A modest Scroll, but mine own.
(1) WORLD FANTASY CON EVOLVES. Meg Turville-Heitz posted a statement about potential changes in World Fantasy Con on Facebook on August 26.
Apologies for the length of the following, but it is in response to a lengthy letter to the board from Andy Duncan and thus requires some length in return…..
Since we are in the process of agreeing on a new structure for the board, issues of board make up and authorities will be discussed as part of our larger conversation about what we will look like in the wake of David’s passing, and thus will be addressed when that is finalized.
We’ve heard, as well, a number of concerns that we as a board have been non-responsive. This is a product of time scales. We approve conventions two to three years out and thus requirements that we put in place in a given year required already seated conventions to react, which can appear like disorder, when it is not. In 2012, a series of incidents regarding harassment, beginning at other conventions, led us to add a harassment policy to our guidelines and a requirement that upcoming conventions draft one. The word, harassment, however, became a problem. Some of the jurisdictions require anything that can be called harassment be reported to the police for incidents that, in convention culture, wouldn’t be appropriate. We modified this to a requirement for a code of conduct and have been building upon the code of conduct language from DC in 2014. We’ve shared this language with upcoming committees as we work through what we want in place. We are limited, again, by local jurisdictions that could supersede our policy regarding something such as, for example, concealed weapons.
Additionally, concerns about the hotel setup in Saratoga Springs in 2015 (board members were participants on panels where the issues were evident, and were also highly dissatisfied with the hotel’s response to an inaccessible dining room) led the board to add the requirement for accessibility guidelines be provided by incoming conventions and as part of upcoming bids. Board members were working on drafting an acceptable guidance document when David died.
Our difficulty with that document comes from the fact that as a mobile convention, we are landing in places where other laws again supersede our guidelines. We have guidance that we will be looking at that suggests language and kinds of policies, but it must remain flexible.
Regarding Columbus’ program, we have looked at the guerilla site and agree that there are great ideas there. Some topics are not relevant to WFC (e.g. science fiction); others clarify topics we have and we plan to steal from it liberally. Darrell’s role in programming is far advanced, and the timing in the convention planning process does not allow for Columbus to seek a replacement. Ellen Datlow has worked with him to vet and build a better and more diverse program. Critical errors were a draft, unvetted program being published.That’s partly due to disrupted leadership as David had always assumed final authority on the program. We aren’t flush with volunteers who know how to program. If we were, some of these issues wouldn’t even need to be debated
And continues at great length.
(2) SNAIL MAIL SALUTES STAR TREK. Classic Trek went on the air 50 years ago today, and the US Postal Service has issued a sheet of stamps in commemoration.
On September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered. Centered on the interstellar voyages of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the prime-time television program’s mission was to boldly go where no man has gone before.With an intricate futuristic setting, multicultural cast, and story lines that touched on social issues, Star Trek pushed past the boundaries of popular science fiction and became a worldwide phenomenon. Each of the 20 self-adhesive Star Trek stamps showcases one of four digital illustrations inspired by elements of the classic TV show…
(3) PLANETARY POST. Robert Picardo’s latest Planetary Post for the Planetary Society.
In this issue, I share my journey to San Diego Comic-Con, where I quiz Trekkies and NASA scientists with trivia to celebrate Star Trek’s 50th anniversary. Engage:
(4) A TRIBE THAT FITS THE DESCRIPTION. Meir Soloveichik makes a Tolkien-endorsed case in “The Secret Jews of The Hobbit” for Commentary Magazine,
…The dwarves of Middle Earth, the central characters of one of the most beloved books of all time, are indeed based on the Jews. This was confirmed by Tolkien himself in a 1971 interview on the BBC: “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, [sic] couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” he asked. “Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.” Similarly, in a letter to his daughter, Tolkien reflected, “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.” …
(5) NO CHILLS. The Guardian reports on a study that found “One third of parents avoid reading children scary stories”.
