Pixel Scroll 9/18/17 The Lethal Weapon Shops Of Isher

(1) GOOD OMENS. Shooting began yesterday… After they got Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins (Terry’s manager) to return a necessary bit of equipment:

And Terry Pratchett’s account tweeted a photo of David Tennant and Michael Sheen in costume as Crowley and Aziraphale. [H/T to Nerd & Tie blog.]

(2) HIGH EXPECTATIONS. Joe Sherry gets on the scoreboard with a “Microreview [book]: Provenance, by Ann Leckie” at Nerds of a Feather.

Let’s start like this: Provenance is a novel about family, identity, culture, truth, and what it means to belong.  Provenance is set in the universe of Ann Leckie’s earlier Imperial Radch trilogy, but only connects with references and by association. This is not Breq’s Story 2.0. This is the story of a young woman, Ingray, attempting to run a pretty significant con in order to impress her mother, the matriarch of the Aughskold family.  She’s a bit out of her league on this one.  There’s something about hiring a company to rescue a disgraced member of a rival family out of a prison planet called Compassionate Removal with the hope / assumption that he will be willing to embarrass his family and help hers by providing her with stolen “vestiges” from his family.

A word about vestiges. Vestiges are highly valued historical documents and items, which could range from documents similar to a Declaration of Independence or the American Liberty Bell to an original copy of a famous speech or perhaps some sort of miscellany from some long ago gala where someone famous appeared. The older and the more historical the vestige, the more valuable and the more important the vestige. Vestiges can, in some respects, represent the identity of not only a family, but the heritage of an entire world.

So, what happens when some of the most significant of them are quietly called into question?

(3) HUGO HISTORY. Just like you read in one of those clickbait history articles about some artifact that sat unrecognized on a museum storage shelf for time out of mind, at last someone has recognized the significance of the lists in a 1956 Worldcon progress report. The official Hugo Award site announced the find in “1956 Hugo Award Page Updated”.

Thanks to new information coming to light, we have updated the 1956 Hugo Award history page with the finalists that appeared on the ballot that year. We thank Olav Rokne for bringing to our attention an article on page 15 of the 1956 Worldcon Progress Report 3 that included the names of the finalists along with voting instructions.

Note that the order in which the finalists are listed is the same order that they appeared in the progress report and does not imply order of finish on final ballot. According to the article, the final ballot included space for write-in candidates. In Best Fanzine, one of the winners appears to have been such a write-in. In Best Professional Magazine, no finalists were listed at all, so all votes were write-ins.

Also, Kevin Standlee said in a comment here:

Remember that in those early days, the rules were “whatever the committee says” and were probably first-past-the-post, and quite possibly “close enough, we’ll call it a tie.” We’ll probably never know the full details. Over time, the model for the Hugo Awards has been evolving toward “tell us everything you possibly can short of how each individual person voted.”

(4) LONG LIST 3. David Steffen has launched his Kickstarter for “Long List Anthology Volume 3”, the third edition of an anthology series of stories loved by Hugo voters – this year including stories by Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Rambo, and others.

The base goal of the campaign will include only the short stories.  There will be stretch goals to add novelettes and novellas.  The goals listed here include only stories that I’ve heard agreement back from the authors–some queries to authors are still pending, there may be another story or two added as an additional stretch goal.  If these stretch goals are reached, I may add on other goals as well.

This project is not endorsed by nor affiliated with the Hugo awards, WSFS, WorldCon, or any associated entities. The Hugo name is used with permission. Please note that the anthology is NOT called “The Hugo Long List Anthology”. It is called “The Long List Anthology”, or the full wordy title: “The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List”.  (I’m noting this because it’s pretty commonly referred to by the wrong name)

At this writing people have contributed $1,094 of its $1,700 goal.

(5) THE FUTURE IS NOW. Eliza Angyanwe of The Guardian says of Nnedi Okorafor, “the Nigerian-American writer is flying the flag for black, female geeks” — “‘So many different types of strange’: how Nnedi Okorafor is changing the face of sci-fi”.

As the science fiction novelist Nnedi Okorafor takes to the stage at the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania, she challenges stereotypes before she has said a word. The 43-year-old writer who won the 2016 Hugo award (the Oscars of the sci-fi world) for best novella doesn’t look like much of a geek. Yes, she wears oversized glasses, but Okorafor’s specs are trendy, royal-blue Cat-Eyes, not wiry aviators. And, crucially, she happens to be a black woman.

