(1) Today’s birthday girl —
Born September 10, 1953 – Pat Cadigan
She had a good day – “My Birthday Wasn’t All About Cancer”
Even though it started with a blood test at the Macmillan Centre, my birthday was all about Chris, and sushi and sake. It was all about my weight-loss making more clothes fit better. It was all about walking all over central London without worrying about having to find a place to sit. Well, until after I drank most of a small(-ish) bottle of sake. My back became a bit less tractable for a while but it had shaped up pretty well after the bus ride home.
(2) Europa SF has a great feature on the Tblisi, Georgia sf club “Fantasti” by Irakli Lomouri.
The first issue of “Fantasti“, The Georgian Science Fiction Magazine , is dedicated to Ray Bradbury.
Our SF and Fantasy Club “Fantasti” was officially registered in Tbilisi (Georgia) on March 18th, 2015, but its history began in August 2014, when I had a holiday – a free month – and lay down on the couch reading SF stories by means of my new tablet via internet. I love SF from my childhood, so I had to recall my favorite stories, and read many new ones – nearly 150.
I got so much pleasure, that I decided to offer it to others.
I wrote in a Facebook: Dear friends, let’s create a SF and Fantasy Club and publish a special dedicated magazine.
In Georgia SF is not popular, so I had no hope I could find real supporters of my idea, but fortunately I found them, so we met and started our club.
Since September 2014 we are having our biweekly meetings at my flat or in the House of Georgian Writers. In our club there are people of all ages, most of them write SF and fantasy themselves, so our club plays the role of literary studio, we read aloud our new stories and discuss them.
In our group on FB we have nearly 500 members (but not all are active)…
(3) Here’s something new to remember: the “t” in Voldemort is silent.
… but I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who pronounces it that way. https://t.co/HxhJ5XY5HP
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 9, 2015
(4) National Geographic has a big article about the discovery of a new species of human ancestor in a South African cave.
A trove of bones hidden deep within a South African cave represents a new species of human ancestor, scientists announced Thursday in the journal eLife. Homo naledi, as they call it, appears very primitive in some respects—it had a tiny brain, for instance, and apelike shoulders for climbing. But in other ways it looks remarkably like modern humans. When did it live? Where does it fit in the human family tree? And how did its bones get into the deepest hidden chamber of the cave—could such a primitive creature have been disposing of its dead intentionally?…
The same schizoid pattern was popping up at the other tables. A fully modern hand sported wackily curved fingers, fit for a creature climbing trees. The shoulders were apish too, and the widely flaring blades of the pelvis were as primitive as Lucy’s—but the bottom of the same pelvis looked like a modern human’s. The leg bones started out shaped like an australopithecine’s but gathered modernity as they descended toward the ground. The feet were virtually indistinguishable from our own.
“You could almost draw a line through the hips—primitive above, modern below,” said Steve Churchill, a paleontologist from Duke University. “If you’d found the foot by itself, you’d think some Bushman had died.”
But then there was the head. Four partial skulls had been found—two were likely male, two female. In their general morphology they clearly looked advanced enough to be called Homo. But the braincases were tiny—a mere 560 cubic centimeters for the males and 465 for the females, far less than H. erectus’s average of 900 cubic centimeters, and well under half the size of our own. A large brain is the sine qua non of humanness, the hallmark of a species that has evolved to live by its wits. These were not human beings. These were pinheads, with some humanlike body parts.
(5) And at the other end of the timescale, NASA is busy today downloading and interpreting photos of Pluto taken by New Horizons.
New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. “The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
In the center of this 300-mile (470-kilometer) wide image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is a large region of jumbled, broken terrain on the northwestern edge of the vast, icy plain informally called Sputnik Planum, to the right. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).
(6) Huffington Post asked 13 top scientists to name their favorite books and movies.
Jane Goodall
Primatologist, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace
“Three books of my childhood probably had the greatest impact on my life. The Story of Doctor Dolittle’ (by Hugh Lofting) and ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ (by Edgar Rice Burroughs) inspired me to understand what animals were trying to tell us and instilled within me an equally strong determination to travel to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. ‘The Miracle of Life’ was a large book my grandmother got for free by saving up coupons from cereal packets. It was by no means a book intended for children.”