A psychologist has stressed the importance of scary children’s literature, after new research revealed that a third of parents would avoid reading their children a story containing a frightening character. A survey of 1,003 UK parents by online bookseller The Book People found that 33% would steer clear of books for their children containing frightening characters. Asked about the fictional creations they found scariest as children, a fifth of parents cited the Wicked Witch of the West from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with the Child Catcher from Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang in second place. Third was the Big Bad Wolf, in his grandmother-swallowing Little Red Riding Hood incarnation, fourth the Grand High Witch from Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and fifth Cruella de Vil, from Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians…
(6) DROPPED IN THE PUNCHBOWL. Don’t let the birthday party stop you. Cheat Sheet fights another round in a timeless culture war: “’Star Wars’ vs. ‘Star Trek’: Why ‘Star Trek’ is Losing”
Star Wars versus Star Trek. The classic debate continues to rage on. But while Star Trek has gained popularity in recent years with both Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) achieving mainstream appeal and box office success, it’s still nothing compared to what The Force Awakens (2015) did this past December both at the box office and when it came to popular culture. In fact, to date the Star Wars series has made $2.8 billion with eight films compared to Star Trek’s $1.2 billion through 12 films. So why has Star Wars continued to be such a juggernaut in the cultural landscape compared to its sci-fi foe? Here are six reasons why Star Wars might be winning the long battle with Star Trek.
(7) MARTINSON OBIT. Leslie H. Martinson, a ubiquitous TV director who was active for decades, has died at the age of 101 reports the New York Times.
Just a partial list includes, from the 1950s, the live drama series “General Electric Theater” and “Chevron Theater,” the sitcom “Topper,” the drama “The Millionaire” and the westerns “The Roy Rogers Show” and “Tales of Wells Fargo.” In the ’60s, he directed episodes of “Surfside 6,” “Maverick,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “The Roaring Twenties,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “No Time for Sergeants,” “Run for Your Life,” “Batman,” “Mister Roberts,” “Mission: Impossible” and “The Green Hornet.” His output in the ’70s included “Ironside,” “Love, American Style,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Room 222,” “Mannix,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Wonder Woman” and “Dallas.” He wound up his television career in the ’80s with, among others, “Eight Is Enough,” “Quincy, M.E.,” “CHiPs,” “Fantasy Island” and “Diff’rent Strokes.”
[Thanks to Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to contributing editor of the day OGH.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Dawn Incognito – Glad to hear things are better-ish. I remember when I had to re-take an EEG.
I had been left alone in the room for too long (and they neglected to mention the “don’t move” bit). After a while, I noticed the machine would make different sounds if I moved different muscles on my head. Ten minutes later, I had a passable cover of Smoke on the Water going.
The Doctor was not amused. Probably hated Deep Purple.
Here is one (link unread). Star Trek is a TV series. It has some film spin offs, but at it’s heart it’s a TV franchise. There have been no new TV episodes in many years.
Star Wars is a film series and right now the films are an active franchise, AND it’s colonised TV as well with animated spin offs. But right now Trek is fighting only the away game, where Wars is stronger.
The Star Wars/Star Trek link is a miserable piece of clickbait.
It’s a “Six reasons Star Wars is awesome” list, and the height of insight they get to is “because lightsabers.”
But they get more rage-traffic by framing it as a “Star Wars is better than Star Trek” piece.
(Did you know that Schnidler’s List is more awesome than Star Wars? It has the girl-in-a-red-dress bit, and Star Wars doesn’t.)
Wow! A reboot of the Pixel Scroll franchise! I hope it doesn’t ruin my coupleofmonthsagohood.
Wars vs. Trek: Jumping in without reading the article or any of the comments. Sorry that this runs long.
One factor, I think, is that Wars is more actiony and less talky and philosophy-y than Trek (the sereses, and older movies, at least), allowing it to appeal to a wider range of demographic groups, including age and education.
A bigger factor, though (again IMHO) is that Lucas/Disney has always been vastly better at marketing than Desilu/Paramount. So much money is spent on marketing Star Wars movies that I wouldn’t be surprised if—when you take production budgets and marketing costs into consideration—the Trek movies actually made more profit than the Wars movies. Think, for example, of the period leading up to the release of The Phantom Menace. You could hardly turn on your television or walk into a store without seeing Star Wars branded items. Cardboard stand-ups stores, characters on potato chips bags and Pepsi cans (I still have two TPM backpacks and a set of “Jedi communicator” walkie talkies won from those game cards found in potato chip packs), “happy meal” type toys at three different fast-food chains, and much more. Has any Trek film ever received even 1/10th as much marketing?