The Nigerian-American’s success has been applauded as a victory by a community that has long cheered her on from the margins. So when she tweeted on 11 August that she was working on her first project with the comic publisher Marvel, fans were thrilled. (“A Marvel story. Written by a Nigerian woman. Set in Lagos. Superhero’s name: NGOZI. What a time to be alive,” wrote one fan on Twitter) And with a novel, Who Fears Death, to be adapted for TV by HBO (George RR Martin is its executive producer) Okorafor is about to go from the solitary geek reference-point for young African women to everybody’s favourite new sci-fi writer.

(6) MORE SUPERHEROS. The Teen Titans are coming to CW (well, actually, to DC’s new digital service.)

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • September 18, 1973 – Georgia governor (and future President) Jimmy Carter reports a UFO sighting.
  • September 18, 1989Alien Nation premiered on TV.
  • September 13, 2002 – The third incarnation of The Twilight Zone TV series premiered.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Web comic artist M. Patrinos of Seasonal Depression made this clever comic about the questionable marketing decisions LEGO has made to target girls with the “LEGO Friends” line.

(9) GET YOUR SHARE OF SMUGGLED BOOKS. Ana Grilo & Thea James from The Book Smugglers have added a bunch of new signed copies of books as reward levels for donors to “The Book Smugglers: Level Up” Kickstarter.

Thanks to the generosity of some of the best SFF and YA authors out there, we have a number of signed copies of new and upcoming books including but not limited to: Provenance by multiple-award winner Ann Leckie, audiobooks of the astonishingly good Illuminae and Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, both Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem by the incomparable Yoon Ha Lee, the YA time travel Fantasy The Girl With the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, and many more.

We also have MAPS AND ART! Aliette de Bodard donated a copy of House of Binding Thorns, along with character art by Hugo Award nominated artist M. Sereno! And Megan Whalen Turner is offering signed copies of not only her entire Queen’s Thief series (and we turned that into a SUPER MEGA reward level for SUPER FANS) but also a cool map of that world.

They’re raising money for “A brand new season of short stories and novelettes, new contributors, …a new look and more.” As of today, backers have given $8,068 toward their $16,500 goal, with 16 days to run.

(10) THE POET FROM BEGINNING TIL NOW. SPECPO, in “Monsters and Heroes: An Interview with Bryan D. Dietrich”, quizzes the author of a book-length study on comics, Wonder Woman Unbound, and six books of poems, who’s also co-editor of Drawn to Marvel, the world’s first anthology of superhero poetry, and a past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.

When are you most satisfied with a poem you’ve written?

When it surprises me.

When it does something I never do.

When it loses control and runs rogue, only to come back to the pack.

When it makes me cry.

When it reminds me why I started writing poems in the first place, which is to say when it lives up to the debt I owe to the language I love.

George Orwell once famously said that a poetry reading is “a grisly thing.” How do you feel about poetry readings?

Well, I think reading about a man having his soul broken in a locked room with a locked cage filled with rats attached to his face is a pretty grisly thing too, but then who am I to judge?

(11) CRACKDOWN ON NAZI COSPLAY. Nerd & Tie’s Trae Dorn reports “Rose City Comic Con Taking Firmer Stance Against Nazi ‘Cosplay’”.

When you get down to it, there are two kinds of people who put on Nazi cosplay. There are people who are two microfocused on their fandom to think about how what they’re wearing will be perceived by the people around them, and then there are people who are completely aware of it and it’s the whole reason they’re doing it. The former are good people who need to take their convention blinders off (and I’ve been complaining about this issue for a while). The latter though are people who have no place in our community, and we need to take a stand against it as a community.

(12) ASSUME A KINDER, GENTLER ASTEROID. “What if dinosaurs hadn’t died out?” — a fannish preoccupation.

Imagine a world where an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs. What would have happened afterwards – and how might their presence have affected mammals like us?

…Even closer to the present day, dinosaurs would have had to deal with the various ice ages of the past 2.6 million years. But we know that Cretaceous dinosaurs were living above the Arctic Circle. “Maybe in cooler places you would see things with thick and elaborate pelts, covered in fuzz and feathers all the way down to the tips of their toes and tails,” says Naish.

