(1) You might not have suspected that L. Frank Baum’s first book was about raising chickens.
At 20, Baum took on the then national craze—the breeding of fancy poultry. He specialized in raising of the Hamburg. In March 1880, he established a monthly trade journal, The Poultry Record.
And when he was 30, Baum published The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.
(2) Peter Capaldi’s interview by a local LA Times writer signals the arrival of a new season of Doctor Who.
At the base of Los Angeles’ Bradbury Building, a slender man in an impossibly clever suit considers the wrought-iron coils of the past that adorned the future of Ridley’s Scott’s neo-noir film. Tucked behind his Ray-Bans, the eyebrows that launched a thousand GIFs furrow.
Just so we’re clear, the 12th Doctor is standing in the “Blade Runner” building….
“It’s a marathon,” Capaldi says. “[Matt] knows what it is like, when you’re on Episode 10 and you’re really sort of dying on your feet. You’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to be able to learn any more lines, I’m not going to be able to pull anymore faces.’ [Matt Smith is] great because I can text him and say, ‘This is where I’m at. Can you help or do you remember this?’ He has totally been such a huge support. As David [Tennant, the 10th Doctor] has as well.”
The last regeneration from baby-faced Smith to the gray-locked Capaldi wasn’t just a change in character age, but in tone as well.
“I think The Doctor has become more and more accessible as the show has become more successful, and this sounds bad, but weirdly I want to make him more distant,” he says. “I don’t want to be so user friendly. I didn’t want to go out and say to the audience, ‘Love me.’ I wanted to be a more spikey character. Hopefully I’m a character that might be uncomfortable to be around. But interesting.”
(3) And the Times ran a companion article full of hints about future episodes.
Spoilers are deadly here — to the fun, certainly, but conceivably to the person who reveals them as well — but a few cats have officially been let out of the bag. There will be Daleks — yes, again and already — including what feels like a nod back to Coleman’s first appearance in the series, before she became a companion, back in “Asylum of the Daleks.”
There will be Missy (Michelle Gomez), the transgender reincarnation of the Master — news whose goodness the two-part opener, “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar,” penned by show runner Steven Moffat, only confirms. (One of Moffat’s great gifts to the series is a string of memorable women — indeed, all his best inventions have been female characters.)
Also, as trailers have shown, the Doctor will play an electric guitar with all the authority of a man — Capaldi, that is — who once led a Scottish punk band (Dreamboys, with Craig Ferguson — that Craig Ferguson — on drums). It’s a pointed, and explicitly pointed-out, reminder that David Tennant’s and Smith’s young and madcap Doctors still live within him: “It’s my party, and all of me are invited.” Said another way: He’s not as old as he looks. (Some 2,000 years of living notwithstanding.)
(4) On Monkeys Fighting Robots the “Top 10 Doctor Who Episodes” begin with —
- The Doctor’s Wife
The Season 6 episode “The Doctor’s Wife” was guest written by Neil Gaiman, a man best known for writing Stardust, Coraline and The Sandman and his episode was awarded the 2011 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Best Dramatic Presentation at the 2012 Hugo Awards.
This episode sees The Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams receiving a distress call from a Time Lord and enter into a rift between Universes to try and save him or her. Where they end up is a void made up from trash and space debris where a group of people have salvaged a living from the junk. Also with them is an eccentric woman called Idris who pretty much jumps on The Doctor when she first sees him.
What made this episode such a delight was Suranne Jones’ performance as Idris, a unhinged woman who is completely batty and has a mysterious connection to The Doctor. Jones was fantastic, letting out her inner Helena Bonham Carter and injected a lot of humor in the episode. Gaiman’s written ensure that was a balance of drama and comedy and references the history of the show.
(5) Missed a big 50th anniversary the other day – the first aired episode of Get Smart on September 18, 1965.
The episode, Mr. Big, introduced Agent 86, Maxwell Smart played by Don Adams and his partner, the inimitable Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) as agents of CONTROL.
Headed by their boss, The Chief (Edward Platt), 86 and 99 worked together to fight the forces of KAOS. In the pilot, Mr. Big, we see the only actual appearance of the head of KAOS, played by little person Michael Dunn, before he is killed by episode’s end by his own Doomsday death ray.
Inspired by The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (which in itself was inspired by the James Bond craze of the early 60’s), Get Smart spoofed every aspect of spy culture including colorful villains, outrageous gadgets and ridiculous plots.
(6) Brian K. Lowe in “It’s the Little Things that We Count”.
