(1) The Register is running a poll for the worst Doctor Who of all.
Was Colin Baker, dressed in his multi-coloured dreamcoat, simply taking a wrong turn on his way to a rehearsal for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical – falling instead into some weird space-time continuum from which no audience member could escape?
Or maybe, just maybe, it was William Hartnell who ruined it for everyone with his curmudgeonly adventures on the TARDIS.
Although Peter Capaldi is not leading, he should be worried about his job security.
(2) I don’t think anyone is genuinely confused, however, Andrew Porter has worked out a scenario to show why people ought to be confused by the reappearance of a well-known pen name.
At Drop Dead Perfect we read,
“Idris Seabright is one demented dame. A 1950’s Florida gargoyle with a penchant for painting still lifes, no matter how her subjects must be stilled, she’s as handy with a hachet as a brush and as rich as she is ruthless. ‘Drop Dead Perfect,’ written by Erasmus Fenn and directed by Joe Brancato, finds Idris torn between her ingenuous ward who has artistic aspirations, a well-endowed Cuban ex-con who may be her nephew, and her pill-pushing lawyer. Idris and ‘Drop Dead Perfect’ are back after last year’s sold-out run for a strictly limited eight week engagement.”
Also, at Vanishing New York,
“Everett Quinton, former lead actor and artistic director of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, is famous for his cross-dressing performances, and he’s currently starring in one of the juiciest of his career with Drop Dead Perfect at the Theatre of St. Clements in Hell’s Kitchen. As Idris Seabright, a 1950s Key West housewife with artistic aspirations…”
“Drop Dead Perfect” is playing now through October 11 at Theater at St. Clements, 423 West 46th Street, NYC. Porter continues —
Except we know that “Iris Seabright” was a pseudonym used by science fiction author Margaret St. Clair, who died in 1995. Is it coincidence that St. Clair was from Maine, and this character is from the opposite place on the East Coast? I called the theater, and they were totally unaware of the previous use of the name.
For more about Margaret St. Clair see her Wikipedia entry.
(3) George R.R. Martin will make an appearance on Zombie Nation reports Entertainment Weekly.
Nothing is going to stop George R.R. Martin from finishing his Game of Thrones novels!
The bestselling author will have a cameo during the second season of Syfy’s post-apocalyptic thriller Z Nation playing himself as a zombie, EW has exclusively learned.
And as you can see from the photo above and the two others below, Martin is quite undead while signing his own books (and even tries to munch on one brainy copy). The title of Zombie Martin’s book is a fun tease — “A Promise of Spring,” which plays off A Dream of Spring — the expected title of his eventual seventh (and presumably conclusive) novel in his epic A Song of Ice and Fire saga. Currently Martin is working on Book 6, The Winds of Winter.
Declared Martin: “I just want to prove to my fans that even in the Zombie Apocalypse, the Song of Ice and Fire books will still come out!”
Martin will appear in the eighth epsiode of this year’s Z Nation, which returns to Syfy on Friday at 10 p.m. In the show, Martin has been imprisoned by a character called the Collector, who captures celebrity zombies and keeps George chained to a desk for his own nefarious purposes.
(4) DB in a comment on “One Alfie, Two Hugos” at Not A Blog —
I have a theory, or maybe a hypothesis, as to why there was no Best Novel Hugo in 1957. The International Fantasy Award, which was a juried award that was also shaped like a rocketship, was being presented at a banquet elsewhere in London the day after the Worldcon. It was an invitational event, not officially part of the Worldcon, but many Worldcon members attended.
My theory is that the Worldcon committee, knowing this, didn’t feel that a Best Novel Hugo was necessary. That would be an odd decision today, but remember that at that time the Hugos were not firmly established, they had much less prestige than the IFA, and awards were few and the overlap and duplication we’re used to today were unknown.
The book that received the IFA that year? Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
(5) Pip R. Lagenta invites you to come see a snippet of LASFS history on his website while you still can. He says Comcast is getting rid of personal webpages (like his) in October.
