tom Welling, the actor who played Superman/Clark Kent on Smallville is back in the Superman tights he avoided on Smallville for so long.
According to Deadline, Welling will reprise his role as Superman in a crossover event for the CW’s popular “Arrowverse” TV shows. This follows a similar return of fellow-Superman actor, Brandon Routh, who is also set to return as Superman on the CW. If you’re not following these shows (and really, you can’t be blamed if you’re not, they’re very confusing) the CW is apparently doing everything it can to get olds like me interested in tuning in again. Tom Welling played Clark Kent/Superman for a staggering 10 seasons on Smallville before the show finally ended in 2011.
(15) “THERE’S ALWAYS THE POST OFFICE”. BBC says they are winners – if this is what winning looks like: “Post office team picked for Antarctic Port Lockroy base”.
Five people have beaten off competition from more than 200 people to run the UK’s most remote post office in Antarctica.
The team will man the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust’s post office at Port Lockroy for four months.
The first permanent British base to be established on the Antarctic Peninsula, it has been run as a museum and post office for tourists since 2006.
The new postmasters start work in November and return to the UK in March.
Each year, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, which is based in Cambridge, advertises for a new intake of seasonal postal workers.
Hundreds apply despite there being no running water or mains electricity and the job involving working in sub-zero temperatures 11,000 miles away from home.
As well as running the office, museum and shop, the chosen team monitors the island’s resident gentoo penguin population.
Several brooms are sent to the team each year to clean the penguin droppings outside the building – which the trust admits would otherwise look like “a penguin toilet”.
(16) BIG CANDLE. Juicy details — “SLS: Nasa’s giant ‘Moon rocket’ takes shape”.
Nasa has finished assembling the main structural components for its largest rocket since the Apollo-era Saturn V.
Engineers at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in New Orleans connected the last of five sections that make up the core of the Space Launch System (SLS).
The rocket will be used to send an uncrewed Orion craft to the Moon, in a flight expected to launch in 2021.
This will pave the way for crewed missions, with a landing in 2024.
The last piece of the SLS’ 64m (212ft) -tall core stage was the complicated engine section. This will serve as the attachment point for the four powerful RS-25 engines, which are capable of producing two million pounds of thrust (9 meganewtons).
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Maestro” on Vimeo, Illogic has hedgehogs, turtles, and birds, singing an aria conducted by a squirrel. (That’s what it says–“Directed by Illogic”.)
[Thanks to Cora Buhlert, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Hampus Eckerman, Michael Toman, Chip Hitchcock, StephenfromOttawa, John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, Greg Hullender, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
(6) Poor Batman will be rushing from city to city looking to save various days…
Clickity
@4: how very interesting. IIUC that means he wasn’t qualified for the Campbell best-new-writer award he received in 1973 — but I don’t know for sure how rigorous the qualifications were then.
@8: re Wells, Things to Come might be remembered for the movie made of it; ditto The Time Machine; The Invisible Man seems to have traction as an idea, although I don’t know how many people who know the LXG version know where it comes from.
@8 bis: I suspect a lot of us of a certain age remember Gibson solely as the preacher; possibly his most visible other role was one of the many unpleasant people in Nashville (non-genre), and that was an ensemble cast.
also @8: do you mean Bangor ignored King, or that it let him go about his business unmolested?
@11: the Almanac needs a proofreader.
(7) It’s Karl Urban, not Keith Urban. (Karl is the one that wears Hawaiian-type shirts much of the time.)
(16) At least some people at NASA don’t think they can make the 2024 date for a manned landing.
@Chip–King has said that one of the advantages of staying in Maine is that Mainers mostly just let him be a human being, whether they recognize him or not.
@Chip Hitchcock – It doesn’t seem that Red Heroin was SFF. I think that means it doesn’t count toward then-Campbell eligibility. But then, I’m no expert on the rules from back then.
Red Heroin isn’t science fiction. I guess you forgot that part of the award rules in your haste to drop that coprolite. See Campbell Award Rules at the Fancyclopedia.
1) I agree with OGH’s count of 16 SFF or SFF-adjacent books in the list. I’ve read 12 books from the list; my read list is not a subset of the SFF part, although the overlap is fairly substantial.
Today, I have walked one hour in the rain to reach a closed outdoor genitals park. For some reason South-Koreans don’t believe in keeping them open with a typhoon incoming.
Upside: One passing car gave me an umbrella on the way to the park. And owner of the park gave me a ride back to my hotel. Strange swedes walking around in a storm without rainclothes seems to have awakened their hospitality instinct.
