131 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/11/16 Infinite Pixels in Infinite Scrolls”

1. Firfth! (It is SO nice to see the scrolls again….)

2. (9) RAISING AWARENESS.

   That sounds like a worthy initiative and hopefully some great discussion. Talking frankly about mental illness and trauma and suicide is really hard, but imho necessary. Too bad it’s on The Facebook.

   Unrelated to the scroll, do you know how presumptuous it feels to add items to the Hugo Spreadsheet O’ Doom? SO PRESUMPTUOUS YOU GUYS.

3. In Soviet Canuckistan, box ticks you!

4. Uhm, ‘splunge’ for me, too.

   Also, Facebook suxx.

5. The needs of the second fifth outweigh the needs of the fifth

6. Also, Happy Eid al Adha!

7. (3) and (4)–And of course, Facebook’s nonsense only resulted in the “Streisand effect,” e.g. the post being even more widely spread. (I linked to the Stonekettle post myself.)

8. @Dawn Incognito Unrelated to the scroll, do you know how presumptuous it feels to add items to the Hugo Spreadsheet O’ Doom? SO PRESUMPTUOUS YOU GUYS.

   It does doesn’t it? I added a few items last year. Congrats for being presumptuous. I’m sure you’ll help a fan find some good reads. 😀

9. There’s also a wikia: 2017 Hugo Nominations Wikia. I just added that short story that John A. Arkansawyer linked to earlier.

10. I’ve posted the text of Jim Wright’s statement on my own facebook news feed. So should anyone else who objects to the administrator’s actions.

    Western government misadventures since 11 September 2001 have contibuted to vastly increased danger and insecrity in the world. We are all still paying for those hot headed actions by war criminals George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

    And I am provided hope by the exploits of Torbjørn C. Pedersen, who is travelling the world without flying, visiting every country, and finding that every stranger is a friend as yet undiscovered.

    http://www.onceuponasaga.dk/about

11. 11 on 9/11?

12. (6) LOOKING SHARP

    Has anyone actually seen John Hertz since he picked up those two Hugos? If I was him I’d have kept on running. 🙂

    —

    And yay for adding recs to places. There’s also the F770 thread.
    I have a slight backlog of a) notes on things I’ve read and b) magazines. My excuse for the latter is that I’ve been tracking back on some novels, on the subject of which Last First Snow by Gladstone and Guns of the Dawn by Tchaikovsky were both very worthwhile, and whoever recced Breath of the Earth by Beth Cato is responsible for a disappearing evening.

13. (4) Streisand Effect, thanks to the people who needed their safe space to keep their fee-fees from being hurt by a different opinion which contained pesky facts/math.

    (5) They’re missing out. Creme brulee French toast is da bomb.

    (9) But what if you find FB depressing or abusive? Or just not worth your time and personal info? A lot of mental health professionals advise their depressed or anxious patients to avoid FB. Why stick to this one stupid platform — esp. one that The Kids Today think is for old people?

14. John Z. Upjohn ?@hymenaeushouse
    Best fan writer goes to Mike Glyer, that weasel who had the temerity to directly quote and even link to unflattering things Puppies said.

    *snort* That Glyer. What a scummy villain. 😉

15. ::ticky ::

16. Apropos of nothing, when my wife and I came into the family room earlier tonight, we saw one of the cats had left a present on the floor.

    “Is that cat barf, or poop?” my wife asked.

    We serve the cats dry food. “It’s cat barf,” I answered. “See the Nutty Nuggets?”

17. One of the Hugo YA Award Committee members has posted a link to a survey soliciting suggestions for the name of the new Not-A-Hugo YA Award, which passed its first reading at MidAmeriCon II.

    If re-approved at the Business Meeting next year at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, the award would first appear on the ballot in 2018.

18. Several almost-clever things I almost have the energy to type.

    Clicky.

19. Tell Helsinki that they can approve the Tove Jannson Award for YA fiction and there’s no way they’ll turn it away…

20. #3-#4

    “USA! USA! USA!” type jingostic patriotism has made box office since 9/12/2001. Remember when Bill Maher had said the terrorists had attacked us cleverly, and got himself fired for it? In many ways, we are still in that mindset.

21. Wait, they’re not going to just go ahead and call it the YAgo?

22. [selection selected]

23. Today’s read — Better Off Red, by Rebekah Weatherspoon

    Fantasy; a college freshman joins a sorority that’s a front for vampires. Since I seek out lesbian SFF, it’s not surprising that every now and then I’ll come across one which verges on erotica (there’s a lot of, er, throbbing in this book.) Such a book can be judged one of two ways — by how much of a turn-on it is, or by the story. On the former, it didn’t appeal to my particular tastes, although that might not hold true for everyone. For the latter … I lost my patience a long time ago for stories where people fall in lifelong love after knowing each other for approximately forty-seven seconds. The plot also meanders around for 5/6 of the story and then Everything Happens At Once. Oh, well.