Sure, this is all for fun, and everybody’s entitled, but there are issues out there that we should be paying attention to: climate change, record refugee migrations, wealth distribution, a presidential election season being run by reality stars. (Somebody has probably actually predicted this somewhere along the line.) Why should we care if No Award got the Hugo for Best Short Story when right outside the auditorium record forest fires, fueled by unprecedented drought, made the air seem less like Spokane than Beijing?
And why isn’t anyone blogging about that?
I have a simple theory: It’s too big. We can’t handle this stuff. This is the sort of thing we elected those guys in Washington to solve for us. See how well that’s worked out.
But you know what? We’re Science Fiction. We think about the big issues, the future. Up until now, instead of the guys in Washington, we’ve let the guys in SFWA do the heavy lifting, so we can concentrate on nominating patterns and voting blocs. Except now the guys in SFWA are right down there with us. We’re letting a thousand ant-like problems distract us from the elephants in the room. Because it’s easier.
I’m not going to sit here at my computer and claim I have the way out. I’m not to claim that I’m any better than anyone else, that I’ve been fighting the good fight while everyone else sat at their bivouac. I don’t, and I haven’t. I’ve fed the monster of small concerns like a lot of others.
But it’s time to stop. It’s time for us in science fiction to stop squabbling about petty matters and get back to bigger things. The kind of looming apocalypses that we can imagine, because we’re not afraid to. The kind of doomsday scenarios that used to be science fiction.
(7) Daniel in “The Forgotten Core of Science Fiction is Not Science” on Castalia House Blog takes on David Brin’s critique of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora.
Good science fiction may include politics of some sort, but despite what Brin asserts, that shouldn’t be its measure. Nor should “competence porn.” It is simply a myth that science fiction’s job is to correct any perceived tropes of the past.
Ken Burnside demonstrated an understanding of this very well in his Hugo award-nominated The Hot Equations. His counsel on the better implementation of physics into space combat is less focused on correcting tropes and is instead written entirely from the perspective of serving an underserved genre:
Thermodynamically limited space opera is a greatly underserved niche, in the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram between Hard SF and military science fiction. – Ken Burnside, The Hot Equations
Where Burnside is on target, Brin is off base. Brin’s argument is based on a premise: that in the future, Science Fiction depends on better political messaging and a commitment to progress.
Brin is half right: Science Fiction can be about an optimistic future that comes about through hard work and sound engineering. But does not, at its core only include that. Despite what Brin asserts, 1984 is not a positive self-denying prophecy. Orwell did not prevent a society that falls repeatedly under totalitarian thought policing – he merely provided a fictional setting that helped some readers identify it when it came for them.
(8) Amanda Palmer is a songwriter, musician and performance artist. She’s about to have her first child. She spoke with NPR’s Rachel Martin about the dueling demands of motherhood and art in “An Artist Worries: Will Motherhood Compromise Creativity?”
MARTIN: So you get this letter from your faithful fan. And you write in the response that this person essentially confirmed your deepest fears about being a mother and an artist. What a nice thing for this person to have done.
PALMER: Yeah, I mean, the part of the letter that confirmed my deepest fears wasn’t so much the are you tricking us into crowdfunding a baby. It was more of this fan’s terror that now that I was having a baby, I wasn’t going to be a good artist anymore.
MARTIN: And is the concern that having a baby – for obvious reasons, it changes your daily routines and your life in terms of how you use your time. But is your concern more about what will be the impact on your creativity?
PALMER: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s seems like there’s a paradox out there because on the one hand, so many artists who are parents will tell you that having children unlocks this unforeseen wellspring of creativity. On the other hand, some of the proof of concept (laughter) can fly in the face of that. And, you know, there’s definitely artists out there who kind of get boring after they have kids but seem to not be aware of it. So nobody’s anecdotal evidence can really prepare you for what’s going to happen. You just know that you’re going to change and you don’t know how.
(9) Best Related Work, Edible? Tattooed Bakers made this Groot Cake, a frosted Jupiter, and a cake referencing The Hobbit.
[Thanks to Will R. and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]
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Daniel’s statement:
Seems to rather run counter to Brin’s:
I’m still not clear what Daniel is trying to say in this piece overall. It seems deliberately worded to sound profound but seem to boil down to the usual puppy “politics bad, story good” With the digression onto Hot Equations looking like self promotion. While a better understanding of thermodynamics may lead to a plot hook I’m not sure how that links to better story telling in any way.
