(1) Blastr reports the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum needs photos or film of the original Enterprise model to assist them in replicating what the Enterprise looked like during and after the cult-classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” That apparently was the last time the model was altered while the series was in production.
The National Air and Space Museum is opening its hailing frequencies and asking fans for help. They need original pics or footage of their original Enterprise model — which has already gone through eight different restorations ever since it was built in 1964, by the way — so that they can restore it to all its August 1967 glory. Yep, it’s that specific.
Star Trek fans made first contact with the ship in 1972, when a model was featured at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., during Space Week (a 10-day gathering of space-related activities). Then, in 1974 through 1975, the ship was put on display in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building in Washington, D.C., while the National Air and Space Museum’s new home base was being built on Independence Avenue.
(2) And while we’re discussing Classic Trek, should anyone ever ask you how Roddenberry came up with “Sulu” as the character’s name, George Takei explains:
In an interview with the website Big Think, he revealed that his character is based on the Philippine Sulu Sea. According to him, show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted a generic Asian name for the helmsman. He thought that most Asian last names were country-specific, like Tanaka, Wong, and Kim. In 1966, Asia was dealing with issues like warfare, colonization, and rebellion, and Roddenberry didn’t want to reference any of that.
(3) A few days ago I posted about the new BB-8 robot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now someone has dissected a BB-8 with photos and commentary worthy of a medical examiner. You sicko!
(4) And on Force Friday, that glorious excuse to sell toys from the new Star Wars franchise, the rarest collectible was a mis-packaged Kylo Ren action figure – found on the shelves in Glendale, John King Tarpinian’s home town. And specialized collectors are always on the lookout for funny/funky slipups like this.
That’s when eagle-eyed shoppers might have spotted Kylo Ren—the helmeted, crossguard lightsaber-wielding new villain played by Adam Driver in The Force Awakens—being sold as lady storm trooper Captain Phasma after an apparent packaging error placed the new Star Wars villain in the wrong box that got shipped out for the massive retail push.
Misprinted, misshapen, and mis-packaged memorabilia occupy a niche spot in the world of collectibles, particularly in the long history of the Star Wars franchise. And while packaging errors are known to occur “more often than people think,” according to Toy & Comic Heaven’s James Gallo, it’s the production errors and discontinued design variants that yield more highly prized value to collectors….
There’s the infamously naughty 1977 Topps C-3PO #207 trading card, in which the Force appears to be very strong in C-3PO’s chrome junk, an aberration that Topps quickly corrected in subsequent printings. A bizarre yellow-hued discoloration on Kenner’s 1997-era Luke vs. Wampa set made the “incontinent” Hoth beast a curious find for Star Wars collectors. “Yak Face” (never distributed in the U.S.), “Vinyl Cape Jawa (later reconfigured with a cloth cape), “Rocket Firing Boba Fett” (cancelled on the eve of production for fear of a choking hazard) and versions of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi bearing telescoping lightsaber accessories have reportedly sold to hardcore collectors over the years for thousands of dollars.
(5) Amazon says The Man in the High Castle: Season 1 will be available November 20, 2015. The first episode was teased in January. This trailer debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con.
(6) For a limited Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood is offering guests the rare opportunity to see the new Batmobile from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice before the movie debuts in March. Here’s a video of Batman’s new set of wheels.
(7) “Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth” writes Ross Andersen in The Atlantic.
A team of astronomers recently tried to determine whether Trinity’s light might be cosmic in a different sense. The Trinity test involved only one explosion. But if there were many more explosions, involving many more nuclear weapons, it might generate enough heat and light to be seen from nearby stars, or from the deeper reaches of our galaxy—so long as someone out there was looking….
I asked Jill Tarter what she thought of the paper. Tarter is the former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s Contact, played by Jodie Foster in the film adaptation. Tarter told me the paper was “getting a bit of buzz” in the SETI community. But she also urged caution. “The problem is the signatures are detectable for cosmically insignificant amounts of time,” she said. Distant stars burn for billions of years, sending a constant stream of light toward Earth, but the flash from a nuclear war may last only a few days. To catch its light, you have to have impeccable timing.
