(1) DID AMAZON CHEAT? The American Booksellers Association is on the warpath: “ABA Condemns Amazon for Breaking ‘Testaments’ Embargo”.
The fallout from Amazon violating Penguin Random House’s September 10 embargo of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood continues to roil the industry.
Late yesterday, the American Booksellers Association released a strongly worded statement condemning Amazon. The ABA disclosed that it had contacted PRH “to express our strong disappointment regarding this flagrant violation of the agreed protocol in releasing this book to the public.”
In a statement released to PW late Thursday morning, Amazon acknowledged it had unintentionally shipped some books ahead of the sale date. “Due to a technical error a small number of customers were inadvertently sent copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments,” the statement said. “We apologize for this error; we value our relationship with authors, agents, and publishers, and regret the difficulties this has caused them and our fellow booksellers.”
Before the broken embargo, the ABA was already working on initiatives that would put pressure on Amazon. In an organization-wide newsletter the ABA sent last week, ABA president Oren Teicher said the group is continuing its ongoing discussions with officials at the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission about looking into whether Amazon is violating antitrust laws. (ABA executives were in Washington, D.C., yesterday, when the news broke about Amazon’s violation of the PRH embargo.)…The Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, NY, created a digital postcard that it posted on its website and on social media with the heading, “Loyal Customers and Supporters of Independent Bookstores: A Request.” In it, the store said Amazon had shipped pre-orders of The Testaments to customers a week early, in clear violation of the “legally binding” embargo that all retailers had to sign.
The store went to ask customers to “please pre-order your own copy at your local or nearby independent bookstore” or to visit a story “on Tuesday, Sept. 10, the day the book legally is on sale.” The post closed with a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, the bestselling prequel to The Testaments: “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
(2) MEANWHILE IN VIDEOLAND. The question is — “Handmaid’s Tale: Was it right to take the series beyond the book?” Warning for those who click through — Excerpt ends at point where spoilers start.
The second series of the Handmaid’s Tale came to an end on Sunday night.
Writing in iNews, Mark Butler calls the finale “a nail-biting conclusion to the season, with a controversial twist”, but Vanity Fair’s Sonia Saraiya termed the climax “a singularly frustrating end to a season that, despite its high points, often struggled to find its purpose”.
The series went beyond Margaret Atwood’s original novel – with her blessing – but how well did the show do in extending the novel beyond its intended lifecycle and how difficult is it to go beyond the book of an acclaimed author like Atwood?
“The novel ends quite ambiguously,” says Julia Raeside, who has written The Guardian’s episode-by-episode guide to series two of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Speaking to BBC News, she adds: “It’s really interesting when someone takes up the mantle of an unfinished story. If they’ve got something to say about what happens when you repress women for so long, then it’s something I welcome.”
The second series has been criticised by some for its brutal scenes, with some viewers switching off entirely due to what’s been termed by some as “needless torture porn”.
“I think the first couple of episodes were slightly misjudged,” says Raeside, “and I wonder how much brutality Atwood really agreed with.”
(3) GREAT LINES FROM SFF. Discover Sci-Fi is running a poll: “What are the best one-liners from sci-fi books?” There are 13 choices. I’d say about half of them shouldn’t even be under consideration. And it doesn’t include one of my all-time favorites, the line that opens E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman Series –
“Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other.”
I’m writing it in. So there.
(4) GAME HUGO? The Hugo Book Club Blog, in “Game Over”, casts doubt on the qualifications and capability of Worldcon members to choose a winner of a proposed Best Game Hugo. Here are some of the reasons they say the proposal should be rejected:
Ira Alexandre, who has been the driving force in arguing for a Best Game Hugo, has done their research. They looked at the amount of gaming content at Worldcons, examined the burgeoning field of interactive works, and made some significant arguments in favour of the suggested award.
But none of their work addresses the fact that gaming has never been a primary focus of Worldcon. Alexandre’s number-crunching even showed that the amount of gaming-related programming has never exceeded nine per cent of the convention — and is usually much smaller. We would suggest that the majority of Hugo voters are unlikely to have played a wide-enough and diverse-enough range of games and interactive experiences to make adequate nominations in a category dedicated to gaming.