See, it is thinking like this – forced sterilization, nuclear strikes on the people, not to mention all the more mainstream BS like banning V8’s and the usual nonsense – that make the US general public leery of being governed by intellectuals and bureaucrats.
As a practical matter these things can’t be implemented on a well armed public that can credibly threaten their enemies with 4GW (I guess thats the term of art these days) retribution.
If we’re talking genocide and SF, Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” has always creeped me out. (cf. ST:TOS “Patterns of Force”)
This is aimed at a different fannish electorate (that of the Organization for Transformative Works), but may come in handy when explaining the Hugo voting process to people who haven’t done it before: http://puckling.tumblr.com/post/129466412054/apollonie-this-years-elections-should-be
Because we all read file770 for the far right buffoon talking points.
@JDC
I always thought the end of The Cable Guy (hey, it’s not that bad! really!) missed a real trick by not having Jim Carrey’s character say that after missing the antenna in the climactic fall to the uplink dish.
It probably never occurred to them because the original scripted ending had the Cable Guy being skewered on the antenna(he still lives).
I forget whether they actually shot it and the studio forced them to change it or they changed it before they shot it.
BTW Judd Apatow was one of the primary screenwriters on the movie, before that meant anything. It’s become a bit of a cult movie.
http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Cable-Guy.html
@McJulie
The assumption of Pravda was the delightful (if you’re reading it at a distance in space and time) assumption that while no viewpoint could ever compare to the rational glory of the Party’s, there were hosts of counter-revolutionaries and capitalist agitators lurking in the shadows with their deceitful trickery. Hence, many straw man. Change party to other words beginning with P to taste while altering Pravda to “Mad Genius Club.”
Towards all, righteous genocide is a staple of Certain Names That Must Not Be Mentioned’s works, with the occasional twist of the plot being based on the revolutionary idea not to genocide. Michael Z. Williamson, aside form totally looking like the sort of person with a list of undesirables to be killed, has written several books discussing the virtuous and manly killing of undesirables with a great man zeroes.
And quite frankly, if we look at all the people who conveniently just go away, we can probably broaden the list off authors who advocate it.
I’m just assuming that Brian K. Lowe must be addressing his own audience, since they are the ones who need to begin taking this stuff seriously.
After all, for decades the American right-wing has had, not merely a disinterest, but an active contempt, for environmental concerns.
One of Reagan’s first actions as president was to remove the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed at the White House (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepresidentandcabinet/tp/History-of-White-House-Solar-Panels.htm).
And it’s been “tree-huggers” and anti-EPA campaigns, and the like ever since.
A standard dog-whistle slur against SJW types is to accuse them of driving a Prius (used to be a Volvo) or trying to save the whales.
And ditto refugees (I won’t even start with the current GOP discussions of immigration) and unequal distribution of wealth,.
At this point, I’ll take it as a positive sign for someone new to be lecturing people on the subject.
So, yeah, quit trying to game the Hugos and go take on serious, real world problems.
Be my guest.
@Mark Hopper Huh. Didn’t know any of that. Ta.
Today’s demonstration of ‘humour bypass’ was brought to us by the letters a, b, u, w, and y…..
Lecturing people on the subject/subjects is the beginning of the problem.
The utopian improvers main blindspot, besides the matter of practicalities, is the effects of the lecture on the audience. In most cases this sort of thing creates at least as much opposition as acquiescence. And the opposition is much more among the general public than the large economic interests that are relatively easily co-opted, with social and environmental legislation for instance.
It’s a common fault of SF that the treatment of big ideas is simplistic. Reality is very messy.
I bring the other side of the story, some aspects of “messy”.
I’m not sold on those hunter-killer robots, that doesn’t sound like a particularly environmentally friendly solution, heck the terminator future just looks like a planet wide environmental disaster.
You bring the opposite of intelligent
@McJulie:
Very well, thank you. 🙂
The trick, of course, is to demonize the others, and claim they’re the ones lying. Whether this consists of calling them SJWs or Monsanto shills, the trick is fairly straightforward. Drown the disagreement in irrelevant complaints about things like motive. Paint the other side as wholly untrustworthy and unreliable. Never let up; use techniques like the Gish Gallop and moving goalposts to ensure that your opponents can never provide a satisfactory response to any of your points. Dismiss objections as “political correctness”. And constantly hammer on the points your audience is naturally inclined to believe.
It’s a more limited technique than Pravda’s, true, but at the same time, it’s a technique that succeeds very well because of the Internet and its ability to allow you to contact huge numbers of people inclined to accept your message all across the globe.