De Profundis is the club newsletter of The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Around about May of 1988 the De Profundis newsletter contained its first, last and only Photo Supplement. This four page supplement is now, here, being republished for the first time (in any form) since the May, 1988, newsletter distribution.
I’m in there a couple of times. Which is either an incentive or a warning.
(6) Cedar Sanderson in “A Dog’s Breakfast” at Mad Genius Club.
https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/622165354702348288
When you confront your reader with, in the first paragraphs, sentences that don’t make sense, you are doing the worst thing to readers an author can do. Mislectorism. Betrayal. You’re showing your readers you hate them, and they will respond to it. “This particular ship has seen action: plasma scarring across the wings and tail fins; a crumpled dent in the front end as if it was kicked by an Imperial walker.” Look at that sentence. Consider that it is not alone. I don’t think I have ever seen as many colons in one passage in all the thirty-some years I have been reading. Nor have I seen this many sentence fragments in once place. I shudder to think of how many dashes and hyphens met their ends here. If I had to name this style I’d call it post-Modern chop suey, because everything is minced and mixed together until it resembles a dog’s breakfast.
Snowcrash in a comment on “A Dog’s Breakfast” at Mad Genius Club.
I think the issue may be somewhat overstated – the Amazon reviews broadly break down into 4 areas – people unhappy that an ebook is priced at so high (USD 17?); people sad to have lost the Expanded Universe; people taking umbrage at the existence of a gay protagonist; and people who take issue with the writing. Down-rating the book for the first 3 seems a bit immature to me, but hey, whatever they want in the cut-throat world of Amazon…
Personally, given it’s sales figures, it seems to be doing fine so far. Let’s see if it has legs though.
Amanda S. Green in a comment on “A Dog’s Breakfast” at Mad Genius Club.
Very broadly break down into that. I’ve taken the time to read the reviews not only on Amazon but on B&N as well. Let’s look at the B&N reviews to start. There are 17 reviews there for a 3.5 star cumulative review. 6 of those 17 reviews are 5 stars. However, and this is a big however, of those 6 reviews 4 are one line back and forth comments between reviewers that have nothing to do with the book. Another has no comment at all. So let’s toss them out. The final five star review is a true review by someone who liked the book. The rest of the reviews deal with the plot or writing style. One review, one of the more supportive ones, does say that the inclusion of a gay character felt forced. Over all, the complaint, even among those giving good reviews, was that the writing was not at the level it should be and that Wendig did not appear to love the universe he was writing in.
If you look closely at the Amazon reviews, you see much the same thing. Yes, there are those upset with the fact the EU was tossed out. But most of the reviews concern the writing style or the story structure. Sure, there are a few who object to having a gay lead character, there always will be someone who doesn’t approve of something. But the overall message is that the book is poorly written.
The key thing here is to look at the author’s behavior and how he is alienating a fan base. He has basically called all those who don’t like his work homophobes simply because they don’t like his work. That is not a way to win friends or influence people, at least not in a good way.
As for the sales figures, eh. We haven’t seen the returns yet and we probably never will. As for his Amazon rankings, those don’t always equate into huge sales. The best sellers lists such as the NYT one are based on pre-orders and then continued orders. As you said, we will have to see if it has legs and, judging from the reviews, I’m not sure it will.
(7) Teresa Nielsen Hayden now denies the episode happened. Brust says that’s not what he was asking about, but that’s irrelevant for purposes of this history.
@StevenBrust @pnh @jenphalian Here's a denial: Patrick didn't even raise his voice to Jagi Lamplighter. JCW fabricated the entire story.
— tnielsenhayden (@tnielsenhayden) September 12, 2015
@StevenBrust @pnh @jenphalian Lamplighter's the one who got warned that she was pushing the limits on the convention's code of conduct.
— tnielsenhayden (@tnielsenhayden) September 12, 2015
(8) He said it, not me…
https://twitter.com/pornokitsch/status/642381622340374528
(9) Oops. Somebody poked a hibernating bear. Part of “Today’s Twitter Rant, 9/12/15” which goes on at length on Whatever.