“It wouldn’t have been difficult for a ‘woolly’ tyrannosaurus or dromaeosaur relatives of Velociraptor to evolve,” adds armoured dinosaur expert Victoria Arbour of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. “Maybe we could have even had shaggy and woolly ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, or hadrosaurs.”

(13) TIPSY SCHADENFREUDE. BBC has the story: “The whiskey toasting the demise of Lehman Brothers bank”. Chip Hitchcock asks, “Perhaps a Maltcon will tell us if it’s any good?”

A London entrepreneur decided that the whole world should be able to taste one of the most profound company collapses in modern times. On 15 September nine years ago 25,000 people lost their jobs when the bank went bankrupt.

James Green says he was inspired to keep the bank’s name alive by the significance of those events.

“After living through the economic disaster of 2008, it really resounded with me. I personally related to it, there were people in my neighbourhood, my family that were personally affected by the crash,” he says.

He says his three different whiskies, one of which is named Ashes of Disaster, have been specially crafted to capture the flavour of the once mighty bank’s fall from grace.

(14) NOTHING IMPORTANT. From the BBC we learn that “Carbon dating reveals earliest origins of zero symbol”.

The Bakhshali manuscript is now believed to date from the 3rd or 4th Century, making it hundreds of years older than previously thought.

It means the document, held in Oxford, has an earlier zero symbol than a temple in Gwailor, India.

The finding is of “vital importance” to the history of mathematics, Richard Ovenden from Bodleian Libraries said.

The zero symbol evolved from a dot used in ancient India and can be seen throughout the Bakhshali manuscript.

Other ancient cultures like the Mayans and Babylonians also used zero symbols, but the dot the Bakhshali manuscript developed a hollow centre to become the symbol we use today.

It was also only in India where the zero developed into a number in its own right, the Bodleian Libraries added

(15) TV GUIDANCE. Do you get Turner Classic Movies? Then you can look forward to a very scary month! So says a blogger at Thought Catalog “Here Are All The Classic Horror Movies TCM Will Be Airing (Commercial Free!) During October”.

It’s good to see some classic movies getting some love. This year Turner Classic Movies will be airing vintage horror movies all month, and unlike other networks, TCM airs the movies commercial free. If you know someone who needs a good education in the history of horror movies, tell them to tune in.

(17) FAUX WORLDCON BID. Calamity Caitlin rediscovered the exhibit she and a friend made for a Springfield, Vermont Worldcon bid in years gone by. (There are 1+12 tweets, but the chain is broken, so you have to look at her Twitter accountfor September 17 or use this search to see them all.)

And it ends with this one:

(18) REPLACES DANDELION. Do you want to know what the latest Crayola crayon color is? Well, here’s the link anyway

The winner was chosen beat out four other names with 40% of the vote in an online naming contest launched in July.

(19) THE HISTORIC DOCUMENTS. Ed Emshwiller’s sf parody short The Thing From Back Issues, made at the Original Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference in the 1950s, was posted online this past summer by Susan Emshwiller. I only recognize one of the writers, although some well-known names were at the 1956 conference, including Robert Silverberg, Cyril Kornbluth, Katherine MacLean, and Lester Del Rey.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Ana Grilo, Kevin Standlee, Andrew Porter, David Steffen, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. And an overdue credit for iphinome. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

48 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/18/17 The Lethal Weapon Shops Of Isher

  1. Pretty sure the Titans trailer is fan made. If you go to YouTube, the title and description indicate it, and the announced Titans series for next year 1) is supposed to be with the animated Young Justice season 3 on a new DC Comics streaming service not the CW, and 2) has a very different cast of heroes than what’s seen in the above trailer. (announced so far are Nightwing, Raven, Starfire, Hawk & Dove).

  2. Tom: That may explain why I didn’t find a copy on CW’s YouTube channel. But then, why is it all over the movie news sites on YouTube? Are they deceived, or what?

  3. (13) TIPSY SCHADENFREUDE.

    BCC has the story

    Look at that, an appertainment opportunity with an appropriate subtitle already…

    ETA: Tipsy fifth!

  4. (5) THE FUTURE IS NOW

    That Guardian writer seems to have very little interest in the quality or content of Nnedi Okorafor’s work.