(8) There’s a tad too much science fictional truth here for this cartoon to make a successful motivational poster. “Shoot for the Moon” on The Oatmeal.
(9) Let’s not forget one other award given last weekend at Dragon Con. Larry Correia and “Brando TorgersOn” were the first to win the “super prestigious LaMancha award.” Says Correia —
The fact that the gnome is tilting at that windmill with a nazi tank is just one of the added touches that make the LaMancha so prestigious. It is crafted out of the finest southern bass wood and delicately hand carved with a poignant message.
La Mancha Award
(10) “We Watched That (So You Didn’t Have To): John Cusack and Jackie Chan’s VOD Historical Action Epic, ‘Dragon Blade’” by Shea Serrano on Grantland —
I sit here before you a man, a man who has watched Jackie Chan in any number of films — in a near countless number of films. There was one where he played a man who operated a fast food van and had to become a hero. There was one where he played a man in South Africa with amnesia who had to become a hero. There was one where he teamed up with a white man to become a hero and also one where he teamed up with a black man to become a hero, not once, not twice, but thrice. And now I have seen him wear a very thick wig and a poet’s goatee and a very generous amount of makeup and sing about racial harmony and total peace and then make a deathmobile out of shields and spears and then become a hero. I sit here before you a man, a man who has seen Dragon Blade.
(11) Your reality may vary!
I wonder, if I did a poll to see who thought this was a genuine comment or a parody, how it would turn out. pic.twitter.com/exDoPlW4uu
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 9, 2015
Honestly, I can never tell when a File770 comment is parody anymore. :-/ https://t.co/opfyTO08dp
— Serenity “Leap Year Capybara” Dee ???? (@sapphixy) September 9, 2015
(12) An especially good installment of SF Signal’s Mind Meld, curated by Paul Weimer, calls on participants to discuss the best deaths in science fiction and fantasy — T. Frohock, Richard Shealy (sffcopyediting.com) , John Hornor Jacobs, Ramona Wheeler, Richard Parks, Alasdair Stuart, Martha Wells, Tina Connolly, Susan Jane Bigelow, Christian Klaver, Joe Sherry, and Gillian Polack.
(13) While researching today’s scroll I found a few more things I needed to report about Sasquan. Such as – the silly PA announcements.
Just heard over the @sasquansf speakers: "Good morning. The voice of God approves this message."
— shoshoctopus ???????? (@shoshoctopus) August 20, 2015
And photos of the Other Awards winners including David Aronovitz.
Sam moskowitz archive award: David Aronovitz@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/Mrc1P9MWJa
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
John Hertz accepting for Julian May, Danny Kaye, and Dorian Gray@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/B6NPWFrTU9
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
Then, someone recorded Filthy Pierre playing the Superman theme on his Melodica.
And finally, whatever the opposite of comic relief is –
https://twitter.com/XDPaul/status/641467729145233408
(14) Just how scientifically accurate is The Martian? This short video on Yahoo! lets Andy Weir, Matt Damon and others make their case.
(15) Sometimes a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise is just a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise.
[Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark, Will R., Colin Kuskie, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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@TheYoungPretender
I think it is likely that BS and her Buddies calculated that they had lost the battle for hearts and minds in the Hugo award for Laura Nixon, and had put something together in advance of the awards to try and counter it. I doubt that they realised the strength of feeling amongst fans, just as Puppidum failed to realise the strength of feeling amongst fans; Laura got almost twice as many first votes as No Award, which came in second in the Fan Writer poll. That is a huge margin.
We voted for her after carefully reading the Report and its follow ups because we were horrified by what had gone on; the perpetration of vicious racism often, though not always, under the guise of opposing racism, the vitriolic verbal assaults on trans people, the calculated cruelty of spending six months harassing someone endeavouring to recover from being raped, the lies about authors who were competitors of the BS persona and her Buddies.