(7) Connie Willis is interviewed by Colorado Public Radio in “Hugos Battle: Both Sides Claim Sci-Fi Is Being Ruined By Politics”. Via Kevin Standlee.
(8) Chuck Wendig has some good news about his new novel.
I kinda didn’t think Star Wars: Aftermath was going to make list. In part because why would I assume that, and also in part because most books come out on Tuesday and this book came out on Friday and it was also a holiday weekend and, and, and.
Apparently, that was wrongo of me.
Because Aftermath debuted on both the New York Times list and the USA Today list at number four. Which is extra funny because it’s a pair of fours which is like Force and because my tweet wanting to be hired to write Star Wars in the first place was on September 4th and because the book then came out exactly one year later on September 4th and also because I actually apparently have the Force. *shoots lightning into the sky*
Of course, if instead of all 4’s it had been all 5’s we could have had a field day on File 770….
(9) And maybe Chuck can sign his next book contract with one of these Star Wars themed pens from Cross.
(10) Science fiction has an advocate in Malaysia.
KUSHAIRI ZURADI discovered late last year that not many publishers were keen to publish Malay science fiction books when he offered his collection of short stories to them.
The 25-year-old author and medical school graduate recalls: “Some publishers believe the readership for Malay science fiction is too small [for them] to make a decent profit and they do not want to take a chance on these novels.”
Realising this, in August last year, Kushairi decided to found his own publishing company, Simptomatik Press, to self-publish his first book, Biohazard, featuring 14 of his short stories. All 14 stories dealt with microorganisms.
“In my final year in medical school, I studied microorganisms and I was fascinated by their life-cycles,” says Kushairi, who is currently waiting to start his housemanship.
“You cannot see them but they are everywhere. We have been taught that 90% of [the cells in the human body are actually] organisms ranging from bacteria to parasites.”
[Thanks to David Doering and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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Catching up with yall on a crowded bus is turning out to be terrific and terrifying at once: i can’t stop the phone from typing in Portuguese and people are starting to wonder at all the faces I’m making, (KYRA, no! I mean yes! I mean ohcraplookatallthosebooksIhavetoread!).
I’d like to esconde Joyce, The limits of enchantment, bc Year of the Ladybird isn’t fantasy. And neither is Hild, though i love it to bits. We could have a feels like fantasy bracket and it would probably win.
So far, incidentally, 31 suggestions for additional authors/books for the list have been made, not counting possible swaps of a different book by the same author, or suggestions that an author should be on that don’t name a specific book.
Welp. Preliminary rounds are a Thing.
If Jim Butcher ought to be included despite near certainty he’d go down to a first or at least early round defeat, should Patricia Briggs receive the same consideration?
*sneaks in to tick the box*
To throw in another urban fantasy: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (2011).
what’s this Ferrett Steinmetz controversy?
Works appearing in a series are eligible as individual works, but the series as a whole is not eligible. However, a work appearing in a number of parts shall be eligible for the year of the final part.
I take that to mean that there is a difference between a series and a work appearing in parts. That’s the only way it can be read without contradiction. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable distinction to me; Harry Potter is a series, consisting of a number of stories each with their own arc; Lord of the Rings is a work appearing in parts. (And in the early days of the Hugos lots of novels appeared in parts, in magazines.)
The categories page begins by talking about TV series, comics and whole novels published in parts – which I take it means something like that Scalzi thing, whatever it’s called, not a series of novels, like Harry Potter. From what they go on to say, they seem to be thinking of things that have a complete story arc, while their parts do not. (Note ‘the voters have clearly indicated that the installment… is not part of a longer work’. So, the voters have indicated that Goblet of Fire is not part of a longer work. It is clearly part of something, but that thing is not a longer work.)