Any year now, I will learn to not head out knowing how stupid it is, thinking “it will work itself out”. On the other hand, it did.
@Hampus – I almost hesitate to ask – what is an outdoor genitals park?
@Lorien Gray
I had the same question. And because of the way that Google targets ads based on search activity, I’m very reluctant to try and find an answer online on my own.
Lorien Gray:
It calls itself a sex museum, but from the pictures I’ve seen, I can’t really understand where the museum comes in. Mostly looks like a lot of different sex statues. But I’ll try to get their again when the typhoon has passed.
Hampus Eckerman: closed outdoor genitals park
JJ: …
@Hampus – Ah, I see.
My internet searching led me to Haesingdang Penis park (NSFW!) but I see it’s a different one.
Lorien Gray:
Yes, I visited Haesindang a few days ago. That park was kind of sweet, will write something about it later.
@Hampus
“closed outdoor genitals park”
Oh my goodness. That made me laugh so hard I hurt. 😀
8) In re Wells, I think The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and possibly The Island of Doctor Moreau still ring a bell – as might some of his non-SF works like Kipps or The History of Mr. Polly. But then I’m a Wells fan, so what do I know? Ask me about Brynhild or The Holy Terror someday. Go on. I dare ya.
Stay safe Hampus. (You tell the funnest stories.)
As much as it’s been on TV over the years, I’m going to guess that a lot of people know Henry Gibson’s face, if not his name, from The Blues Brothers.
Not genre, but McSweenes Anthology is named Keep scrolling until you feel something. There must be some filers responsible….
7) I remember enjoying the few episodes of Dark Skies I saw at the time – the premise seemed to be more “what if everything famous [in America] about the 60s was really because of aliens?” – Jim Morrison, mind-controlling Beatles records, the Gulf of Tonkin incident… I think they had trouble keeping it up, though, and I’m told it went downhill pretty fast.
Area770: Closed Outdoor Alien Genitasl Park.
@Nigel:
There´s alien in them hills!
Imagine if some news journal had published a “100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century” list – in 1919!
Snerk.
(Is tempted, but vita brevis and all that)
Is there a shoggoth park out there?
8) Chuck Jones also did some of the 60s & 70s Dr. Seuss animated specials, most notably How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
There were some really cthulhu-esque genitals in the Haesindang-park.
Steve Wright says In re Wells, I think The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and possibly The Island of Doctor Moreau still ring a bell – as might some of his non-SF works like Kipps or The History of Mr. Polly. But then I’m a Wells fan, so what do I know? Ask me about Brynhild or The Holy Terror someday. Go on. I dare ya.
I’ll wager they’d ring a bell but not as works by him but rather as films. Hasn’t The Island of Doctor Moreau been made into a film at least three times?
Books-A-Million occasionally has his novels in their five dollar hardcover editions section with fancy fake gold leaf covers. Same goes for Doyle as well.
Joe H. notes Chuck Jones also did some of the 60s & 70s Dr. Seuss animated specials, most notably How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
He also did Halloween Is Grinch Night, a prequel to that story which Seuss wrote which came out originally on videocassette. You can see it here.
5) As long as the costumes are good, nobody might notice the change in storyline.
8) Wells was actually the first science fiction I read as the library I had access to as a teen didn’t carry contemporary stuff. Invisible Man was quite heartbreaking.
1) I’ve read 29 of those, 9 of which I think qualify as sff.
8) Wells — I was given a Penguin short story collection as a kid, then in my late teens read quite a bit of other stuff, including maybe half a dozen non-sff novels and his “Experiment in Autobiography”, all readily available in the public libraries I was using in the mid-1970s. I don’t know if they are still as accessible. I have a newish copy of The Invisible Man on a tbr shelf.
7: Dark Skies went over quite well in the UK, to the extent that Channel 4 were negotiating a co-production for a second series. One of their conditions was that J T Walsh would be available to carry on his role in the series. He promptly died so that was the end of that idea….
@Cat Eldridge — I think I watched Halloween is Grinch Night when it first aired, but haven’t seen it since. That needs to be rectified on my part.
1) I’ve read seven of them.
3) I met Ellen Datlow at Boskone, and we chatted for a couple of minutes about her anthology The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea. Her enthusiasm about the stories and happiness that readers enjoyed them was obvious.
8) I absolutely love a couple of King’s novels, like Salem’s Lot and Duma Key, but on the whole, I agree that his short works are even better.