It’s already difficult enough for Hugo voters to get through a voting package with six works on the shortlist in 15 categories. Games and Interactive Works individually take up to 150 hours to play through – with a short time between the announcement of the shortlist and the voting deadline, it would be difficult to play through, and be able to adequately assess, even one such game.
(5) A CAT BY ANY OTHER NAME. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Not sure if this is newsworthy, but a cheap laugh for others at my own expense is surely a good thing.
One of our rescue cats, Baldur, who we’ve had for about two years, came down very sick and has spent the last week at the vet’s. Recovering well, thankfully, but in the process we discovered something surprising about “him”. Tweeted it here:
In some follow-up tweets, I discussed a possible renaming for our newly-female cat:
Hope the tweets are amusing. I wouldn’t say “amused” for myself, but certainly bemused.
(6) SUPERBRAWL. Alyssa Wong has written all three issues of these Future Fight Firsts comics from Marvel.
Introduced in the Marvel Future Fight mobile game, White Fox, Luna Snow, and Crescent & Io recently made their Marvel comic book debut in War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas and now, because you demanded it, all three will have their origin stories revealed in Marvel Future Fight Firsts! Check out these gorgeous covers by In-Hyuck Lee and prepare yourselves for an up close look at these new fan-favorite characters!
Marvel Future Fight Firsts arrives in October in comic shops, on the Marvel Comics App, and on Marvel.com.
FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: WHITE FOX #1
- Written by ALYSSA WONG
- Art by KEVIN LIBRANDA
- Cover by INHYUK LEE
FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: LUNA SNOW #1
- Written by ALYSSA WONG
- Art by GANG HYUCK LIM
- Cover by INHYUK LEE
FUTURE FIGHT FIRSTS: CRESCENT AND IO
- Written by ALYSSA WONG
- Art by JON LAM
- Cover by INHYUK LEE
(7) POLLY WANNA CONVERSATION? “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang in Nautilus is a short story excerpted from Chiang’s new collection Exhalation.
The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?
We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
(8) SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY. Randall Munroe will soon be bringing us How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. His book tour started this week.
For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s the world’s least useful self-help book.
It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.
With text, charts, and stick-figure illustrations, How To walks you through useless but entertaining approaches to common problems, using bad advice to explore some of the stranger and more interesting science and technology underlying the world around us.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born September 5, 1936 — Rhae Andrece and Alyce Andrece. They played twin androids in I, Mudd, a classic Trek episode. Both appeared as policewomen in “Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club” on Batman. That’s their only genre other appearance. (Died 2009 and 2005.)
- Born September 5, 1939 — George Lazenby, 80. He is best remembered for being James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Genre wise, he also played Jor-El on Superboy and was a Bond like character named JB in the Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. film.
- Born September 5, 1939 — Donna Anderson, 80. She was Mary Holmes in On The Beach, based on Neal Shute’s novel. She also appeared in, and I kid you not, Sinderella and the Golden Bra and Werewolves on Wheels.
- Born September 5, 1940 — Raquel Welch, 79. Fantastic Voyage was her first genre film though her appearance in One Million Years B.C. with her leather bikini got her more notice. She was charming in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. She has one-offs in Bewitched, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Muppet Show, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child and Mork & Mindy.
- Born September 5, 1951 — Michael Keaton, 68. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! He also has the title roles of Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns. His most recent role is The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
- Born September 5, 1964 — Stephen Greenhorn, 55. Scriptwriter who has written two episodes for Doctor Who: “The Lazarus Experiment” and “The Doctor’s Daughter”, both Tenth Doctor stories. He also wrote Marchlands, a supernatural series with Doctor Who star Alex Kingston.
- Born September 5, 1973 — Rose McGowan, 46. Best known as Paige Matthews on Charmed. She played two different roles in the Grindhouse franchise, Cherry Darling in Planet Terror and Pam in Death Proof. She was Miss Kitty in Monkeybone, a very weird film indeed.