It’s true that they then confuse the matter by calling the whole work ‘the series’, since one wouldn’t normally call the Scalzi thing a series. (Or would one? I’m not sure.) Well, I’d still say it hasn’t clearly been set down.
Sigh. Perhaps we need a series Hugo to resolve this. Though creating a new category to resolve problems with elgibility for another category is rarely a good idea.
I wouldn’t be too concerned with whether you think they’ll Go Down Early. I’d be concerned with whether or not you think they’re good. You might (or might not) be surprised.
(There’s several books already on the list that that I fully expect to get stomped all over even though I consider them among the finest fantasy of the new millennium. But hey, what if I’m wrong? About either their lack of chances or their quality? Or both?)
@alexvdl
Google theferrett boobgate
Can I throw in a suggestion for Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence? Many may disagree with this, and for many reasons, and I totally get that, but I did really enjoy reading it. It got me out of a pretty bad book slump, also.
Oh and can I throw in some begging to you and the Dice of Doom not to place Coraline up against Night Watch or Perdido Street Station in the first rounds or I’ll cry?
so, between the bit on Malaysian SF, and the Walters article in the guardian, i needed to add some world sf to my want list – the series of anthologies referenced by walters (the apex book of world sf 1,2,3,4) looked like a good place to start.
then i noticed that volume 3 was edited by someone i would like to avoid supporting, not sure if i can purchase any of the series, since I don’t know if purchasing the others supports this person
so, anyone have any suggestions for good anthologies of world sf? or insight into the apex series, perhaps i can simply buy 1,2,4?
[ticky box]
Meredith,
I did and the first result was for this very page with your comment.
Damn, Google is getting scary fast these days.
Also, man, I remember that kerfluffle. Was it really six years ago?
The Blade Itself is easily Abercrombie’s weakest novel, in my judgment. It’s too focused on setting up standard tropes for him to demolish in later installments, and the execution of the tropes…well, it’s fine, but that’s all. I’d swap it out for, I dunno, Heroes? Served Cold?
Definitely supporting Range of Ghosts for 2012
Huh. I was going to suggest Heroes Die, but apparently that was published in 1999. So…Cain Black Knife, 2008, Matthew Woodring Stover. Science fantasy, as it’s a portal world in which people from Future Earth go to Portal Fantasy D&D World to have The Ultimate Reality Show, Now With More Kobolds and Gore.
The serial-works rule was originally crafted to deal with novels published in multiple parts in magazines; the novel itself was eligible in the year in which the final part appeared. This was easily extendable to things like webcomics, much to the dismay of people who thought that only the publication in paper form counted, which sometimes would be in a subsequent year.
The serial-works rules have been stretched and pulled out of shape by voters applying them in ways that probably were not on the minds of the people who wrote the rules originally. Considering all of the episodes of a single TV season to be one long serial work is fairly plausible to me depending on the structure of the show itself. (Doctor Who, “Trial of a Time Lord,” was packaged as a series-long multi-part story, and said so up front.) Blackout/All Clear was well understood to be in two books for commercial reasons, just like The Lord of the Rings, and thus could be considered a single work for award purposes. But The Wheel of Time. I was really skeptical of that one, and I think the members let their enthusiasm get away from them, and the Administrators were reluctant to rule them out of order. (I understand why, too, having had my Administrator hand slapped for being “too activist.”)
I’m not really sure what can be done here. Some people really want a Best Series Award, and there’s a committee trying to come up with something workable. But just like the YA Award, I think the enthusiasts either do not understand or do not care about the subsidiary issues such Award categories create, and they won’t understand until something peculiar happens (like the same work winning multiple categories in the same year due to overlapping definitions), after which they’ll be complaining that Something Should Have Been Done to Prevent This. Or maybe not. Possibly they don’t really care about the same work being eligible in two places at once. And there is a pending constitutional amendment aimed at targeting such cases: whichever category the work receives more votes is where it lands.
Hmm … honestly, if I were going for the strongest Abercrombie in a series, I’d probably go with “Before They Are Hanged”. (People tend to have a thing against middle books, though, I’m not sure why, which is why I edged it towards “The Blade Itself” on the first pass through.) For his more stand-alone works, I might go with “Best Served Cold” above “The Heroes”, but could probably go either way.