The next factor is merchandising. The Star Wars movies would probably be better considered as loss-leaders for the merchandising. Counting every version of every character, I wouldn’t be surprised if the there have been more than 500 types of SW action figures sold over the past 40ish years. If an alien or droid had more than 37 frames of screen time in any of the SW movies, it is pretty much guaranteed to have not only at least 1 action figure but also an extensive back-story in tie-in fiction (I have around 70 types of aliens and droids in my collection, and it is a very long way from all-inclusive) not to mention every costume change for every “human” character eventually getting at least 1 figure (let’s see—the biggest numbers in my current collection are 8 versions of Luke Skywalker and 6 versions of Padme Amadala—again, not all-inclusive). This constantly keeping SW toys on the shelves means that SW movies are never completely out of mind for the primary action-figure buying demographics of pre-teen children and post-teen adults (and therefore more likely to be interested in seeing a new SW movie.) Star Trek simply does not have remotely enough distinctive background aliens and robots to produce such a gigantic toy line, even if they did make the effort (which they don’t.)
And beyond that, there is the unending stream of SW tie-in novels, comics, and video games that have been in more or less continuous production since the early 1990s (I know that ST has had some of each, but nothing on the same scale.) Plus TV series—The Force Awakens was led into by the well-done recent Clone Wars and current Rebels serieses. The 2009 Star Trek reboot was 15 years out from the end of the best known and most popular of the “modern” ST TV serieses. (I don’t have statistics for this, but I’ve got the feel that TNG has much more of a mainstream, non-hardcore SF-fan audience penetration than DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise.) There was very likely a large fraction of the meaty movie-going teen demographic for the ST 2009 reboot who had nothing more than a passing familiarity with anything Star Trek. That can and does happen with Star Warstoo, but it is much harder to manage.
And of course tastes will vary on this last point, but for ST movies, the best of the lot leading up to the 2009 reboot (IMHO) was Wrath of Khan in 1982, followed by 8 inferior movies ranging from “good, just not as good” to “absolutely ghastly”, with the last two movies being the most ghastly of all. (While Star Wars had only 3 “inferior to ghastly” movies since 1983 (or 4 since 1980, if you want go with ESB being the high point and ROTJ a fall in quality).)
tl;dr: To even begin to compete with the Star Wars movies, the Star Trek movies would need to spend vastly more money on advertising, and to make that profitable, they would need to add lots more distinctive (and distinctively alien) background characters and lots of costume changes so that they have lots of things that they call sell as action figures, vehicles, playsets, accessory toys (i.e, somehow make phasers as cool and varied as lightsabers) bedspreads, Halloween costumes, and a thousand other types of merchandise) to keep the audience primed between films—make the movies a loss-leader, the iceberg tip of a merchandising empire. (This is also, BTW, why merchandizing won’t save an underperforming movie like the 2016 Ghostbusters. There aren’t remotely enough distinctive characters and costume changes to support a large and ongoing product line.)
This can be caused by traveling back in time and accidentally becoming your own grandparent. There is an upside in that you are immune to the Brain Spawn.
Any Snicket fans here on the File?
I just ran across a new podcast for A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s called “Unfortunate Associates”, and they’re doing one episode for each of the 13 books – which will bring them right to the premier of the new Netflix series.
I enjoyed the first 1.5 episodes. I love the Unfortunate Events series, and it’s intriguing to me to hear an in-depth take from young people who feel that they’ve literally grown up on the series (“I always saw A Series of Unfortunate Events as Harry Potter for goth kids”). They’re fun, and excited, and energetic (even if they do seem overly attached to the miserable movie adaptation, and even if they’re rather more optimistic about the TV series than my own curmudgeonly self).
What I am finding disconcerting, though, is that they seem to take the books so… literally, in some ways. The books are obviously exaggerated, satirical, grotesque. So them saying stuff like “But there should be a legal way for the Baudelaires to control their own money!” or “Social workers would never ignore a threat like that!” strike me as downright weird.
(I do love those books dearly. Ask me about my long-held contention that A Series of Unfortunate Events is the one true Jewish Narnia!)
@supergee – beat me to it.