(10) MYTHBUSTING. The results of test purport to explain “Why phones that secretly listen to us are a myth”.
A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations.
The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts.
Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online.
Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.
(11) IN A SNAP, IT’S GONE. “Trolls cause shutdown of official Jeremy Renner app” – BBC has the story.
Superhero Hawkeye may have helped defeat Thanos – but trolls have proved too tough a foe for him to best.
Actor Jeremy Renner, who plays Marvel’s eagle-eyed hero, has shut down his app after it was hijacked and used to harass people.
Abuse and harassment mushroomed after trolls found a way to impersonate the actor and others on the Jeremy Renner Official app.
Renner apologised for the shutdown in a post explaining what had happened.
Identity crisis
Created in 2017, the app, on which Renner regularly posted exclusive images and content and occasionally messaged users, also operated as a community hub where fans could post their own stories and communicate with each other.
In his explanatory post, Renner blamed “clever individuals” who had found a way to pose as other users.
(12) FRIENDLY (?) NIEGHBORHOOD SPIDER-DRONE. What flies through the air and snares its enemies in webs? CNN has the answer: “China says its drone can hunt like Spiderman”.
China says it has developed a new hunter drone that can disable other drones — or even small aircraft — by firing a 16-square-meter (172 square feet) web at them.
“Caught by the web, the hostile drone should lose power and fall to ground,” said a report on the Chinese military’s English-language website.
Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, the drone can work alone but also can integrate with China’s defense system for small, slow and low-flying targets, according to the report.
The hexacopter drone can also perform surveillance and reconnaissance, it said.
(13) NECRONOMICON. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda gives a con report for Necronomicon, including the panels he enjoyed and the art and books he brought home: “Dispatch from a ‘horror’ convention: It began in a dark, candlelit room .?.?.”
… Because NecronomiCon runs a half dozen simultaneous tracks, you can’t help but miss wonderful-sounding panels and events. On Friday alone I would have liked to have heard “Unsung Authors,” “Pulp History,” “Providence in Weird Fiction,” “Children’s Horror Anthologies of the 1960s and 70s,” and a discussion of the lushly decadent fantasist Tanith Lee, which featured, among others, her bibliographer Allison Rich, science fiction writer and critic Paul Di Filippo and popular Washington author Craig Laurance Gidney.
Still, along with my friend Robert Knowlton — a Toronto book collector who has read more weird fiction than anyone else alive — I did catch the program devoted to the specialty publisher Arkham House. Its participants included Donald Sidney-Fryer, who in his youth got to know that most poetical of Weird Tales writers, Clark Ashton Smith. Donaldo, as he likes to be called, generously inscribed my copy of “The Sorcerer Departs,” his memoir of that friendship. Not surprisingly, among the many films shown during the con was Darin Coelho Spring’s superb documentary “Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams.”…
(14) PYTHON RECOVERIES. Not exactly SF but Monty Python does a surreal riff. The BBC in a two part series of just 15 minutes are revealing newly discovered material from the cutting room floor — Monty Python at 50: The Self-Abasement Tapes.
Part one here.
On the 50th anniversary of Python, Michael Palin hunts down lost sketches. This programme contains material never heard before, including the infamous Fat Ignorant Bastards sketch.
(15) DRESS FOR EXCESS. Jezebel claims “The Woman Who Wore a T-Rex Costume to Her Sister’s Wedding Is the Best Person in America”. Photo at the site.
…As chill as many soon-to-be-married couples pretend to be, weddings are all about control. This is why bridesmaids are forced to purchase matching dresses that make them look like bipedal draperies, often to the tune of several hundred dollars. But this wedding season, one woman had the courage to say “no” to wrapping herself in an ill-fitting puff of chiffon for her sister’s nuptials. Instead she went with an outfit she loved, something she knew she’d wear again and again: A T-rex costume….