@ Gully Foyle
The first three volume are edited Lavie Tidhar and the fourth by Mavesh Murad.
@Gully Foyle
I have Apex world sf 4 but haven’t started it yet. I can’t work out who of concern edited 3, but 4 lists Murad and Tidhar as editors, no other names lurking inside in the credits.
Seraphina/Shadow Scale feels like an edge case to me. There’s a ton of things left unresolved at the end of Seraphina, and I feel the books work best together as a unit. On the other hand, there *is* a major plot arc which concludes at the end of Seraphina.
S/SS seem more like a single work to me than, say, Shards of Honor / Barrayar (which my understanding is, actually was a single book that got cut in two, and is now sold as a single book, even though Barrayar won a Hugo by itself.) On the other hand, S/SS seem more like a book plus sequel than, say, Dreamhunter / The Dream Quake, where nothing at all is resolved at the end of book one and neither book makes any sense standing alone.
maybe i failed as i was reading on my phone, but vol 3 had the name of RH prominently on it? ah i see – not editor, but author of a work in it.
ok – thats clear for me then. just skip 3 it looks like
Okay thanks guys, it looks like I’m going back to the bookstore tomorrow to buy the copy of Seraphina I saw. I hope you’re happy!
I might also pick up Fish Eats Lion because damn it’s pretty.
That reminded me to run through Apex 4 and see what was 2015. Turns out I read one of the 2015-eligible entries, The Language of Knives, on tor.com separately a few days ago having seen it recommended elsewhere. It evokes a very different culture through a description of its funeral rites, with some powerful family relationships in the mix as well. A very rich and intense story, but I’m not sure I so much enjoyed it as experienced it.
> “I hope you’re happy!”
Well …
Yes?
Never mind, just saw my inbox. Nothing to see here, move along …
Well, okay. Good.
More fantasy novels – this is kind about writers whose work in general I think is good enough, hard to pick which individual work should be here.
Kate Elliott – Crown of Stars 2006 or Spirit Gate 2007
Michelle West – The Sun Sword 2004 or House Name 2011
Martha Wells, Wheel of the Infinite, 2000
(I do read books by men! but my favourites have already been mentioned.)
@Gully Foyle yeah RH has a story in the third volume.
2009, Blood of Ambrose, James Enge. One of my favourites.
2006, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
2008, The Painted Man, Peter V Brett
2010, The Midnight Mayor, Kate Griffin
2009, Retribution Falls, Chris Wooding
Which, I should point out, has been how Hugo Administrators have usually treated the case of one item receiving nominations in multiple categories.
The proposed change would simply codify that practice in the WSFS Constitution.
I think the “However” means “the next part is an exception to what we just said.” Otherwise why include that word?
Bracket additions:
2001: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling
2001: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
2006: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
2006: A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham (I like this better than Dragon’s Path, although that is also a great book/series)
2008: Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Re: 21st century fantasy brackets;
* Fledgling is wholly science fiction. I know that there are people in the world who disagree with me about this point of fact, but those people are wrong.
* The Fall of the Kings is generally less well regarded than The Privilege of the Sword, I believe. (This opinion is based in large part on several friends’ comments about the books, since I tried to read the former a couple of times and just couldn’t get through it, while the latter’s still on my TBR mountain.)
* Personally, I’d switch out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (which didn’t impress me at all) for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (which I consider flawed but still wonderful). Everyone’s going to have a different opinion regarding which later HP book is best, though; too bad Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was published in the 20th century.
* Seconding the Temeraire rec.
* Additional recommendations:
A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan
The Bees by Laline Paull
Maplecroft by Cherie Priest (If a Lizzie Borden/Lovecraftian mythos mashup isn’t too far on the horror end of the spectrum.)
Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett (Too obscure?)