It is a perfect illustration of why there are so few “science fiction fans” compared to “fans of media fantasies”.
Campbell opined, in several editorials, that science fiction is NOT for the masses because most of the mass is incapable of appreciating/understanding it.
Has anyone looked at so-called puppy-derived SF? (I’ve not). Does it lean more towards “science fantasy”…?
***
Yay for the return of pixel scroll: Is this “Bride of Pixel Scroll”, “Return of the Pixel Scroll”, “Pixel Scroll II: The Revenge”?, or …?
Not a “fan” in the sense that I spend much time thinking about the books, but I did read and enjoy them. I was also able to enjoy the movie by the means of seeing it before I read the books and couldn’t realize what a pale shadow the movie is.
(The closing credits for the A Series of Unfortunate Events movie is by itself one of the Greatest Animated Shorts Ever IMHO.)
To be fair, the “science” in ST is every bit as big a steaming pile of crap as the “science” in SW.
@Darren- I love that, and the music is one of my favourite pieces of film music!
I just want to point out how appropriate it is that the Star Trek stamps are “forever” stamps….
(For those across the Pond, some stamps have a money value printed on them… I still have a bunch of 32-cent stamps and first class postage is now something like 42-cents…. but some stamps are sold as “forever” which are first class postage for less than one ounce no matter what happens to the postage rate. A hedge against inflation, as it were.)
@cassy Re: Forever stamps
And some people are complaining because the current proposal is to drop the first price stamp cost by a cent…
TL;DR on Kate Paulk’s post: Most of her numbers are wrong because she didn’t use the authoritative source but a secondary one with greater potential for systematic misunderstanding.
Ben Yalow has shown up in the comments already to gently point out the error.
lurkertype said:
WFC’s small size and commensurately smaller committee actually make it more vulnerable to this sort of problem. The biggest reason you’ve never seen a Worldcon do that is that the modern Worldcon program is too big for one person to assemble alone.
Worldcon committees are actually much, much freer than WFC ones to do whatever the heck they want– the only WSFS requirements for a Worldcon are that it administer the Hugos, administer site selection, and hold the Business Meeting. All that keeps the rest of it in line are expectations and tradition.
STAR WARS certainly does get the promotion. When they rolled out the prequels, KFC/Taco Bell offered one of the two greatest kid’s meal premiums I ever scored. They would always sell me a prize for a buck if I asked. This one is a space ship from the movie that hovers above its stand via the miracle of magnetism, only touching its host in one place, and that’s so it doesn’t just slide off the magnetic bubble. It’s on top of my TV over there right now.
They also sponsored the best cereal prize I’ve seen, pretty much ever: a lightsaber spoon that lights up when you press a button. How cool is that? (Kids, don’t blow your head off!) How much did that cost them, per unit? No way in hell the cereal company bore any of that. The box art shows Li’l Obi and some other guy in a saber duel, and I always intended to shop spoons into the pic instead of the beams.
I once bought a bag of Cracker Jacks that had, not one, but six or so prizes, their bags still linked. Each one was a whistle capable of a range of three or four notes (ocarina-type fingering), and shaped like a baseball or a glove or a baseball diamond. Obviously, they gave me “too many” (heh heh), but even one of those was lavish compared to the forgettable cardboard that subs for prizes these days, and which had been the norm for years at the time I got them, back in the middle or late 90s.
The other greatest ever kid’s meal prize is also on the TV. It’s Feathers McGraw, the quietly evil penguin from THE WRONG TROUSERS. He’s just standing there, staring, with slightly shiny eyes. When you press down on him, the eyes go to a shade of black that’s non-reflective. Yes! The only thing it does is blink.
Some people at MGC appear to really have a hair across their butts about mobility scooters.
Welcome back Mike!
If I remember rightly, the Child Catcher isn’t in the book of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The villain there is called Joe le Monstre. If people are avoiding reading their children the book because of the Child Catcher, they are doubly unfortunate.
@ Darren Garrison. I think there is plenty of Star Trek themed merchandise that they could sell if they put some effort into it. For alien action figures, there are Breen, Klingon, Ferengi, Andorans, tribbles, Borg – a changeling action figure could transform into different shapes. Lot of different spaceship types also. There just isn’t a lot of stuff sold, esp. stuff aimed at kids.