(16) MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. Live Proms from the Royal Albert Hall, London: London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames in music from Sci-Fi films. On the BBC Sounds website: “Prom 27: The Sound of Space: Sci-Fi Film Music”. You can listen anytime.
A Late Night Prom with a futuristic spin brings together some of the best sci-fi film music. Excerpts from cult soundtracks come together with recent works by Hans Zimmer and Mica Levi. The award winning London Contemporary Orchestra – whose collaborators include Radiohead, Goldfrapp and Steve Reich – perform music from Under the Skin, Interstellar and the recent Netflix series The Innocents, among other titles, as well as from Alien: Covenant, whose soundtrack the LCO recorded.
- Steven Price: Gravity
- Mica Levi: Under the Skin
- John Murphy: Sunshine
- Wendy Carlos: Tron (Scherzo)
- Carly Paradis: The Innocents
- Clint Mansell: Moon
- Louis and Bebe Barron: Forbidden Planet (Main Titles – Overture)
- Jed Kurzel: Alien: Covenant Jòhann Jòhannsson arr.
- Anthony Weeden: Arrival (Suite No 1)
- Hans Zimmer: Interstellar
(17) SWEET. The Harvard Gazette calls it “Pancreas on a chip”.
By combining two powerful technologies, scientists are taking diabetes research to a whole new level. In a study led by Harvard University’s Kevin Kit Parker and published in the journal Lab on a Chip on Aug. 29, microfluidics and human, insulin-producing beta cells have been integrated in an islet-on-a-chip. The new device makes it easier for scientists to screen insulin-producing cells before transplanting them into a patient, test insulin-stimulating compounds, and study the fundamental biology of diabetes.
The design of the islet-on-a-chip was inspired by the human pancreas, in which islands of cells (“islets”) receive a continuous stream of information about glucose levels from the bloodstream and adjust their insulin production as needed.
“If we want to cure diabetes, we have to restore a person’s own ability to make and deliver insulin,” explained Douglas Melton, the Xander University Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). “Beta cells, which are made in the pancreas, have the job of measuring sugar and secreting insulin, and normally they do this very well. But in diabetes patients these cells can’t function properly. Now, we can use stem cells to make healthy beta cells for them. But like all transplants, there is a lot involved in making sure that can work safely.”
Before transplanting beta cells into a patient, they must be tested to see whether they are functioning properly. The current method for doing this is based on technology from the 1970s: giving the cells glucose to elicit an insulin response, collecting samples, adding reagents, and taking measurements to see how much insulin is present in each one. The manual process takes so long to run and interpret that many clinicians give up on it altogether.
The new, automated, miniature device gives results in real time, which can speed up clinical decision-making.
(18) BUT IT’S NOT RIGHT. BBC reports “Left-handed DNA found – and it changes brain structure”.
Scientists have found the first genetic instructions hardwired into human DNA that are linked to being left-handed.
The instructions also seem to be heavily involved in the structure and function of the brain – particularly the parts involved in language.
The team at the University of Oxford say left-handed people may have better verbal skills as a result.
But many mysteries remain regarding the connection between brain development and the dominant hand.
(19) HAVING A MELTDOWN. Global Meltdown:My Ice on YouTube explains what happens when the last man on Earth stands on the last piece of ice.
[Thanks to Bruce Arthurs, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
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….And you don’t God Stalk on the Fifth
(16) I’ve read Stross’ “The Annihilation Score” – this musical lineup is clearly a trap.
(5)
I’ve heard of people taking their cat in to have it fixed, and finding out it already is. (Don’t try changing the name, if the cat’s already learned it.)
(3)
Maybe they were listening, because the Lensman quote is now in the list. I note that more than a few of those entries are from older works. Not that older works can’t have great lines, but surely recent books do as well. I also note, somewhat disappointedly (though not unsurprised) that only 2 of the entries are from women, and of course one is LeGuin. Not to say that she has no notable lines, but it seems that any list with a tiny number of women authors for SF always has either LeGuin or Bujold as part of that tiny sample. Because other women SF authors don’t exist, I guess.