@Buwaya:
He lectured. 🙂
Let’s consider some of the more absurd implications of ignoring actual modern conditions on modern SF, regarding the fairly important matter of suspension of disbelief. Let’s say Swirsky. Yes, I’m going there again, but its just an example.
You could say its absurdly pedantic to object to the imagined way it would have gone down, because it was imagined anyway, the premise is inherently absurd, etc. Still, lets say the person/entity were a dinosaur, and said dinosaur had cleaned out the saloon in question instead of being a human and dead, said dinosaur would likely not have outlived the human by more than a few minutes to an hour. There’s just too much firepower out there.
So the lady in question mourning the human would have similarly mourned the dinosaur.
I’m reading an interesting alternate history book right now. It’s called Exceptional, by Dick and Liz Cheney. The authors use the same worldbuilding technique Charlie Stross used in Merchant Princes: the book purports to describe our world, but periodically they throw in a detail inconsistent with our reality. It’s done subtly and completely straight-faced so you have to pay attention or you might be fooled into taking it seriously. It’s a War of the Worlds for the 21st century.
In the Merchant Princes, I figured that Stross wanted plausible deniability to protect against criticism and/or libel actions resulting from his portrayal of contemporary figures. That doesn’t seem to be the motivation here though; this book dares its subjects to react to their fictional doppelgängers.
Anyway, I’m having fun picking out the points of divergence from our world.
While Precipice, the intentional community at the heart of John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider is based on the village greens built at UC Davis (coincidentally where Kim Stanley Robinson lives), it turns out we have similar communities in London, as detailed in this fascinating piece on the Segal self-build movement:
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/16/anarchism-community-walter-segal-self-build-south-london-estate
I merely bring the alien perspective, reporting from the alternate but just as “real” reality. SF, or much of it, is about imagining the alien. It seems though that this facility requires a bit of exercise. Consider what I bring exercise, a challenge to imagine a different (and not very different) world view.
All right, which one of you imagined Buwaya? Fess up!
@Buwaya
Different worldview certainly, challenging… perhaps not.
Monsters! Monsters, from the ID…
I confess to creating Buwaya in a krokodil-induced fever-dream. I wanted to externalize that part of myself that, to my shame, imagines that it has everything to teach and nothing to learn. The externalization worked all too well. My apologies.
Here’s an exercise – can you write a sympathetic character like John C Wright and explain his motives and feelings ? Or Damien of Molokai ? Or Sayyid Qutb ?
Oh heck, you could try write a character like buwaya. That should be easy.
@Rick K. — Didn’t that book start as Tom Clancy fanfic on Cheney’s blog?
@Jim Henley
/shun!
For people without ticky box addictions:
JJ has started an Unofficial File770 Best Novel from 2014 Bracket over here. 🙂
Mike, I’m going with Thomas Friedman, because a good portion of buwaya’s material reads a bit like Friedman’s stuff, where taxi driver in whatever end of the earth the columnist is currently visiting, manages to express the ‘kernel of wisdom’ that is at the center of the day’s column.
Honestly, I was thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
@Jim Henley
You must be subjected to the Vampire Procession of Shame!
(What We Do In The Shadows reference.)
I… I was wanted to put this here, take a step back, look at it. Rub my eyes. Look at it again.
Yes, it still says that.
@Meredith:
This is totally fair.
That is classic!
Re kernels of wisdom.
Yes I love those ! I run across something that strikes me as interesting, and I grab it and obsess over it for a time, figuring out how it fits and what it’s good for.
I imagine I’m a bit like Nabokov’s squirrely Professor Pnin, carrying off a card catalogue like a nut.
Friedman is silly because he only really talks to big shots and probably doesn’t even listen to taxi drivers. He is stuck up.
Brin:
Odd to have him put Bujold in the camp that has humans “just fit in”, because that second paragraph describes every one of her ecosystems.
Jamoche, yes, you don’t tramp across a continent eating nothing but oatmeal and blue cheese dressing (if memory serves) if you can live off the land. <wry grin> I wonder, has he ever read anything by Bujold?
I had always assumed, by the way the talking points get muddled when buwaya becomes overwrought, that it is a bot or a highly evolved crocodile.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan on September 20, 2015 at 1:05 pm said:
. (One of Moffat’s great gifts to the series is a string of memorable women — indeed, all his best inventions have been female characters.)
I… I was wanted to put this here, take a step back, look at it. Rub my eyes. Look at it again.
Yes, it still says that.
This, so much this.