I don't need a fucking "Web of Trust" to be a science fiction and fantasy fan. I don't need a fucking gatekeeper. I'm a fan because I am.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 12, 2015
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Pip R. Lagenta, both Marks, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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NelC at 7:58
Warning: “Trial” is still Colin Baker. The serial I see most often suggested as an introduction (and high point) for McCoy is “Remembrance of the Daleks”, though my personal favourite is probably “The Happiness Patrol”.
I found episodes 1-3 supremely disappointing, but hold the original 3 close to my heart. Particularly the very first one.
I don’t think the prequels are particularly good, but after boasting about how the Pups have their hand on the pulse of popular fans, it seems ironic that some of them haven’t even seen any of a set of science fiction movies from one of the most popular franchises in genre history. Movies that, despite being somewhat less that great, managed to entertain enough of the “ordinary fans” the Pups claim to represent that they made hundreds of millions of dollars.
I traded in my revenge cat for a revenge Chihuahua.
@aaron – totally agree, the bloody hypocrites
You mean revenge voting.
@hypnotosov – the price almost stopped me. I don’t like breaking the $9.99 barrier for ebooks. But dammit, I like Chuck Wendig and I loathe this particular Amazon review mashup that’s happening around him.
Zombie GRR Martin chained to a desk just seems like the sort of thing that was always likely to happen.
Well, I haven’t kept up with Star Wars either-just not my thing in spite of the tie-in novels often being written by people whose other work I adore-but I wouldn’t put myself in the place of deciding what’s a proper Star Wars novel or author or whatever, either.
I do think it’s lovely that a tie-in series seems to go out of its way to ensure that interesting things happen in the volumes, though. I think I have standing for that remark.
$14.99 for the JCW kindle version? From the bit of the sample I could scan (I just couldn’t read it – it hurt my brain) it needed its editor to take the writer strongly in hand. I think JCW would be doing Tor a favor by moving all of his work over to Castilia House (that will show Tor). He does have 36 reviews already. Fifty is where Amazon’s algorithms start taking notice so “no revenge reviewing” as not only isn’t it ethical/moral but it helps the person so doesn’t work as revenge. This is why it’s important to understand systems and not to be a jerk. Not buying the book because the sample show it’s unreadable that’s appropriate behavior.
David Shallcross — According to the handy Yamato wiki, the space battleship masses the same as the original: 62,000 tonnes (empty).
Although, comparing the two in profile I’m inclined to think that the space battleship was a new build incorporating elements of the old (and probably sealife-encrusted and -eaten) wreck, rather than a retrofit, and may well have massed more.
Erm. I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy for nigh on fifty years, and it still makes up the bulk of my fiction reading. However, though I saw and enjoyed Star Wars IV-VI when they came out, I have not bothered with the three earlier movies. I don’t generally see movies in theaters any more, and by the time they hit the premium channels I’d seen so many negative reviews that I didn’t watch.
Should I turn in my Fan Badge?
No, Jim, just don’t go publicly criticizing any one or any work based on your nonexistent experience of those particular works. 😉
Just like I can’t comment on anything re other tie-in novels that I haven’t read. Still a fan.
@Jim
You may want to if you’ve been spending the last couple of years castigating vast swathes of other people for being out of touch with ordinary fans/popular culture.
If not, hey – too much stuff, too little time.
ETA: TPM is not thaaaaat bad, Jar Jar and annoying kid aside. It’s Ep 2 onwards that the real scope of the disaster becomes clear.
Tasha, the $14.99 price tag no doubt reflects all the effort and cost to Tor for editing the book.
Should I turn in my Fan Badge?
No. People should be fans in the way they want to be fans.
But . . . .
If one has positioned oneself as the unelected spokesperson for the “ordinary fans” and have been condemning Worldcon voters for being out of touch with said “ordinary fans”, one should expect to have one’s hypocrisy noted when it turns out that one has not even watched any of the movies from one of the most popular sets of genre movies in the world.
@Tasha – I can’t even be bothered to look at a free sample of JCW on Amazon any more. No revenge reviewing here – I’ll only review things I really want to praise up.