(Sorry for the mini rant, but I’m tired and cranky).
Avilyn: That’s funny! Apparently the response is small enough that the 2 votes my thing has is enough to get it on the poll.
(7) “The Great Silence”–This isn’t its first publication, right? I’m quite sure I’ve read it, but I don’t remember where. Good story.
(7)
Agreed Lis, I definitely read it before Exhalation came out. I thought it was in Nature but I wouldn’t swear to it. I dont have my copy on hand, but I’m sure he also says in the notes of the book that this story was originally presented with pictures (or video?) in a sort of slideshow at a gallery(?). I’d love to see it in that format.
@3: a mix of relatively old and what look like quite-new quotes; I wonder whether the list will get more balance? A group of us pulled up 30 quotes from memory to decorate a rather ugly hall at Noreascon 4; I don’t think any of these made it. I suppose I shouldn’t grumble about age; the one that immediately strikes me is “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.” — and for some reason I’ve recently had “You can’t just die. You got to do it by the book.” (not used at N4) on my mind. Granted, we were going for memorable openings — but ISTM that a good opening is as memorable as any one-liner in the middle. (And they’re being a bit loose about one-liners, including the entire Litany Against Fear.) Next one to pop into my mind: “Today we’re going to teach you ## ways to kill a man.” (I’m really not in such a mood, just random.)
@9: On consulting a source I find that Bedazzled came out a year after Fantastic Voyage — for some reason I thought it was earlier in the 1960’s. Welch in her short spot as Lust was certainly memorable, but she wasn’t the face of all the print ads as she was in One Million Years B.C..
@Avilyn: I’m not sure Le Guin did clever lines rather than more careful builds of language; I’d expect snappier lines from Bujold, although right now my mind is blanking.
@Lis & Trey,
It was here first:
https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/
(4) I’m not so sure about this claim:
My Steam library current has 656 discrete titles. I’m fairly sure I’m not alone.
14) Well, thanks, whoever found this Monty Python series. Even the leftovers of Monty Python are still funny funny stuff. But there aren’t two episodes, but five.
(3) I find the Dark Space / Scott quote a rather clunky rewrite of the 1983 version: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
I agree with the above commenter that the first line of The Last Unicorn deserves a spot.
I also have a soft spot in my heart for an early couple lines from Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation: “When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
(5) OMG. That Big Barda statuette? With the helmet, elbow, knee and wrist protection, the short skirt, and the fishnets? That’s a roller derby skater. Sure, she’s about to get a honking big equipment violation penalty for that bat, but as she goes to the box, her team will chorus, “WORTH IT!”
(7) Howhaven’t I read this yet?! Ugh. It can wait til I crack open my copy of Exhalation but this has bumped it way up my TBR. Probably right after I finish Dreyer’s English (current read).
4) I more or less agree with the Hugo Book Club Blog, apart from thinking that you don’t have to finish a game to see how good it is. Usually, it is enough with 15-20 hours of playing.
12) should probably be “neighborhood” unless I’m missing some wicked word-play.
Michael Keaton in Spider-Man:Homecoming was wonderful. The scene with him and Tom Holland in the car together was my favorite in the whole movie.
ETA: Oh my! That “Big Barda” figure looks like one of my favorite coworkers. Especially the somewhat stern face. I’ve always had the feeling she was about to produce a bat.
2) That article refers to the end of series 2. And I have just finished watching the 3rd series (which to be fair pushes ones sense of disbelief about June’s ability to avoid punishment just a touch-but I rolled with it, accepting Commander Lawrence and the Deus ex Machina )
I did observe that the finales of each of series 2 and 3 could have quite effectively been reshot to finish the story quite easily.
Frevrf 2 – Whar trgf vagb gur ina naq rfpncrf – Raq perqvgf
Frevrf 3 – Whar qvrf bs ure jbhaqf naq vf pneevrq gb ure erfg ol gur fheivivat unaqznvaf
3) You can add your own quote just like OGH did. Go on, add some more!