They’re good people, aren’t they?
I find it weird when people in fandom sling around slurs about health and appearance. It’s people with a shared geeky love for reading, not a master race training programme.
Seth Gordon: Some people at MGC appear to really have a hair across their butts about mobility scooters.
Yeah, MGC makes an art out of the sort of insults you would hear from 6-year-olds on the playground.
It certainly does not speak well for the sort of people they are.
On the Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate: not to disagree with anyone, but doesn’t the discussion also rest on how we define “winning” and “losing”? If we define them in terms of box office receipts and/or merchandising, the answer is one thing. But the “cultural landscape” is a lot more than that, or it can be. How about presence in the English language, for example? (Or possibly world languages, but I’d really have to think about that.) For English, I’d say that words, phrases, and concepts from Star Trek may outnumber those from Star Wars–or at least, they might be running neck-and-neck . . .
My favorite toys from that series are the “action globes“–small representations of planets that are spring loaded so that when you press a button the top flips up and a small scene briefly moves. (Anyone know the generic term for this type of toy? I know that it isn’t a SW exclusive invention because I have one bought years before that at Gay Dolphin (briefly featured in William Gibson’s Zero History!) that is an oval shape that pops open to reveal a swimming sea turtle.)
I read recently that Cracker Jacks now don’t even have a piece of cardboard crap in them–they have a URL that you can go to to play some sort of on-line game or some such. And they come in a bag like potato chips, not in boxes.
Yeah, but none of them are really as creative as Star Wars aliens, such as Ephant Mon (I bought 3 of these) and Amanaman (bought 4 of them) each of which got like 5 seconds of screen time in RoTJ.
They still sell Cracker Jacks in boxes, as well as in bags. Boxes are better for portion control, being smaller. The problem is, sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re not, and there’s no way to tell ahead of time. I got one, at least, within the URL timeframe, and it seems like you get a bit of cardboard or thick paper with some image on it, and if you go to the URL, you can see it move or something. I didn’t bother with it.
I once had a dream I was back in the day when Cracker Jacks prizes were ‘real.’ If you got a tiny little metal record, it really played. If you got a toy piece of fruit, it was really the fruit that it looked like. Somehow. Dream logic. At the time I had the dream, prizes were still stiff (easily breakable) plastic, for the most part. They also had little books that were amusing, and flip movies around ’64 or ’65. Like the books, they were glue-bound and lost pages from the get-go.
Cheryl S.:
Along with “America the Beautiful” and “My Ride’s Here”, the other song I sang my kid to sleep with was “Come As You Are” (titled by my kid “Drenched in Mud”, which I guess is what it’s called when your mom played rugby), but I always did leave off the “And I don’t have a gun” part, choosing to hum-la-scat it instead.
@Petréa Mitchell:
You are singing my song. One of the great barriers to church growth is that with more people to do more things, someone who has control of a thing because no one else can do it loses that control. I say that’s a feature, generally speaking, but to them, it’s a giant killer grasshopper ready pounce and kill.
Paul–
Lowering the price of a first class stamp isn’t a proposal. Every time I go to the supermarket the PA system reminds me that the price of forever stamps has been lowered from 49 cents to 47, and encourages me to buy some today. Of course, a few months ago they were urging us to buy some because we could buy them now and use them forever, even if postage rates went up.
@Vicki
Oh, I didn’t realize they had gone and done it. Thanks for the clarification
Welcome back, Mike! It’s good to hear that you are recovering.
Kate Paulk certainly seems to me to have re-invented the “Worldcon is Dying” argument, without any understanding that it has been dying since before I was born (1965), and always will be dying, with a new group of people every year crowing over how it’s dead, dead, dead, and they should simply give up and stop holding it.
Incidentally, to address something that has been floating about: Paulk has been talking to the chair of the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (Dave McCarty) to discuss promotion of the Hugo Awards. I have no further details. It may sometimes seem (because I’m the one doing most of the updating on the Hugo web site) that I’m in charge of Hugo Award promotion, but the actual committee chair is Dave McCarty. But in any event, Paulk is not lying when she says she was discussing Hugo Award promotion behind the scenes.