Gosh, now I come to think of it, that last bit reminds me of the Puppies; as I have always stated I oppose all slates, no matter who composes them. I don’t care whether it’s a very rich guy who thinks the Taliban have some great ideas, or a very rich woman who thinks a Hugo would make a nice paperweight and has no scruples about the way she acquires it; I do care about the people who suffer as collateral damage.
I live in a very large and very diverse city, but, even before I moved into the City of London over 30 years ago, I knew perfectly well that the assumption that one person with a brown skin is interchangeable with every other person with a brown skin is profoundly racist. There was, and is, no conceivable justification for that assumption, and, in my view, the fact that they used it at Loncon tells you all you need to know about BS and her Buddies.
And if we’re going to keep discussing them it will be BS&B…
Voice Of God Stalk!
What, I was the first to think of it?
@RAH
I love the Man of La Mancha award At least they can laugh at themselves because the result was tilting against windmills. Dragon con sounds like fun. People want to have fun and do not take themselves seriously.
I would suggest anyone and everyone hesitate and think real hard before accusing them of having “wrongfun”
If they can have a good laugh over it, more power to them.
@James David Nicoll: It’s certainly not nothing, but to get supernova or GRB levels of output you need direct conversion of 10% M_solar, which is more than 10,000 times the level you’d get from the pure conversion of the Earth.
I could have sworn And He Built a Crooked House was by LeGuin. I’m not seeing the male genitalia there at all.
Also, with the La Mancha award, I truly love the way the “cha” is kind of a scribble at the end. Makes me think that the guy with the sharpie wrote the award text first and then the award name second and then couldn’t be bothered to go and get a new block of wood when he screwed up there. Or maybe everything was already glued on. And he couldn’t get another small piece of wood to cover it up. Was it made at DragonCon on the spot?
(I actually like the gnome, tank and windmill, although I think the gnome should have been replaced with a troll. The one and only good garden gnome out there is this one.)
Sorry to hear about the kitten, Lydy. Much luck to Lady Jane Grey.
@RAH
That’s how I read it, too. Glad to see some straightforward humor from the Pups. Correia and Torgersen have a grating tendency to whine. An ability to laugh at themselves could be a harbinger of growth.
Darren:
Thank you *so* much for that info, it is incredibly useful! I’ve tried creating EPUBs in Calibre, with ugly ugly results. I’m going to be posting your method on my tumblr and dreamwidth for ease of reference.
Quite right. Unfortunately, GRRM likes the way that sounds and has said it repeatedly, even after I left him a comment pointing out it’s untrue.
The first and second sets of Hugos were handmade. The third set (1956) for Dave Kyle’s NYCon II was hood ornaments — and that’s the only year they ever were.
Thanks for the kind words, all. Lady Jane Grey continues to do well, has put on weight and is less hot to the touch.
@redwombat: I have been reading “If You Were a Platypus, My Dear” on an almost daily basis. It picks me right up. Thank you again.
@everybody else: I am so totally not caught up. Not even close. I blame you, each and every one of you.
@Mike Glyer
Cat on September 10, 2015 at 5:59 am said: After all, the Hugos were once repurposed hood ornaments,…
Kevin Standlee: Not really. Fannish legend.
Quite right. Unfortunately, GRRM likes the way that sounds and has said it repeatedly, even after I left him a comment pointing out it’s untrue.
The first and second sets of Hugos were handmade. The third set (1956) for Dave Kyle’s NYCon II was hood ornaments — and that’s the only year they ever were.
Oddly enough, that is the part of “once” that I understood.
> “The third set (1956) for Dave Kyle’s NYCon II was hood ornaments — and that’s the only year they ever were.”
Wouldn’t that make the statement “the Hugos were once repurposed hood ornaments” technically correct, though?
@devin
Drag goes linearly with density and quadratically with velocity. Given that Martian air pressure is about 0.6% of earth’s, you’d need ~12 times the wind speed for the same force. Not totally out of the question…
Thanks for this. I’m not particarly technical (B.A. in political science and a J.D.) but I love SF. I always felt at a loss when confronted with particularly technical aspects of SF literature. “Is this plausible?” to me always became “did the author make this seem plausible?” Which I think is a good way to read.