6) Finally managed to secure a physical copy yesterday (4th bookstore had it in, one chain promised to be able to deliver a “click-and-collect” within two hours, but apparently don’t even have a single copy in the UK, but they have a few in Amsterdam…)
It’s very… typical for what you would expect. At least so far.
@Hampus: The focus of the new Best Game Hugo was on Narrative in Games etc. If you wanted to judge the narrative, you would have to play the whole game, wouldn’t you? (Unless you can clearly see it’s not very good.)
Trying to read some Graphic Novels from Europe Comics to see if something fits for the Hugos. Europe Comics does translations from different european comics.
Asgard, Book 1: Ironfoot
Very much drawn in the traditional european style of realism, reminds me very much of Thorgal. It is a Viking comic where the main character is a kind of monster hunter and his sidekick is a plunky former slave girl.
While I do like the drawings, I’m not that fond of the characters. The main character Ironfoot is very unlikeable that constantly speaks down to his sidekick, such that it seems extremely unlikely that she would want to have anything to do with him, much less being constantly cheerful while near him.
The plot is ok: They want to defeat a Kraken that stops the viking ships from leaving for their voyages of plunder. There’s no magic or anything involved in here, they have to make do with what an ordinary viking had at hand, the longships, the forests, ordinary weapons and so on.
As usual it seems a bit ridiculous for me as a swede when they use english for almost all words to suddently use a version of a scandinavian word for something to make it feel more exotic. Such as Krökken instead of Kraken, Drak instead of Dragon or Hilde instead of Housecarls.
In the end I found it a bit too simplistic to be Hugo-worthy and it was quite humourless, but it was an adventure story I would have liked when younger. If you’ve got a kid that likes vikings, you could do worse (it is gory though).
Another graphic novel from Europe Comics:
Aion, by Ludovic Rio. It is a classic SF story about Captain Lexi Neil who is awakened from cryosleep when her ship receives an emergency signal from a moon of a nearby planet. Turns out it comes from a research base and she might even become part of the research…
I liked the story well enough, a twist on a story that has been done in many versions before. It had a slightly creepy feeling already from the start. The art felt a bit stiff though, and a few pages felt like filler material to fit a specific length. It was an ok story, but I wouldn’t call it Hugo worthy.
(4) Best Game Hugo. I for one am totally unqualified to nominate lat alone vote for this category and so would not.
Woohoo, title credit!
Still, 120 hours is a lot, especially coupled with the need to pay three figures to actually get the games. Can’t see a Hugo packet with relatively new release games in it.
We are talking computer games here aren’t we? Not the new Call of Cthulhu supplement, which I’d like to pay, but don’t have an active group, and the experience depends on how good a GM one has.
We are talking absolutely every kind of game, including card games, board games, phone games or computer games.
7) Chiang’s “The Great Silence” — yeah, that’s one heck of a piece.
@Trey is correct — originally, the text was written as part of a video-art installation; a collaboration with Jennifer and Guillermo Allora.
The text was juxtaposed with footage from the Arecibo telescope, and footage of endangered Puerto Rican parrots.
Eventually Chiang repurposed the text for e-flux, and it’s been reprinted several times since. F&SF reprinted it in one of their issues, which was very nice — it struck me all over again, reading it in print.
@Chip Hitchcock:
Some of the Le Guin that comes to mind is either two or three lines, literally–“The ice says there is nothing but ice. But that young volcano has a word or two it thinks of saying.” (From memory, I’m not sure I have the second sentence quite right)–or are memorable for other reasons–“There was a wall.” “The king was pregnant.” “Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished.” (That works without Genly’s following statement that those are “the only ritual words of the Handdarata that I ever learned.”)
(All my books are in boxes, again. Unpacking is slow.)
I’ve been watching Amazon’s “Carnival Row” lately. Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne lead a cast of thousands* in the tale of fairy war refugees living among humans.
Season 1 dropped on 30 Aug. 2019. I think it’s pretty good and worth following.
ETA – Anyone else been watching? Thoughts?
*a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s still pretty massive.