  5. (3) HUGO HISTORY

    I was taken by the list for Most Promising New Author

    Robert Silverberg
    Harlan Ellison
    Frank Herbert
    Henry Still

    One of those is not like the others….who is Henry Still? Per isfdb he published a little flurry of stories in 55 and 56, and then only a couple more before falling silent. He has no SF encyclopedia entry. I asked Mike if he knew, but apparently he’s not turning up in any fan histories.

    The only possible link I’ve found by some googling is that an author of the same name published some science-related non-fiction over the next 30 years. Camestros turned up that a amazon review described him as a “Newspaperman turned aaerospace executive.”

    (I have no good reason for wanting to know this, just idle curiosity)

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  7. 8. Two thoughts:

    a. A Lego spokesperson wouldn’t say ‘Legos’.

    b. While ‘specially for girls’ is certainly not the way to go, I’m a bit worried by the suggestion that Lego is inextricably linked with geekish interests. When I was young, Lego was a construction tool that could be used to make anything – including a juice bar, if you wanted to. Well, I’m not sure juice bars existed then, but say a sweet shop. The way it has become connected with specific themes strikes me as unreasonably limiting.

  8. Re 8. I get the arguments about ghetto-ing children’s toys into pink and blue, forcing assumptions on them, etc….but my daughter loved Lego Friends. She generally chose it off the shop shelf ahead of bog standard Lego, although certainly she got some sets of that as well. She also chose Star Wars Lego when that became her thing, and she likes my old Lego spacemen, etc etc.
    I’ve seen arguments that Lego Friends somehow inhibited girls from building in the same way, but I’ve had the traditional Lego-on-the-floor-oww-oww foot injuries from her extravagant creations in just the same as my parents did from mine.

  9. My objection to Lego for girls is that the bricks were a different size. Why can’t a girl run a juicebar in Mos Eisley?

  10. @Word Weary

    They were compatible with other types of Lego – same bricks, same sizes etc etc. The only thing you couldn’t do was put a “Friends” body on “classic” legs or vice versa, because the “Friends” body shapes were designed to look a bit more realistic and be slightly better articulated, and so they didn’t fit the old ones. You could absolutely put a “Friends” girl in the Mos Eisley juicebar.
    (Mind you, I think that Lego ought to have produced a much wider range of figs for “Friends” to make up for the incompatibility)

  11. 6) What I’ve seen on the new live-action Teen Titans series is that, after TNT passing on it, it’s now going to be part of DC’s new online digital offering. It will be connected with The CW’s DC shows (same producers), and characters will cross over on to the CW shows, but is not (unfortunately) going to be actually on The CW.

    Here’s an article that I found on it this morning:
    http://io9.gizmodo.com/which-teen-titans-will-be-in-the-live-action-tv-series-1794633901

    18) I would just like to point out that the pigment for Bluetiful was developed at my alma mater, Oregon State University, which also developed the modern method for producing maraschino cherries.

    Just to show that OSU produces more than winning baseball (and losing football) teams. 🙂

  12. John Lorentz: I would just like to point out that the pigment for Bluetiful was developed at my alma mater, Oregon State University, which also developed the modern method for producing maraschino cherries.

    I’ve hunted down a half dozen stories about it, trying to find out what is so special about the color, and haven’t been able to find an explanation anywhere.

  13. 15) the TCM Halloween programming is pretty much the same as they have been running for oh, 10 years? 15 years?

    also, the people who most need “a good education in the history of horror movies”, are the ones who won’t go near black & white films.

  14. Andrew M on September 19, 2017 at 3:33 am said:

    b. While ‘specially for girls’ is certainly not the way to go, I’m a bit worried by the suggestion that Lego is inextricably linked with geekish interests. When I was young, Lego was a construction tool that could be used to make anything – including a juice bar, if you wanted to. Well, I’m not sure juice bars existed then, but say a sweet shop. The way it has become connected with specific themes strikes me as unreasonably limiting

    They sell both specific theme sets, like licensed for DC/Disney/Marvel, etc. However LEGOs continue to sell well in non-licensed sets, or stuff like Ninjago which they created. My nephews in particular like LEGO City sets, and they’ve developed a cartoon and games surrounding those. My wife’s family traditionally played with LEGO sets and are still into it so I get to see some multigenerational stuff and you’ll be pleased to know that while the licensing stuff gets attention from various fandoms, new sets include building robots that work, pirate ships, jungle exploration, an old fishing store set, racing cars, construction vehicles, etc. The cars and stuff range from for kids to fairly expensive (a friend bought the VW camper and VW Beetle to put together and spent $100 on each).