Does the genital park have a ball field?
Do the bushes need trimming?
I don’t think Los Angeles would accept a Vulva Park, more’s the pity.
Ah, now my curiosity is aflame to learn what you would have put on the list!
I read 11 of the list and own four more… I did read the no 1, but it was the one book of the eleven I DNFed… My non-genre reading tip from that list is The Henrietta Lacks one: True story and not (just) about what you think. One of my favorite non-fiction books!
@Mike Glyer:
(It was a hypothetical list of “100 best books of the twentieth century” as if it had been compiled in 1919)
Wellll … I’d probably cheat a bit and start with year-by-year lists of bestsellers as a reasonable starting point.
Going by this:
https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Bestsellers,American,_1895-1923(Bookshelf)
The list would almost halfway filled with real head-scratchers to today’s readers, with very few recognizable titles except:
The Crisis, by Winston Churchill
The Hound of the Baskervilles, by A. Conan Doyle
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Pollyanna, by Eleanor H. Porter
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Virginian, by Owen Wister
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, by Alice Caldwell Hegan
And because sometimes bestseller-buyers are big dummies, I’d add a few things they ignored. Not all of these were considered great by 1919 and so probably would not have shown up on a list of great books back then, but since I’m not really trying to emulate a 1919 point of view, here they are anyway:
À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 2, by Marcel Proust
Anarchism and Other Essays, by Emma Goldman
The Book of Khalid, by Ameen Rihani
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes
The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
Family Limitation, by Margaret Sanger
The First Men in the Moon, by H.G. Wells
Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit
A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter
Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell
Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling
The History of Standard Oil, by Ida Tarbell
Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham
The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Mountain Interval, by Robert Frost
My Antonia, by Willa Cather
My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse
Night and Day, by Virginia Woolf
Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley
Pragmatism, by William James
Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie
Renascense and Other Poems, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington
Viet Nam vong quoc su, by Phan B?i Châu
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
… Well, goodness. It looks like I got off to a good galloping start after all.
Oh, Aron Eisenberg, the actor who played Nog, just died
Aiiee. I actually wrote up a list and it does not seem to have posted.
@Mike Glyer, may I ask if it got caught up in the buffer somehow? It was a stupid amount of work and I’m feeling rather discouraged that it seems to have vanished.
I also quite liked Dark Skies. Towards the end of the series, Jeri Ryan, who’d go on to SF fame as Seven of Nine in Voyager, showed up as a Russian agent who quickly became a series regular.
1) I’ve read 29 books on that list and while there are some in that number that definitely belong, their taste does not for the most part accord with mine.
(1)
I’ve heard of twenty or thirty of those books, but I’ve only read two. Most of them don’t sound interesting to me.
Kyra’s Best Books List, 1900-1919
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Five Children and It
The Phoenix and the Carpet
Peter Pan
The Scarlet Pimpernel
I Am A Cat
The House of Mirth
The Story of the Amulet
The Enchanted Castle
A Room With a View
Anne of Green Gables
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Wind in the Willows
The Secret Garden
Howard’s End
O Pioneers!
The Valley of Fear
My Antonia
Kyra: A wonderful list! There are a few of these I didn’t realize dated so early.
Mike/Kyra: Or for me, in the case of the Doyle, so late.
@Cat Elridge: I suspect most people know War of the Worlds from the movies (or from stories of the infamous Orson Wells radio play). So I’m not sure how it differs from Dr. Moreau or The Time Machine in that regard.
(5) Oh man, I so want WJW to write that script now! 😀
(14) This isn’t Tom Welling’s first comic-book-based TV show appearance since Smallville; he also had a major role in season three of Lucifer, a show I actually like a bit more than most of the Arrowverse–and not just because Tom Ellis, who plays Lucifer, is insanely hot, though that doesn’t hurt. 🙂
@OGH: there’s a reason I said “IIUC”. (And I think your reaction is excessive; compared to Pournelle’s common behavior, I was being so polite you should have offered me snuff.) I would also note that your reference dates only to 2004; absent a reliable retrospectoscope, I’m not going to claim absolute knowledge of what Ben Bova (or anyone else who might have ruled) would have said (or did say) in 1973 given knowledge of previous work. And the rule may have been formalized, or even settled, in 2004 — but I am unconvinced that a mundane author who wanders off-piste into genre should be treated the same way as someone who has just made their first professional sale.
My heart swells with Nebraska pride to see two Willa Cather books on Kyra’s list.