I do think Sally Sparrow, the River Song of Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, and the Amy Pond of Series 5 are great characters, and the best ones Moffatt created. (Arguably Captain Jack beats them all.) I think the bigger problem with Moffatt and female characters is that if he gets time to ruin them, the probability of his doing so approaches 100%, and once he got made showrunner he was guaranteed to have the time.
I started an entire Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space tabletop RPG campaign purely to fix Amy and River. I was even cool with River being Amy and Rory’s kid, just not the way that Moffatt worked that out.
Anna, Lauowolf
Thirded.
You can’t “Live off the land” on Barrayar. Every inch has to be conditioned to grow Earth plants. Even untreated water is poison. They had a war over horse manure, for pete’s sake.
Komarr is even worse, no one can breathe the atmosphere.
Sergyar has the worm plague, floating vampire jellyfish, and vicious scavengers.
And that’s just in the Barrayaran empire. There’s Beta Colony, Klein Station, Rodeo, Ylla, The Union of Free Habitats, the Hegan Hub….
I’m with Cassy B. Has he read any Bujold?
http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2015/09/sarah-monette-the-key-to-the-library
oooo
I didn’t know this was the same person.
Love Shadow Unit.
Ultragotha
And moving on to CJ Cherryh we have Cyteen, equally as deadly…
This is really supposed to be a comment on “Pournelle Resumes There Will Be War Anthology Series”, but I don’t seem to see a “Leave a reply” link attached to that blogpost, so…
If Pournelle actually “do[es]n’t pay attention to fan politics”, it’s unclear where he got the idea that anybody has called for VD’s death-without-trial. Perhaps VD told him so?
I note that a big part of why Pournelle went with Castalia is that Castalia promised to take care of a bunch of fiddly details for Pournelle. One hopes, for Pournelle’s sake, that VD handles said details better in the case of the TWBW anthologies than he did in the case of the late, unlamented Warmouse.
Hey, all. I’m back from far travels and working on the next round of the bracket. Should be up in the near future.
@Cubist
There seems to be a tried and true rhetorical device of “I don’t pay attention to [issue X], but [repeat tendentious argument made by one side in X]”.
If JP picked Castalia because Day promised he would make the publishing trains run on time, that’s his prerogative, but I don’t think Castalia has particularly distinguished itself as particularly competent in any professional aspect so far.
I know we get a lot of latitude to discuss things here, but maybe circumventing a no-comment thread isn’t the most considerate thing to do?
OK, Round Two of the 21st Century Fantasy bracket is about to go up. You can vote for a book, abstain, vote for a tie, or vote for a book not on the bracket (publishing in 2000 or after.)
For the three-way race, please rank the books in the order you would prefer (you can rank either all three, two, or just one.) It will be determined by instant run-off voting.
21ST CENTURY FANTASY, ROUND TWO
1. THE KNIGHT ERRANT AND THE PALADIN
Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire
Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
2. POLICE SQUAD!
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Snake Agent, Liz Williams
3. ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
4. RESPECTABLE DRACONOLOGY
Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton
A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
5. YET MORE FALSE THINGS
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
The Tower at Stony Wood, Patricia McKillip
6. GARDEN PARTY
In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal
7. ALL MANNER OF STRANGE BEINGS
The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
8. BATTLE OF THE BEST-SELLERS
A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling
9. CARNIVOROUS UNICORNS, MILITARY DRAGONS
To Ride a Rathorn, P. C. Hodgell
His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
10. THE HUMBLE AND THE ARROGANT
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
11. NOT THE EUROPE YOU REMEMBER
Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
12. MI-?
The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross
Rivers of London (AKA Midnight Riot), Ben Aaronovitch
13. MI-?
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Declare, Tim Powers
14. DETERMINED YOUNG WOMEN
The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
Sunshine, Robin McKinley
15. MAGIC LESSONS
Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone
The Magicians, Lev Grossman
16. IRV FTW
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett
Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear
21ST CENTURY FANTASY, ROUND TWO
2. POLICE SQUAD!
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
3. ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
7. ALL MANNER OF STRANGE BEINGS
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
8. BATTLE OF THE BEST-SELLERS
A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin
9. CARNIVOROUS UNICORNS, MILITARY DRAGONS
His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
10. THE HUMBLE AND THE ARROGANT
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
11. NOT THE EUROPE YOU REMEMBER
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
14. DETERMINED YOUNG WOMEN
The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
16. IRV FTW
1. Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear
2. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin
Ruritanian Racism : A Reprise