It’s the way I approach pop cultural treatments of the law, which happens to be my specialty. Nearly all TV shows or movies that deal with a courtroom or the U.S. Justice system get it SO wrong–and there are so many of them! Aside from THE WIRE or (perhaps surprisingly) MY COUSIN VINNY, i can’t think of any pop culture depictions of lawyers or law that is anywhere remotely plausible.
SPOILERS FOR SEVENEVES AHEAD!!!!!!
I was thinking about this when reading SEVENEVES. During the first portions I was like “okay this setting is similar to our world but there are privately owned space travel companies that are more advanced than we have today…” Then I hit the middle section and was like “WUT??” You could read three Wikipedia articles and know more about evolutionary genetics than I do, but I still found the creation of the human race from scratch (ok, 7 women and a giant DNA database that somehow survived) implausible to say the least. Based on the comments here, it is implausible from a technical standpoint, but I think Stephenson, God bless him (he is one of my all time favorite authors), pooped the bed. When a dumbass like me is like “hold on, this doesn’t make sense” you are in trouble.
Question for the FFA members on here:
In The Martian, my biggest ‘Er, what” moment was around the lights in the hab for growing the potatoes – don’t LED growlights need to be way more powerful than just general interior lighting?
What do the Farmers think?
Chris S on September 10, 2015 at 9:50 am said:
Question for the FFA members on here:
In The Martian, my biggest ‘Er, what” moment was around the lights in the hab for growing the potatoes – don’t LED growlights need to be way more powerful than just general interior lighting?
What do the Farmers think?
Not only more powerful, but, more importantly, different spectra.
Kyra: Sure — in the sense of once meaning one time. However, the context in which GRRM makes the statement comes across to me as giving “were once” its alternate meaning of “formerly,” which conveys that it was formerly always the case.
@Jack Lint
I’m curious to see how The Martian does. Traditionally the period from September to October is something of a dead zone for movies – between the summer blockbusters and the start of the Christmas and Oscar movies. It used to be this was the slot for smaller movies or movies that the studio didn’t have much confidence in.
The release date for The Martian is October 2(the September date is probably because it’s playing at the Toronto Film Festival which is happening now). They are deliberately trying to capture the audience that turned out for Gravity, which opened October 4 two years ago.
After the success of that movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a similar type of movie around that time every year, until one flops. Interstellar is thought to have left money on the table by opening a month later, against fiercer competition(it was thought to be more of an awards contender than it turned out to be).
I would bet that the upcoming movie Passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence opens October 2016. Not sure how hard science that one is(it’s about a passenger on a colony ship waking up out of stasis 60 years before everyone else, and deciding to wake up someone else to spend the time with), it seems more like a romance with hard sf trappings, but with that cast it should be huge.
Whoever recommended Children of the Stones a while back, thank you!
It’s all on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwT0wLnT7Rc
I don’t think it’s aged all that badly.
Not terrifying, as it might have been to younger viewers back in the day, but a good workmanlike series, and quite watchable still.
AND at the end, somehow YouTube automatically continued to another program of the same era, Sapphire and Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nU-X0m9GcQ
Vintage David McCallum as an agent defending the integrity of time!
I’m hoping the LAMANcha award continues next year – same sharpie/wood base and gnome, with perhaps updated and newly relevant scene and props, to be created/awarded at DragonCon by John Ringo.
Make it so.
@Ray: Obviously, we have vastly different understandings of the phrase ‘say something personal about’.
In my book, pointing out someone’s going around making derogatory claims about one’s self that are humourously at odds with consensual reality is not a personal comment, just noting the occurrence. Nor is noting that that person ‘usually does’ have something to do with appending yet more such material to the referenced anonymous gossip Web site, since that is observably true, too. But I’ll gladly assume that your dictionary says otherwise, and write it off to dialect.
Cat: After all, the Hugos were once repurposed hood ornaments,…
Kevin Standlee: Not really. Fannish legend.