Regards,
Dann
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing. – Isaac Asimov
(1) DID AMAZON CHEAT?
Can somebody explain what kind of accusation is being made here?
Like, what (allegedly) would Amazon’s motive be in leaking some preorders early?
I’ve little love for Amazon, but I’m honestly not clear on what the claim is.
Speaking of Le Guin one-liners, I always loved the first sentence of City of Illusions: “Imagine darkness.” Not a snappy one-liner to win a poll, but it definitely captured my interest in two words.
@Standback, I think the issue is that it’s just another way your local bookstore can’t compete. Amazon deeply slashes the prices of their books, ships preorders to a customer’s house on release day, and now apparently doesn’t even respect release dates. Whether the early shipments were really an accident or something more sinister obviously I don’t know, but I believe, generally speaking, that’s why the ABA is up in arms.
@Vicki: The LeGuin that always comes to my mind is “To speak, one must be silent. Before, and after.”
@ Standback:
Pure hypothesis, but if there’s been a spate of “release pre-orders early”, you can (eventually) train the marketplace to pre-order with you, because that means early-access top the pre-orders. Especially if it’s public, and there’s no push-back.
I am by no means saying that’s what happened, but I would not be surprised if a perception (or anticipation) of something like that is why there’s an outcry.
It’s hard for me to have sympathy for Amazon, but this does sound like it really might be just a simple technical mistake, not deliberate malfeasance. Some years ago, the Hugo Awards web site accidentally broke the embargo on the Hugo Award finalists because we used the WordPress “post at future time” feature (because none of the web site team were going to be at a computer at the release time) and discovered to our horror that the widget that cross-posted from the web site to the LiveJournal feed (LJ still being mostly viable in those days) didn’t respect the timing and instead posted it immediately to LJ (but not to the web site). We were accused of deliberately breaking the embargo, and at least to one of that year’s Administrators, no amount of explaining what happened mattered; we were clearly being malicious, and nothing we could say would convince them otherwise. It took several years before any Administrators would trust us we embargoed information again, and I can’t say as I blame them.
This, BTW, is why I get extremely anxious when I’m handling embargoed information. I’ve been known to disconnect my internet connection while composing material for later publication using embargoed information, just in case I accidentally hit the wrong button. And during the live coverage of the Hugo Awards (where I usually have a list of winners provided under embargo shortly before the event), I type the winner information and then take my hands completely off the keyboard so there’s little chance of my pressing enter before the winner is announced.
Kevin Standlee says This, BTW, is why I get extremely anxious when I’m handling embargoed information. I’ve been known to disconnect my internet connection while composing material for later publication using embargoed information, just in case I accidentally hit the wrong button. And during the live coverage of the Hugo Awards (where I usually have a list of winners provided under embargo shortly before the event), I type the winner information and then take my hands completely off the keyboard so there’s little chance of my pressing enter before the winner is announced.
Which you cannot do if you’re using WordPress as it most decidedly doesn’t have an offline mode even though the WordPress company has been asked for and has even been working on such an app for some years now. Fortunately the scheduling aspect of both posts and pages are both simple to use and quite stable.
@Soon Lee–Thanks!
1) I suspect this happens because of Amazon trying too hard to ensure customers who pre-order an item receive it on the day of release. I have had a number of pre-orders from them delivered on the Saturday preceding the Monday release date.
8) Soon? Amazon delivered my copy on Monday.
16) Left it a bit late to post this. The prom was on the 7th August, so it is only available to listen to until today.
I’d wager you’re not alone, but also by no means do I believe that you’re representative of the majority of Worldcon attendees.
16) Mica Levi’s score for Under The Skin is genuinely strange. Think avant-garde classical.
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I would also wager that the percentage of an average person’s Steam library which they have actually played to any great degree is very different from the total number of games. It’s a running joke of sorts in the community that a gamer’s Steam Library is a bit like the average Filer’s Mount TBR (well, phrased differently, but you know what I mean). Steam Sales are very persuasive! 🙂
(9) Mr. Keaton is 68, not 58.