24. @NickPheas: Did Jannson write anything remotely YA?

    The Moomintrolls are captivating, but for children. And her non-Moomin work that I know isn’t YA either.

25. @Jim Wright’s FB post:
    we can spend our lives in fear, or we can spend our lives in hope.
    Unfortunately, there seems to be a genetic predisposition towards the fear reaction.

    If this were NIven’s Known Space Universe, I’d be encouraging the US to engage in as many land wars as possible; this would accelerate the elimination of highly aggressive individuals (whose fear response causes them to get so unthinkingly patriotic that they’re willing to “travel to distant lands, meet interesting people, and kill them”), thus raising hope that fewer of the amygdala-challenged will be reproducing.

    But more seriously: considering that we know that human brains don’t fully mature until somewhere around age 25-30, (and the parts that mature last are those that govern rationality and provide impulse control), isn’t it really a form of child abuse to recruit 18 year olds into the military?

    (Across the board I do think that we should be looking at biology and the facts when making determinations of “maturity” and responsibility, rather than some artificial length of time: want to drink, own a gun, drive a car, make life-changing permanent/semi-permanent decisions? Take a brain scan: if your brain has stopped putting all of its parts together and is fully functioning – regardless of how many wrong ideas may be stuck in there – you get your maturity card and are declared a fully functioning human, responsible for your own decisions. If not – nope, sorry, you’ve got to stay on the birth control meds and ask permission from an adult for a while longer….)

    And another thing: who’s bright idea was it that just because you can have children, you are capable of being a parent?

    Hmmm. Must be a bad morning at Casa Davidson….

26. @Nigel: Somehow, naming an award for readers who can’t drink after a brand of cheap hooch just doesn’t fit….

27. ‘But more seriously: considering that we know that human brains don’t fully mature until somewhere around age 25-30, (and the parts that mature last are those that govern rationality and provide impulse control), isn’t it really a form of child abuse to recruit 18 year olds into the military?’

    Exhibit 1: Tank Marmot
    Exhibit 2: Brad Torgersen

    Not sure that either of these gentlemen shows maturity or rationality even now. The virus of ‘my country/my god right or wrong’ is especially virulent in young males. This is why they are the most likely to volunteer for service. And after such service often suffer traumatic consequences for those actions which they have been ordered to do, and have done in that service.

28. Standback:

    “The Moomintrolls are captivating, but for children.”

    Or for adults AND children. But not really YA. I would love a childrens award with The Martian as a trophy though.

29. Woo! I’m a contributing editor!!

30. The lack of YA is a weakness in the Tove Jannson Award, I’ll grant you that.

31. @Ken Richards

    I could say various uncomplimentary things about both those gentlemen were it on topic, but none of those things would focus on the fact that they do or have served in the military, which I consider irrelevant when people claim it as a merit in other topics and so the reverse should also be true.

    @steve davidson

    Your second paragraph sounds terrible even with the If… in front.

32. Looks like Captain Kirk has a new ship.

33. I couldn’t resist…

    “Alpha Beta Omega”? How… subtle.

34. @Ken Richards:

    Whoa. You are tarring an awful lot of soldiers and veterans with a very wide brush there.

    I have many issues with the lack of mental health support and PTSD therapy in the military. I think a lot of soldiers returning from overseas tours are not receiving help that would be quite beneficial. But what you wrote implies that the bad behaviour displayed by your “exhibits” is related to their service in the military. Not cool.

35. Really not liking the digs at either development of maturity* or military service. This is the sort of crud I dislike.

    I come here because I rarely see it here.
    _________________

    I think the arguments about how books that appeal to children and adults aren’t really YA strike me as really weird. “You might want to read these older or younge,r but not when you’re 14.

    That’s all beside the point that if the YA not-a-Hugo excludes middle grade stuff entirely, when MG has been nominated for the Hugo proper, something is badly broken. Unless you want to propose breaking the new award in two so you can keep your purist “But YA is teen fiction” definition and not the observed history of the development of the award, which clearly intended to include MG all along.

    ______________
    * Seriously, yes, we’ve learned a lot about how brains develop and that maturity doesn’t end in the late teens, but I think the tendency these days to treat young adults over the age of majority as infantile has been more detriment than positive, and trying to back that claim because science ignores the way plenty of 18 year olds, even lacking fully developed impulse control, can still act like grown-ups.