I did wonder this morning (after perusing the linked twitter event despite myself) if maybe the Tor editors along the way decided to apply some revenge non-editing to his more recent books, given that I’ve seen comments here and elsewhere that his first book in this series was enjoyable. Only they would know and I’m just idly speculating that maybe he’s lost the goodwill of people who are in a prime position to improve the final form of his writing.
Anyone contemplating the Star Wars prequels, which are, on the whole, much like Wright’s writing — in dire need of an editor, or at least someone to say “that’s stupid, don’t do that” — is encouraged to hunt down one of the various “phantom edits”, which greater improve them.
Example: All three into one two-hour movie.
Of course, by doing so you will miss the “endured a bad film” camaraderie. But most won’t begrudge you the lack of pain.
Here’s the Everything Wrong with the Phantom Menace version.
Note: that’s not an official “everything wrong” video (so it’s not as good), but it’ll give you the gist.
From where I’m sitting Green and Sanderson just appear to be concern trolling with the whole trying to tell Wendig what he should or shouldn’t be doing to win friends and not alienate people (which is amazingly ironic from them particularly). I read Wendig’s words on the subject and he wasn’t calling fans who didn’t like his book homophobic, he was calling out the reviews that appeared to mostly have a problem with his use of gay characters within it as though just having a homosexual character a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away was just too much for some to handle.
Namely reviews like this one:
(also tons of reviews that are angry he’s not Zahn, that main characters from the movies don’t really show up in the book, and folks using present tense like it’s a bad word and use it in the same way so often that it looks like they copy/pasted another complaint)
I’m not sure you can count this has constructive criticism. I saw someone mention they couldn’t find any reviews like that, which is weird as I could find dozens among the one star reviews in about 2 minutes. Frankly what could be said to Frank Sirianni? ‘Sorry I hope you like my next book in the trilogy, I’ll completely change my writing style and leave out anyone gay for you’?
While I’m sure Green and Sanderson truly are just filled with worry that Wendig is alienating readers like that by telling them that he’s not going to change his writing style or including gay characters, I don’t think that people who leave reviews like that are people really planning on buying his next book in the first place. He has an audience who does buy his books though so I’m sure he’ll be ok.
I say this as a person who really doesn’t like his narrative voice and doesn’t plan on buying his next book, I don’t see the insult they’re implying is there.
I looked at the JCW preview on Amazon. Can anyone tell me why a ramscoop ship has streamlining to reduce drag? Some peculiarity of the aether it rides on, maybe?
As for Dr. Who, I like Capaldi, but I don’t think he has been well served by the scripts. But then again, I would have far preferred Bernard Cribbins’ character as Donna’s grandfather to have been the companion instead of Amy.
@Beth Z.: You want the Doctor’s Dad to be the Companion?!
Actually, that would be cool.
@Jim Henley
You want the Doctor’s Dad to be the Companion?!
I never said I was normal. 🙂
@BethZ: I’d love to see that particular trail of bread crumbs picked up, myself. But Moffatt showed no interest and Davies left it so it was clear but could be ignored.
I can’t believe I’m taking the time to do anything for JCW, but, here goes.
The basics are that even in a thin medium like interstellar gas, the streamlining makes a difference. The problem is though, a ramscoop will slow you down (IIRC) because it interacts with the medium. What’s more, your ship is going to need to be mostly ablative armor as it gets sandblasted by C-fractional hydrogen gas whenever the ramscoop is turned off. Or any comes in around the ramscoop.
BethZ — I imagine that neutral hydrogen might be a feature of high interstellar speeds, and there’s always the possibility of a landing on a planet with atmosphere. Not to mention, if this is influenced by Traveller, the ship might refuel (for low velocity, sub-ramscoop speed manoeuvring) by scooping gas giant atmospheres.
Edit: Or maybe, as per Stross’ Lord Vanek in Singularity Sky, it’s just streamlined as a sales feature.
Randomly, I mention how much I came to hate Traveller, a.k.a. “1975…In SPAAAACE!”
And yet my first professional writing sale was to the Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society. Because life is strange.
Bernard Cribbins was a companion back in 66, in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150
For a group of people who are constantly inventing new insulting names to call people, the Puppies sure are delicate when the shoe’s on the other foot.