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
No love for Steven Erikson in the brackets? All the books in his Malazan series, except for the first one, are 21st Century. Deadhouse Gates (2000) has the Chain of Dogs thing that is pretty powerful. Memories of Ice (2001) and Midnight Tides (2004) stood out for me as exceptional books in a series of exceptional books.
@Kyra
Best Served Cold and Red Country both have too much playing with movie tropes for my taste. I mean basically they’re Kill Bill in Elfland and Generic Western in Elfland. I’m not sure why it turns me off when Abercrombie does it, and not necessarily when other authors do, but there it is. (Side note: for a great deconstruction of westerns, though very dark, Blood Meridian is worth a read)
Agreed that Fledgling is science fiction.
I utterly reject the notion that Point of Dreams, by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, is “too obscure.” It’s wonderful!
Seconded. The Chain of Dogs sequence hit me hard and stuck with me, even though it’s been years since I read it.
@Lis Love the Point books!
@Kevin Standlee: This is where the rule the Pegasus Awards has proves its virtue. There a filker can only appear in two categories, and only once within a category. I didn’t realize until this year that the Hugo didn’t take the same precautions, and was mightily unhappy with the ballot hog, who shall be nameless.
@Happy Puppy, caught your post last night. Thanks again, and good review!
2007: Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch
I read this one first, and I’m not sure I’d have ever gotten to it if I’d tried Locke Lamora first because that one has become one of those books I set down one evening and never picked back up again. Locke as a kid just isn’t that interesting.
2000: Galveston by Sean Stewart
Did this as a Compuserve Book Discussion book back when it came out, and some of the vivid Mardi Gras imagery still stays with me.
I think the “However” means “the next part is an exception to what we just said.” Otherwise why include that word?
Well, I would guess just because there’s a sort of contrast; a series and a WAIP are rather similar things, but one is eligible and the other isn’t. Or, ‘you might think that by ruling out series we were also ruling out WAIPs; however, we don’t mean that’. Certainly if you left ‘however’ out the sentences would run rather oddly.
But perhaps you could read it as meaning that a WAIP is a kind of series; ‘series generally aren’t eligible: however, this special kind of series is’.
If you just read it as ‘series generally aren’t eligible; however, they are eligible in their final year’, it strikes me as really weird; when else would you expect them to be eligible? How can one nominate something that hasn’t been finished yet?
Kevin’s account of the purpose of the rule makes sense to me, but I would actually differ about WoT; I think it does count as a single work like LOTR and Blackout/All Clear, because the individual volumes (after the third, at least) are not at all self-contained, and cannot really be called novels. So the only way it could be honoured was as a novel of extreme length. If there can be a two or three volume novel, then there can be a fourteen volume novel. But certainly having it competing with one-volume novels, even if legal, was not helpful.
(Oh by the way, I think Marie Brennan’s dragons are SF. They aren’t at all supernatural; the books are about the scientific investigation of an unusual species. But I’m weird.)
Lori Coulson on September 11, 2015 at 10:51 am said:
A person has appeared five times in the same year, assuming you do consider Seannan McGuire and Mira Grant to be the same “person” for your purposes.
(Mind you, what can one possibly do about cases where the nom de plume isn’t “open” the way Seannan/Mira are?)
There are people who have objected strongly to the domination that Doctor Who has on the BDP Short Form category; to them, all episodes of the same series are the same “person.” I suspect that some would prefer to limit BDP short to one episode per series per year.
One of the proposals that received first passage this year would limit an author or BDP series to two slots in each category, although it would not impose an overall limit across categories. There are plausible arguments for and against such limitations. I suspect that the fact that co-authors count toward this restriction may cause some people to have indigestion about it, given that it could result in someone being done out of a finalist slot because they share author credit with someone who had two more-popular works in the same category.
Andrew M on September 11, 2015 at 11:13 am said:
If something is sufficiently popular, people will start nominating it no matter whether or not it is finished yet. Don’t expect people to behave sensibly.
Here’s what Nicola Griffith herself had to say about Hild:
“The other day in the pub a friend asked flat-out: is Hild fantasy or not? I couldn’t answer.”
So that clears everything RIGHT UP.