    A lot of times with things like this it’s more about the execution rather then the intent to market specifically towards a demographic, as ‘specifically for girls’ has proven successful for both LEGO and DC recently. While I get that comic I also think the City, Jungle Explorer and licensed sets have done well with including a lot more female minifigures than in the past. Part of that is due to the success of the Friends line, through which LEGO and many other toy makers are discovering that there’s a larger market out there that they’ve been completely ignoring (DCs Super Hero Girls is a billion dollar success) and are making awkward strides trying to figure out how to tap that market.

  15. @MattY

    However LEGOs continue to sell well in non-licensed sets, or stuff like Ninjago which they created.

    Arguably, those positioned it for their eventual licensing breakout. I was a kid when they first introduced the Space LEGO series, and that was a huge hit. Then it was the Castle and later Pirate LEGO sets that ended up dominating the marketplace for awhile. It wasn’t until they introduced the City line that what gets considered traditional LEGO became a major seller again.

    The LotR, PotC and Harry Potter lines are very heavily influenced by the original Pirates/Castle LEGO series and many sets are fairly minor variations of older builds.

  16. (5) @rob_matic: On the other hand, this was written as a Life > Women article, ie mostly as a celebrity piece. And having an article about a science fiction author there, where success in science fiction literature is treated just as any sort of success, is a big step forward. It’s a sign that science fiction is truly mainstream, in its way.

    Also of general interest: Farah Mendlesohn is crowd-funding her Heinlein study, which ended up too long for any of the academic presses to publish (and none of the editors could tell her which pieces to cut): https://unbound.com/books/robert-heinlein

  17. (6) Teen Titans trailer. When I embiggen the video to run full screen, the superimposed text up to includes “Fan-made.” Q.E.D., Res ipsos loquitor, ad loc ad hoc ad scroll pro quo. (And IMHO, no authorized DCU thing would start with Barbara Gordon (as in daughter of Gotham City’s Comissioner Gorden) being dead and gravestoned. (Versus the BG in Fox’s GOTHAM TV series, who could easily die and come back a few times, along with half of the rest of their big bads and medium goods.)

  18. @Dex – Absolutely, though they were having trouble prior to their licensing breakout and Star Wars/Bionicle kept them away from financial disaster around 2004. Of course City, Ninjago, Friends, their board games, etc also rely on the fact that LEGO brought in fans to help them create new sets and ideas that retained the classic feel they grew up on. One of those cool stories where a company turned to their fans (and brought in good financial advisers) to turn around a situation going south on them.

  19. We didn’t really have any Lego sets when I was a kid, although we did have a fairly large collection of bricks and figures acquired as hand-me-down’s and jumble sale finds, but I’ve made up for it in adulthood by developing a collection of the Nanoblock Sights To See range (which are apparently extremely popular with women). I missed the beginning of the Lego girl-specific sets, I think, although either way I wouldn’t have had any.

  20. (Although I adored horses in all forms, including the little Lego horses that your Lego figures could ride on.)

  21. John Lorentz: Here’s the press release from Oregon State

    That was exactly the information I was looking for! Thank you! 😀

  22. I could see a DC project start with killing off a significant character. Nevertheless, Barbara Gordon has not shown up on Gotham. The Barbara there is Barbara Kean, which is one version of the maiden name of a wife of James Gordon in the comics (depending on the universe/continuity, Gordon’s been married up to twice, and the women he’s been married to have had different names [i.e. his first wife has been named both Thelma (Earth-2) and Barbara (Earth-2)]). On the show, she was initially Gordon’s fiance, but they broke up and she both became mentally unstable and went over to the dark side. There’s speculation she may end up being the show’s Harley Quinn. At any rate, the odds of her being Barbara (Batgirl/Oracle) Gordon’s mother on the show are pretty slim.

  23. “Pixel the Scroll and post some more,
    post some more, post some more.
    Godstalk a tickbox and we’ll comment more,
    Pixel, Pixel, the Scroll”

  24. @1: those aren’t the figures in my head (Aziraphale in particular seems much too centered) — but I want to see how they play out.