36. Since there’s a 9/11 topic in the scroll today, I thought I’d ask something that was on my mind yesterday: What are the post-2001 works of SF/F that were most influenced by the attacks and subsequent societal changes, either explicitly or implicitly? I can’t think of one that strongly comes to mind.

    This Fantastical Andrew Fox wrote five years ago:

    Five stories and seven novels, of which only three stories and one novel deal directly with the events of 9-11-2001. This seems like a vanishingly small number, particularly given the enormous volume of fiction published from 2002 on.

37. @rcade: Last year’s highly-regarded story “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill”, for one. And there was an anthology a couple years ago.

38. Lenora Rose:

    That’s all beside the point that if the YA not-a-Hugo excludes middle grade stuff entirely, when MG has been nominated for the Hugo proper, something is badly broken.

    Agreed.

    I think it’s clear that a lot of people in fandom don’t really distinguish between YA and middle grade, thinking of all young people’s fiction as much the same sort of thing. (Well, OK, not all. They wouldn’t call The Gruffalo YA. Probably. I’ve seen people calling Alice in Wonderland YA. though.)

    I’ve mentioned before now how the ‘YA’ Hugo proposals kept metamorphosing between ‘YA and Children’s/YA/Youth’, but everyone constantly called them simply YA proposals. I’ve found another piece of evidence to add to that: the Norton has ‘YA’ in the title, but ‘YA and middle grade’ in the regulation, while the Dragon for youth fiction has ‘YA and middle grade’ in the title but only ‘YA’ in the regulation. People (not everyone, obviously, but many people) just aren’t thinking about the difference.

    So I think a lot of people will nominate books that are actually published as MG/older children’s for this award, because they think that that is what ‘YA’ means; that the administrators won’t rule these out of order, because they don’t do things like that; but that some people will complain about this, and say that the award is for YA and shouldn’t be going to this kid’s stuff.

39. PS. Two awards would make sense in principle – Goodreads does it, and so do the Edgars – but would be problematic in practice, because a. It would give us yet more to read. b. While the two bands clearly exist, and some works are definitely on one side or the other, there are a lot of works that are disputed (and often the most interesting, I find).

40. I have a bit of a mixed reaction to Jim Wright’s perfectly reasonable outrage over his facebook post being targeted. Yes, it’s a problem that random people will target you on facebook for posting opinions they disagree with, and will lie and scheme to get the faceless algorithms of fb on their side. It happens to a lot of people. And many people get targeted in this way, not for their opinions but for their simple existence. Now, I’m not saying that Jim’s reaction is over-reaction. Nor am I saying that people need to demonstrate a required level of outrage-on-behalf-of-others before being outraged on their own behalf. (I rather suspect that Jim would meet any such requirement.)

    But I saw people who supported him claiming that this outrage against Jim’s post meant that anyone who continues to use facebook should be ashamed of themselves. And that kind of misses the complexities of life.

    It reminds me a bit of when my family moved across the country when I was a kid and my father encountered seasonal allergies for the very first time and threatened to quit his job, sell the house, uproot the family and move somewhere, anywhere else, because how could anyone live like this? Surely no one else’s allergies could ever have been as bad as his because no one else was complaining about them as loudly as he was.

41. I just finished the Jeffrey Ford short story collection and it was great: his usual wonderful combination of the weird and often grotesque with a matter of fact view and great human characterization.

42. Ursula K. Le Guin mentions in her latest blog post that she has had some health issues (which upset me when I read it). OTOH, she included some small charming poems in the post, including one to her SJW credential.

    http://ursulakleguin.com/Blog2016.html#117HealthUpdate

43. Whoever suggested Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders, thank you. I had to hold back tears during lunch at work. I may re-read the last chapter at home where I can sob in peace.

    Though it has been a while since I read the Psammead books, the style felt true to form, and of course the WWI parts are heartbreaking.

    Thank you, Filers, for your always wonderful book suggestions!

44. Omg, they are selling a Futurohouse in Sweden!!

    http://beskrivning.fasad.eu/objekt/760143/beskrivning.html

45. What are the post-2001 works of SF/F that were most influenced by the attacks and subsequent societal changes, either explicitly or implicitly?

    What was the Baen book whose cover had a tank rolling over OBL?

    Paul Levinson’s The Pixel Eye (Tor, 2003) was a confused mess about how the danger of weaponized squirrels in terrorist hands demanded unsupervised intelligence organizations.

    As I recall, Spider Robinson and RAH’s Variable Star managed to blame GWB for Nemiah Scudder’s rise to power. The book was in general an odd mix of 1950s SF tropes and stuff that mattered to Robinson in the 2000s, with very little editorial oversight to ask questions like “if they can terraform Ganymede, does it matter that Earthlike worlds are rare?”