(I find it fascinating, incidentally, that I have encountered a huge number of people willing to firmly argue that Swordspoint is fantasy and an equally huge number of people willing to firmly argue that Hild is not fantasy.)
@andrew M I think reading A Natural History of Dragons as alt-world natural history SF is a perfectly valid reading.
Well, even though I wouldn’t necessarily vote for it, we gotta get a GRRM in there, don’t we?
I actually loved Mieville’s The Scar more than Perdido, but may be a minority voice on that one.
If we can go younger, Eva Ibbotson’s The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (I like Star of Kazan better, but don’t recall any specifically fantasy elements.
ARRRGH, O’Shea’s Hounds of the Morrigan is 1999. But I will recommend that book FOREVER.
Also–and I will die on this hill–Hatoful Boyfriend is an interactive novel from 2011 and it deserves EVERYTHING.
By the way, there was a Best Series proposal floating around last year, which I think would have overcome the duplication problem; this year’s proposal seemed to be different and not to be based on it. (I turned up as last year’s Business Meeting in the expectation that both this and the YA proposal were going to come up, and was frustrated when neither of them did.)
The YA people also seem to have come up with an answer to the duplication problem, though I’m still not wholly clear about how it would work. (If anyone from that committee is still around. I’d be interested to hear more about it.)
I read somewhere (I think) in File 770 comments in the last week or two, that years ago, there had been an instance of Worldcon’ governing committee (?) deciding that something nominated by Hugo voters, was not really SF/F and so could not be a nominee.
At the next year’s business meeting, a resolution was passed making it clear that anything the Hugo voters choose to nominate, is SF/F, as far as the Hugo Awards are concerned.
I’ve searched, but I haven’t been able to find the post, or find a reference to this happening on google.
Does anyone remember where that comment I read was? Or, even better, know what year or what work this kerfuffle concerned? Since I can’t find the comment, I don’t even know who wrote it – some of the folks who comment here are ultra-reliable sources, but not all of us are.
Anyway, if anyone can help me out – either by a reference, or by definitively telling me I’m delusional and no such event ever happened – I’d really appreciate it.
RedWombat on September 11, 2015 at 11:20 am said:
… ARRRGH, O’Shea’s Hounds of the Morrigan is 1999. But I will recommend that book FOREVER.
YES!
I recall that comment as well. Pretty sure it was Kevin Standlee within the last several days, and I recall it exactly the way you do.
Around a thousand years ago, a colony ship from a nearby system arrived at Sol. Their remote observations had indicated that there was a habitable planet here, with a functioning biosphere that’d support them.
Things got weird when it turned out there were sapients present.
Despite obvious signs of life–primarily the oxygen-rich atmosphere–it hadn’t occurred to them that there could be intelligent life. They have a … it’s difficult to explain, might as well call it a religion but that doesn’t really capture the size of the thing. Maybe call it a fundamental orientation, such that it was unimaginable to them that there could be other sapients.
The evidence of sapients on Earth was shocking to them, and most refused to accept it. As they approached, it became harder to ignore. The … again, we’d call it “cognitive dissonance” but the phrase fails to express how utterly impossible this seemed to them, it led to schisms among the crew, and eventually to violence.
Violence among their species had been unknown for thousands of years, but became possible because this shattering of their world-view created factions that were literally incapable of communicating with one another.
The mechanism by which these differing views of the significance of sapients on Earth led to alien factions that were unable to communicate with one another is difficult to express in human terms, but is closely related to the way that their belief in their unique place in creation was fundamental to their nature.
Simplest way to explain it is to say that their brains simply cannot process as meaningful messages the expressions of brains that differ about key axioms.
The exterminationist/colonialist faction became dominant in the resulting struggle. The next-largest, but still much smaller faction that insisted that Earth must not be colonized because of the already existing sapients–a basically suicidal faction since the ship had no ability to reach another system–succeeded in destroying the ship by ramming it into a nearby proto-planet.
Anyway, I figure that’s the obvious conclusion to draw from these most recent photos of Ceres. Occam’s razor and all.