Bernard Cribbins was a companion back in 66, in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150
Cool. Hadn’t known that.
And thanks fir the info on ramscoops. It looked jarring, but glad to know he got something sort of right, though I don’t know if the ship he was writing about could land in atmosphere, NelC.
The two Doctor Who movies are with checking out, even if for the historical curiosity factor. They’re basically Peter Cushing playing a character similar to The Doctor in loose adaptations fo the first two Dalek serials, in the most 60s cinema style possible,
“Can anyone tell me why a ramscoop ship has streamlining to reduce drag?”
It was weird to me that the “drag-reducing streamlines” somehow suggest (“implied”) that “the paradoxes of Einstein were in her” (as did “the heavy armor”). Honestly, my first reaction was to think it was a joke (i.e., that it was obviously nonsensical) followed by a pleasant couple of seconds thinking about whether aerodynamics could possibly affect anything vis a vis what I know of relativity (which isn’t a vast amount but isn’t nothing, either). In the end, I failed to come up with anything, but if I missed it, I am eager to hear.
The only real Star Wars prequel movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Didn’t Cedar flounce? Something about being muzzled? That muzzle seems to be pretty bad quality, if it allows daily blog posts.
The funniest part about her diatribe is that enough people liked the book that it made #4 on the NYT bestsellers list. And Amazon sales rank doesn’t give a damn about what the reviews say, merely that it has reviews. So by leaving hundreds of one star reviews, it just boosts the book up the list, making it more discoverable and more successful.
Her complaint seems to boil down to “A book that I wouldn’t have read anyway, seems to be something I don’t like.” Also possibly, “That author was mean to his fans.”
Well, Chuck’s got 44.5K twitter followers and Cedars got 585. That’s like a Pop Warner QB complaining that Peyton Manning doesn’t run the plays he does.
I think there might be some confusion about how ramscoops (well, the non-fictional proposals by Zubrin and others) might work. They’re not like atmospheric ramjets, instead they would gather and focus the interstellar medium into a fusion ‘bottle’ using magnetic fields vastly more extensive than the material spacecraft, which would be tiny in comparison.
And this is where the drag comes in. Spacecraft drag is insignificant (so it should not need to be streamlined for that reason) but the drag generated by that big magnetic ‘net’, it’s been shown, would swiftly cancel out the thrust gained as velocity increases. And that’s why ramscoops have been out of fashion for a good while and now it’s all sails and huge launch lasers. Pity, I really liked Tau Zero. But some have suggested that the concept could be revisited, not sure what that would take.
Anyway, yes, especially if you’re sending lifeforms and not just machines, you do need spacecraft shielding from relativistic gas and dust, but a big lump of ice, nothing fancy, could serve as your ablative shield there. Plenty floating around in the Kuiper Belt. Probably help to streamline it some just to minimise wear, but it’s really thickness that counts. You’d likely want it to extend it out as a broad shield to protect instrumentation, radiators and such external to the main hull too, so the end result would not look especially sleek, I think, probably more like a big interstellar mushroom.
Since imitating Wendig’s style made the bit you quoted quite sharp, snappy and readable, I think it may have undercut at least one of their own major criticisms.
So here’s a lot of very geeky discussion of the drag question: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php
The “drag” is said to be “caused by bremstrahlung and synchrotron radiation produced by the motion of the charged particles as they spiral through your collector fields and into your fusion chamber.” Would streamlining help in this regard? Perhaps it’s some kind of metaphorical streamlining or magnetic runway?
Also, the method appears to limit your speed to about 10% C, so again I wonder if this really ties the engine to Einsteinian “paradoxes.” There are probably some Einsteinian paradoxes that don’t immediately come to mind, I guess.
But here I am thinking about JCW. On File 770.
Also, armorwise…wouldn’t this really be a factor for any quick ship?
Once, twice, five times a clicky.
So I read The Martian today. A one-sitting book if there ever was one, just the right balance of tension and resolution. Weir gets one of my Campbell nomination slots this year.