    One book written well before 9/11 that will likely never be reprinted thanks to 9/11 is Frezza’s 1994 Fire in a Faraway Place . It ends with the heroes from a troubled backwater world convincing the lone superpower to stop destabilizing their world with ill-conceived interventions by hijacking a space ship, then flying it into the tallest building in the superpower’s economic capitol.

46. James Davis Nicoll: I thought the “Bush did Nehemiah Scudder” argument quite plausible. We Americans are still in the grip of madness from 9/11, and I’m not sure the other shoe has really dropped on us, so far as the rest of the world is concerned. I’m doubtful I’ll get the see the whole story play out.

    Or maybe that’s hopeful. I’ll have to think about that.

    “if they can terraform Ganymede, does it matter that Earthlike worlds are rare?”

    The book itself rather answers that question in part, doesn’t it? Not only Tnalzrqr naq gur erfg bs gur fbyne flfgrz trggvat qrfgeblrq, but that the technology for getting people to other solar systems isn’t able to take anything more than a generation ship. It’s logistically a lot easier to terraform in a developed system than outside one.

    I’m fond of that book, myself, and hope the full three volumes get written, naq gung vg’f qvfpbirerq gur fbyne flfgrz jnf qrfgeblrq orpnhfr gurl jrer hfvat gur dhnaghz gbepu sbe gur fuvc naq abg ol rarzl npgvba. V’q yvxr gb frr fbzr yvtug fxvezvfuvat jvgu gurbergvpnyyl rarzl fcrpvrf orsber gur gehgu pbzrf bhg: Gung gurl’q orra fclvat ba hf gb svther bhg vs gurl pbhyq xrrc hf sebz trggvat gur gbepu naq qrfgeblvat gur fbyne flfgrz, naq gung jura gurl snvyrq, gurl svtherq gung jnf gur raq bs hf, naq qvqa’g unir gb pbire gurve genpxf, guhf znxvat gurz obgu svaqnoyr naq nccneragyl phycnoyr.

    That breaks into three volumes nicely and honors Heinlein’s strong inclination against writing real villains. I thought this book did so–the bad guys in this book could easily have been heroes in a different Heinlein novel–and I’d like to see that string continue. So far, it’s an average Heinlein novel.

    I was very sad to discover Jules and Rickey were lifted from someone else’s story. I wanted a whole book about them and their further misadventures–in space!

47. @rcade on September 12, 2016
    You will hate them, but SF/Alt-History books that directly used 9-11 themes as a take-off point include:
    Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove
    The Last Centurion by John Ringo
    Ghost by John Ringo

48. Another odd pre-9/11 novel that will get hidden in an omnibus is Stephen King’s The Running Man (under the nym Richard Bachman). As you might remember, the book ends with the protagonist flying a passenger jet into a building owned by a TV network.

49. For me, the problem is that YA and middle grade are marketing designations, not one that really indicates who reads the books, what’s in the books, or even who the authors thought s/he was writing for. Books that go across generations, like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, don’t fit neatly into a YA or “children’s” niche, anymore than Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, the Narnia Books, or something like Coraline.

    The best line you can draw (or I can draw, anyway) is the age of the protagonist, but that is certainly not perfect. When push comes to shove, there are no bright lines and the most celebrated books, the most remembered and most beloved books are the ones with the broadest appeal and the fuzziest claim to YA status. I think it’s kind of “I know it when I see it” for each of us when it comes to what would qualify, and I think that’s ok. If a Harry Potter book won both a Hugo as Best Novel and took the YA award, so what? If I want to nominate things like Castle Hangnail and The Lie Tree, even though the former is probably classified as middle grades and the latter as YA for marketing purposes, why is that not ok? I read and loved both and I’m an adult (and then some) and they fit my concept of “book appropriate for young adult readers.” Good enough.

50. James Davis Nicoll said:

    One book written well before 9/11 that will likely never be reprinted thanks to 9/11 is Frezza’s 1994 Fire in a Faraway Place. It ends with the heroes from a troubled backwater world convincing the lone superpower to stop destabilizing their world with ill-conceived interventions by hijacking a space ship, then flying it into the tallest building in the superpower’s economic capitol.

    I doubt that would keep it from being reprinted. Shortly after the attacks, people started pointing out that there are a lot of examples in sf that resemble them. For example: The Running Man (the novel), which ends with the protagonist hijacking a plane and crashing it into the skyscraper housing the HQ of the people running the game. Or the Doctor Who episode “Earthshock”, where the Cybermen hijack a spaceship and intend to crash it into a city to disrupt a peace conference.

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