@Rob Thornton: 16) Mica Levi’s score for Under The Skin is genuinely strange.
And thus perfectly matched to the film. (Which I thought was absolutely brilliant.)
@rochrist: what @Olav Rokne said.
@Hampus Eckerman: …you don’t have to finish a game to see how good it is. Usually, it is enough with 15-20 hours of playing. That’s 2-3x as much time as I think is reasonable for a book — and a book won’t encourage more damage to assorted no-longer-young joints.
@Vicki Rosenzweig: you’re right — especially about “The king was pregnant.”, which I should have remembered as I reread tLHoD just a year ago.
@Kevin: I think there’s a lot of difference between a few good-willed amateurs and HSAR.com — the latter should be held to higher standards. There’s also a lot of difference (half a ton or so?) between letting out a few electrons and letting out 800 books; ISTM a reflection on Amazon’s competence (to put it kindly) that this mess could come down to a few keys pressed with no crosschecks.
1) Stores that put books on sale before their official publication date are sometimes embargoed by the publisher — but I can’t imagine anyone embargoing Amazon.
@Dann665 — I’ve seen the first two episodes of “Carnival Row” and I’m really liking it. It has a Victorian steampunk vibe, but it doesn’t seem to be set on our Earth so it’s about 5 or 10 degrees off our reality. The sets are absolutely stunning — every so often I gasp in amazement at something. Not sure where it’s going so it could all end up disappointing me, but so far it has any number of interesting plot lines. And Orlando Bloom turns out to be able to do something other than elfy-welfy.
To properly assess video games, wouldn’t you need to own multiple consoles, multiple phones/tablets, and a computer which runs Windows? The only one of those I own is a phone. (Yes, they finally brought Steam to Linux, but as far as I know–I haven’t tried it–it still offers only a subset of the available games.) So…yeah. I’m pretty sure I’ll be skipping the category completely.
(I know that console-exclusive titles are less popular than they used to be, but I don’t think they’ve gone away entirely. Though I’d be happy to learn that I’m wrong.)
“I saw Goody Proctor with the pixel!”
(Just to clarify: I meant that I believe Steam on Linux offers only a subset of games available on Steam. Games on Steam, in turn, is only a subset of available games.)
(4) The question is: Does the Hugo wants to aknowledge all kinds of genre narratives? If yes, then games are just another medium and they should be awarded, hoewever that would work in practice. Howeber, I dont think the Hugos should have this goal, but then again, I dont think the Hugos for movies or TV epsiodes are necessary.
A big problem is to seperate narraitve from gameplay. Yes, thats somewhat similiar to having distinguish prose and narrative in a book or story and cinematograohy/acting in a movie, but, Id daresay, they can be much more disjointed in games – there are a lot of good games with poor narrative, and while considerable less, there are also good narratives, that dont really work well as games.
(8) Currently reading this. Its more like “What If” then the blurb suggest, just that there is no specific question, more like a topic and he explores what fun physics (usually) stuff you can have with it. Entertaining! And you learn what an astronaut would do if snatched by a Roc.
Carnival Row: We recently got Prime, and expect to try CR this week.
(4) I’m one of those who thinks that narrative in video games does clearly need to be rewarded alongside narrative in other forms of media in fan-based awards, but I am also one of those who knows how utterly impossible that would be, simply through the nature of how video games work. I mean, Bandersnatch was difficult enough for people to assess coherently and that was a highly circumscribed format.
It would likely be even worse with RPG supplements as the narrative there is deliberately based around player response, with the advantage over video games that a human GM can modify things far more easily (that’s on my list of “I’ll believe AI is here when…”)
And board games are a whole different kettle of fish because they can have intensely involving narrative that is not created by the designer except in the context of enabling play.
But I also think that there are folk who are transforming game narratives in the same way as some novelists and that somehow they deserve recognition. I just wish I had any idea how it could be done.
4) Could videogames be judged by a qualified panel instead of by fan vote? Maybe that would reduce the logistics associated with the award.