I think there’s a number of reasons that Star Wars has outpaced Star Trek. First and most importantly is initial impact. Lots of people liked ST, but their ratings chased them off the air after three seasons and other than a few licenses, they stayed dormant as a property until 1979. The licenses for things like cartoons, comics and novels never really had a directing force behind them, so they ended up more as fanfiction than canon. I can think of at least three different ‘the death of Kirk’ stories, all with totally different ideas.
On the other hand, Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon. It not only rebooted interest in sci-fi as viable media properties, but it was also aimed for a younger audience. That made it easier to grasp and gave it broader appeal. Because of that, a whole generation grew up with the franchise in a vast way. Their merchandising filled bedrooms with toys, games, comics and branded sheets. By the early 90s, it still had value as nostalgia. Lucasfilm was also smart enough to keep a much tighter hold on their properties. When they returned to licensing novels and comics in the 90s, they made sure there were consistences, so it expanded the universe and built on it. Reading about what happened to Luke had more pull because that was supposed to be what happened, as opposed to that writer’s own idea, soon to be counterbalanced by a whole different reality.
I know people like to compare them, but they really are fundamentally different properties with little in common beyond the space backdrop.
@Kip W
The history of the Cracker Jack toys are quite interesting. There’s a long term employee who is the final approver of absolutely every toy they issue. On her desk is an odd rubber tube with an aperture (it looks a lot like a sex toy). Every toy is tested by fitting into it. The reason is that it mimics the size and elasticity of a child’s throat, so they can check whether it is a choking hazard.
Glad to see you back at the controls, Mike. The Autopilot was starting to get weird
I’ll go to the dollar store so that I can get my Cracker Jacks in a box, not a bag. The bag is just wrong…more so than what they call a prize now-a-days.
Cheap ebook alert: Greg Bear’s EON is on sale at Amazon for $1.99 today.
I was a fan of ‘Unfortunate Events’, until I read the final book and was deeply disappointed. The first twelve books gradually tease out a mystery with a solution, and I don’t think you can do that for twelve books and then tell the readers who’ve invested time, money and emotional energy into the series in the thirteenth book that what the whole thing is really about is how sometimes you never really find out the answers to things because life is funny like that. I felt cheated, to put it bluntly.
He didn’t even reveal what VFD was 🙁
Yes, he did.
He also revealed who Beatrice was, who the survivor of the fire was, the significance of Olaf’s tattoo, why there was a secret passage linking the Baudelaire house with 667 Dark Avenue…
Near the end he introduces two other major mysteries to which we don’t get answers; the sugar bowl, and the immense underwater being shaped like a question mark (which was a rather big clue that we would never find out – and indeed he said as much when he introduced it).
The moral is not ‘none of your questions will ever be answered’. It is ‘however many of your questions are answered, the world remains large and mysterious; there is no story that will answer everything‘.
Ah, I see the mobility challenged scooter users were made fun of by our old “Friend” Phantom.
I could say something about him here, uncharacteristic of me, too, but it would get me comment moderated. So I will Rot 13 it: Jung n shpxjvg
Mike, so glad to see you felt up to doing this. Here’s to many more.
Miscellaneous responses to the above comments:
“Lucas/Disney has always been vastly better at marketing than Desilu/Paramount”: I did see Star Trek movie tie-in products in 1979 – including a McDonald’s Star Trek Meal promotion (featuring TMP‘s Klingons) and a special-issue bottle of whiskey in the shape of Mr. Spock in his blue Federation tunic – but they weren’t successful because the movie wasn’t that well received, and no such tie-in efforts were made for the later Trek movies. (Desilu hasn’t existed since 1968 and it didn’t do any “marketing,” other than trying to sell series to networks.)
“If I remember rightly, the Child Catcher isn’t in the book of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang“: There was NO plot similarity whatever between Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the wretched 1968 movie. Not one supporting character was the same, and not even the central family was the same: In the book the family was named Pott and was a family of four (dad, mum, boy and girl).
“And beyond that, there is the unending stream of SW tie-in novels, comics, and video games that have been in more or less continuous production since the early 1990s”: Star Wars tie-in novels go all the way back to 1978 with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster. Does the number of different ST novels exceed the number of SW novels today? Perhaps the leader goes back and forth. (I haven’t read these myself and have not been interested in anything SW-related since my one and only viewing of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Nor have I read a ST novel since James Blish’s Spock Must Die! in 1970; that sufficed.)