Reading the first page of JCW’s new work made me feel utterly exhausted at 8:30 in the morning after a good night’s sleep. And not just because of the generously stuffed prose. Because you know just know that an example of what gets you in the “trust network” for appreciating “good storytelling” is that enervating screed, for five hundred pages. We’re going to hear about how it’s the best novel of the year. They’ll get enough nominations to get it through.
And we’re going to hear that the fact that we all don’t bow down and say what wonderful story telling it is means that we all aren’t real SFF fans. And that all the books we think are just better written? Those are all trash that isn’t real fiction, but is just a sign that we are herd animal SJWs.
As I said, enervating.
Based on 1-3 comments I’ve seen from David Hartwell, JCWs Tor editor, I find that unlikely. I think his comments came up in regards to the Tor boycott but I could be misremembering and my Google fu didn’t work (I did wade through 3-4 of JCWs threads before I gave up).
@Will R.
Great link. I hadn’t hear the phrase ‘Bussard Scramjet’, but they do sum things up well:
No, at 10% of c, time dilation is insignificant, so no ‘twin paradox’, I’m afraid. Incidentally, like the Fermi Paradox, it’s not really a paradox – the paradoxical elements can be explained by general relativity; special relativity does not deal with acceleration, so seems to create a problem where there isn’t one.
Still, even a ship at 10%c will have the need for some shielding, though not as much as a truly relativistic craft. In fact, if they’re not using a ramscoop, they’re worse off, because there is no magnetic field to deflect charged particles. But (and this has been suggested as a way to protect Mars astronauts from solar outbursts) a less expansive magnetic field with no big drag coefficient (it would be much closer to the hull) might serve to protect the craft. Otherwise, it’s a big slab of armour just the same – of course you can also put fuel, other volatiles, supplies etc up front as extra shielding too.
The interstellar site I like to look into from time to time is Centauri Dreams, by the way. They’re pretty good at covering the history behind the thinking, and they don’t mind mixing in a bit of SF from time to time (yeah, OK, it’s nearly always Stephen Baxter…)
I congratulate JCW for coming in below No Award in the 2016 Best Novel Hugo.
You just know he’s going to be forced onto the ballot.
@Simon Bisson
Definitely one sitting. I just read the whole thing yesterday myself. And then I checked to see if it was awardable. Great minds I’m sure…
(Pity the taties wouldn’t get enough light, though. Jaysus now, me ould grandad back on the farm in Wexford could have put the fella right on that. Not that Wexford gets a lot of sunlight either, but at least you don’t have to worry about water…)
@fin And we also ignore the peroxides in the Martian soil…
(and of course light is why back home we grow the Royals on south-east facing hillside cotils. Best potato ever!)
@Simon Bisson
Which is a strangely missed bet. H2O2, that’s extra oxygen and water for Watney, right there. He had plenty of energy to cook it off giving him viable soil substrate plus more volatiles. And for a man willing to sod about with hydrazine (eek!), peroxide is just child’s play.
I actually liked TPM quite a bit. Mind you I saw it dubbed and Jar Jar stripped of his unsavoury ethnic connotation was actually kind of adorable.
I also liked elements of the third, maybe because I was still living in Italy at the time and the evil senator taking over power kinda resonated with me… but the second is pretty unsalvageable.
I have translated a lot of novels in the Star Wars franchise in my time. Some were so-so, some were good, some were terrible. Zahn (which I didn’t translate, but had to read to familiarise myself with the canon and the translations) is AFAIK the worst of the lot.
I read a few pages of the JCW book and I had many problems with it. Because my brain is weird, my biggest problem was that “Blackie” is a name I associate with Torison Black Lord, Highlord of the Kencryath, and as exciting as his life is I don’t see it including space ships any time ever.
On the other hand, one could fix the Insert Name Here Awards by appointing only Arrin-ken to act as gatekeepers, so maybe this could work out after all.
@Fin Thanks for the link!
Did you know Kevin J. Anderson wrote some Star Wars novels?
When Bookspan was sending me cases of books, a fair chunk of them were Star Wars novels. I am far more familiar with the history of that universe than I really want to be.