Mike: Quite right. Unfortunately, GRRM likes the way that sounds and has said it repeatedly, even after I left him a comment pointing out it’s untrue.
The first and second sets of Hugos were handmade. The third set (1956) for Dave Kyle’s NYCon II was hood ornaments — and that’s the only year they ever were.
Richard Brant: Oddly enough, that is the part of “once” that I understood.
Krya: Wouldn’t that make the statement “the Hugos were once repurposed hood ornaments” technically correct though?
Having passed successively through disappointment (aww, another cherished image shattered) through fellow feeling (I like it too) and back into hopefulness (but that means I was right, sort of–by accident, but right!) to vindication (see, Richard and Kyra think so too!) I shall now pull a kitty and say “I meant it that way all along!”
Cat: You may enjoy reading my post about this from 2013 — The Oldsmobile Hugo.
When one of these old favorite stories comes up it never hurts to run a search, especially if the Hugos are involved, I’ve written about a lot of them.
It’s apparently Scottish authors week here at the Kyra household. I just finished Lanark by Alisdair Gray (Which, whoa. Great book.) and have just started Kirsty Logan’s The Gracekeepers, which I’m really liking so far.
(If I want to continue the trend, I’ve got Pippa Goldschmidt’s The Need For Better Regulation Of Outer Space, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, and Anne Donovan’s Gone Are The Leaves sitting on the TBR pile …)
@Jack Lint:
Also, Atlantis!
Laouwolf
Thank you for the Sapphire and and Steel link; I’d been looking for an excuse, sorry, reason not to catch up with the laundry, and this is absolutely wonderful!
@Lauowolf
Sapphire and Steel, the story with the thing without a face that hid in photographs scared the bejeezus out of me as youngster. Great series.
Also featuring don’t forget the timeless Joanna Lumley too.
ETA: Man with no face was Assignment 4 apparently…
IanP on September 10, 2015 at 11:25 am said:
@Lauowolf
Sapphire and Steel, the story with the thing without a face that hid in photographs scared the bejeezus out of me as youngster. Great series.
Also featuring don’t forget the timeless Joanna Lumley too.
Sorry, I can’t see anything through the dazzling McCallum hair/cheekbones.
(Oh, be still my inner 13-year-old beating heart!)
… yeah, she’s pretty glamorous too.
@Stevie
She is a transplanted Australian… so she was grafted onto a local cyborg-style?
@Mark
It’s easy to get confused, but Hoyt uses the word marxist while Paulk prefers
Socialists (because that includes the Nazis).
At one point I had so much on my TBR stack that I had to get a new bookcase for it, but after I filled it up there was still stuff so much left on the pile that it seemed as if nothing had been removed.
One other thing I saw linked from the Children of the Stones YouTube was Nigel Kneal’s Stone Tape which also creeped me out when I watched it.
What did they use at Loncon? Did I miss something? I’m sick, so I might well have.
@Darren Garrison: (EPUBs and word processors)
Being the roll-yer-own type, I advocate using LibreOffice Writer’s Save As HTML function. It’s not perfect – the hard line wrapping gets on my nerves, as does the silly inclusion of CJK styles when nothing calls them – but it’s pretty good.
Since I’m more concerned about getting HTML that lines up with an outside CSS file than making the exported HTML replicate the Writer styles, I don’t have much trouble tweaking Writer’s output. It’s pretty much a matter of changing EOL markers to UNIX style, doing a search/replace to add a newline after each close-paragraph tag (and, if necessary, each close-header tag), and then using a built-in plugin’s Unwrap Text feature. Trim trailing blanks, remove empty lines at the end, touch up the headers, and I’m yer uncle. 🙂
The one oddity that really gets me is the way edits affect formatted text. If a phrase is, say, in italics, and you go in to change a word, the saved HTML uses three sets of italic tags for the phrase. One set covers the part of the phrase before the edit, another the edited part, and the last the remaining part. It doesn’t just say “oh, this is one italicized phrase.” To make it behave, you have to highlight, clear manual formatting, and then add a fresh set of italics. Annoying and senseless, but at least there’s a workaround.