“For English, I’d say that words, phrases, and concepts from Star Trek may outnumber those from Star Wars–or at least, they might be running neck-and-neck”: Even Star Wars itself (1977) was forced to borrow language from Star Trek – tractor beams, proton (i.e., photon) torpedoes, etc.
What are stamps used for, again?
To double back to an ongoing urban legend, stories keep coming and going about USPS customers trying to send mail out using an e mail address on the envelope.
Yeah, wrapping one’s mind around Astounding ideas like “Psi Powers: Awesome and Totally Not Either Delusion or Fraud!”, “Dianetics: Surely We Will Never Regret the Magazine’s Role in Popularizing This!” and “The Dean Drive: Even More Plausible than the Hieronymus Device” is so difficult for the common folk.
Has anybody made the “City on the Edge of Forever Stamps” joke yet?
Oh, so there’s a possibility of a SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, The next Generation?
Bottom line for me: Star Trek (most series) was about solving things. Star Wars was about blowing things up.
@Andrew: He did? There were a bunch of fake abbreviations but I don’t remember him revealing what VFD actually stood for. And what does it actually do? We learn vague things about the schism, eye tattoos, secret tunnels, fires… but that’s mostly window dressing.
My favorite recent postal story was the person who sent a card to a farm in Iceland, but didn’t know the address so they drew a map. (Specified which village the farm was near.) It did get delivered and now tourists are starting to come to visit the farm. (Well, they have the map to where it is, you see.) Turns out that the farm has a petting zoo, too.
Mike! So glad you’re back. So happy to see a Pixel Scroll. I just want you to know I had nothing to do with the shog—I mean, um, yeah, well, the walls are so perpendicular, you know?
Did anyone watch the Paul SciFi4Me interview? I got seven minutes in and bailed. Her interviewer was basically rehashing puppy points for her, and at the point that he said that a slate was really just a list of options, and that both a ballot and a recommended list such as Scalzi’s list was really a slate, I was out.
Did anyone watch the Paul SciFi4Me interview?
I did. It doesn’t get any better. Paulk, for the most part, is either clueless or duplicitious throughout, depending on how charitable one wants to be towards her. The interviewer doesn’t so much interview her as enable her, and stumbles throughout.
I watched a couple of other SciFi4Me interviews from Worldcon and was unimpressed. None of their interviewers are even remotely competent. Checking those videos out pretty much convinced me to ignore the channel forever.
@gottacook
Even Star Wars itself (1977) was forced to borrow language from Star Trek – tractor beams, proton (i.e., photon) torpedoes, etc.
“Tractor beams” go back to E. E. Smith.
Bartimaeus: We are told what it stands for gradually through the last few books, but absolutely explicitly on p. 317 of The End ‘naq nf gur puvyqera unq vairfgvtngrq gur Ibyhagrre Sver Qrcnegzrag, svefg gelvat gb qrpbqr gur betnavfngvba’f fvavfgre zlfgrevrf naq gura gelvat gb cnegvpvcngr va vgf aboyr reenaqf’.
I think it’s clear from book 9 on that it is basically a crime-fighting organisation, devoted largely to collecting information about villainy (apart from those who have gone bad and perverted its symbols to a villainous end – and it’s true that isn’t explained, though their motto provides a clue). What that has to do with its name is explained in Book 12, pages 6-7. ‘I.S.Q jnf bapr n havgrq tebhc bs ibyhagrref, gelvat gb rkgvathvfu sverf, obgu yvgrenyyl naq svthengviryl’.
I really think that by the end of the series I know as much about VFD as I do about, say, the SFWA – what the initials stand for, what their basic purpose is, many of their activities. No doubt if I were a member of either organisation I would know a lot more.
The constant ‘Oh, it’s a mystery’ tends to obscure how much we are being told. We forget that when we first heard of V.F.D. and for several books afterwards, we didn’t even know it was an organisation. So every time we find out more we say ‘Yes, but..’ – we’re actually encouraged to do that. But we really do learn quite a lot.