    @Mark re @3: best new authoring doesn’t always work out long term; consider early Campbell winners Robinson (half a Hugo and several variously-tolerable novels), Cherryh (3 Hugos, Worldcon GoH, ~70 novels that I mostly love, and she’s still writing) and Longyear (a Hugo 30 minutes later and a career that went downhill a few years later). Or local 1997 example Michael Burstein (Scroll’d recently for his moves at a town meeting), who had one collection published but AFAICT hasn’t written any fiction in a decade or more). I suspect that an examination of Campbell nominees would suggest that the 1956 nominees were stunningly strong — 3 of 4 having lifelong careers — but I’m too late and it’s too tired for me to dig through this.

  25. Chip Hitchcock: I suspect that an examination of Campbell nominees would suggest that the 1956 nominees were stunningly strong — 3 of 4 having lifelong careers

    1978 was pretty strong, too: Orson Scott Card, Stephen R. Donaldson, Jack L. Chalker, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and Bruce Sterling. But yeah, there are a lot of “where are they now?”s on that list.

  26. Re the Campbell, you can find real stunningly strong years still, like 2007 (Naomi Novik, Scott Lynch, Sarah Monette, Brandon Sanderson, and Lawrence M. Schoen). That said, I’d view any rate higher than 50% of a strong later career to be phenomenal.

  27. That is a strong group, but 2007 is way too recent to tell whether they will stand the test of time. There are a lot of SFF authors who did well for a decade and then disappeared.

  28. @JJ: true that; a career can flame out at any time — and these times are probably worse, given (e.g.) the notorious bookstore-buyer death spiral. The spiral may be balanced by better distribution, electronic or otherwise; e.g., I’ve had no trouble finding new Hambly because buying books from the UK is much easier, particularly for libraries — but that may not pay enough to keep people writing.

  29. The stats I’d be interested in seeing for the Campbell are the proportion of finalists whose eligibility trigger was novels versus short fiction. My perception has always been that starting your eligibility without at least one novel is extremely difficult, but in the last few years it feels like there’s been a higher proportion of short-fiction-only candidates. But that’s all a very subjective impression, which is why I’d be curious about data.

  30. @Heather Rose Jones: I think (though I don’t have hard numbers to back it up) that we’re coming out of a time of near-collapse for short-fiction markets. Not that long ago, people were talking about reducing the number of short-fiction Hugo categories by one (eliminating Novella, and broadening the definitions of Novelette and Short Story) because of low participation in those categories. But it seems like the markets have started to learn to adapt to changing technologies and whatnot, and short fiction is starting to move once again.

    Thus, it probably was true that it was nearly impossible to get a Campbell without a novel, at least for a while, but that may not be the case any more.

    But yeah, data, rather than speculation, would be nice to have.

  31. The Campbell wikipedia page lists their eligible works, with novels in italics vs shorts in quotes, so you can check. Assuming that it’s correct (a big if), a quick tally of the winners showed it’s pretty much 50:50 over the full period. There might be a trend towards novels over time, in both finalists and winners, but that’s just me eyeballing the list rather than anything more scientific.

  32. Looking at the Wikipedia Campbell list, it’s not clear to me that much has changed – there seem to be a couple of short-fiction-only winners in each decade, suggesting it was never impossible, but was, and remains, quite difficult.

    One thing worth considering for the future, though, is that novellas have mutated into a rather different kind of beast, and perhaps shouldn’t be seen as short fiction any more – I guess they reach a wider audience than magazine etc. short fiction. (Though of course the internet means that actually short fiction reaches a wider audience than it used to as well.) Certainly the voting patterns for novellas are very different from those for novelettes and short stories. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of novella authors turning up in the Campbell.

  33. Er, correction, it was the Novelette category that was proposed for elimination, not Novella. (I always confuse those two, since the one with the longer name refers to shorter fiction, and vice versa.)

  34. @Xtifr–

    Er, correction, it was the Novelette category that was proposed for elimination, not Novella. (I always confuse those two, since the one with the longer name refers to shorter fiction, and vice versa.)

    Novelette is the category that was invented because at the time there was too much short fiction and not enough categories for them.

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