IanP:
I still think she’d be superb as the Doctor (and not just in the best Red Nose Day parody ever), if she’s willing when Capaldi hangs up the sonic screwdriver. Even if Moffat claims to not like the idea. Perhaps some ‘Lumley for #13’ picket signs are in order, next time I’m in Cardiff.
I second the call for exposition of the Sriduangkaew/Loncon thing. This is the second time I’ve seen it obliquely referred to around these parts recently, but I haven’t been able to Google anything about it. Not to mention that I was at Loncon and didn’t hear a word about it, whatever it was.
I think I’ve managed to wrangle them all, but if you spot ones I missed please let me know. My email is at that gmail place with the username soonlee.nz
My pile usually ranges between 2 and 10 books, and it was at the low end of the axis this week thanks to a couple of very quick reads (and points where I bought a later book in the series when I saw it cheap), and I tend to buy remaindered and second-hand books unless it’s an author I really like, and I’m feeling the financial pinch right now, and my nerd budget is split between books, comics, toys and tabletop gaming. I started Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson yesterday, which was like the second-last in the pile, so I was looking to replenish (and picked up Station Eleven and Honour’s Knight by Rachel Bach) for like €11 total this evening so I’ve got a buffer of a week or two)
The main character of the comic book, that is a common thread among the characters in Station Eleven, has a pomeranian. Now I’m a bit stuck. I don’t think the dog dies in the comic book…but given lots of people die in the main story I’m now not willing to give a zero-dead pomeranian guarantee in case there is a touching scene in which a post-apocalyptic comic book reader recounts an equally touching scene in the comic book…What’s the opposite of a spoiler?
@Rick Moen
Until you said that I would’ve said I didn’t like the idea of a femaIe Doctor (largely knee jerk dislike of change for changes sake), but I could actually get behind that.
I’m ready to dive into a new novel that might be Hugo worthy. Looking around at what’s being widely read and seems promising, I’m down to either Seveneyes by Neil Stephenson or Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. But they’re such obvious choices I wouldn’t mind looking someplace less obvious. Any suggestions?
@stankron: as Hypnotosov pointed out, a parsec is a measure of distance, based on parallax angle (the earliest method of determining distances to nearby stars was to measure parallax from opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit) so “parallax seconds”, equivalent to 3.26163344 light years.
Apologies for pedantry, especially if you did know that.
Me:
El otro Nigel:
I was under the impression they’d said something about more in the series at Sasquon’s Here’s What’s Coming Up from Tor” panel, but I could be wrong.
I asked Paul hisself on Twitter last night, and he said:
So that’s as direct as news can get, I’d say.
rcade, Chaos Horizon is predicting nominations from the following:
Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear
Touch, Clair North
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Uprooted, Naomi Novik
The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Book of Phoenix and Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor
Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson
Armada, Ernest Cline
Nemesis Games, James S.A. Corey
@Vasha: It’s a play on a line in Star Wars that uses ‘parsec’ as if it were a unit of time. (“It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”)
I have a short list of female actors who I’d like to see play the Doctor, two to be precise, both of whom have said they’d like to do it at some point. Helen Mirren and Hayley Atwell. The latter was recently asked if she’d like to be a guest on DW and she basically said “Hell no, I wanna be the Doctor!” Go Hayley.
I could definitely add Joanna Lumley to that list, though I’d have to shake Patsy loose from my brain first.
RCade — Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall will almost certainly be on my nominating ballot. I also look forward to reading the new books from Aliette de Bodard and Amanda Downum.
@Kyra: If you haven’t read it already, The Testament of Gideon Mack, by James Robertson, would be a great addition to Scottish Authors Week; it’s an astonishingly good book.
I would rather like to see Rachael Stirling as the Doctor. (Diana Rigg’s daughter). She was in an episode or two and also was in Bletchley Circle.
Is Wylding Hall novella or novel length? The e-book says 146 pages. Also, it is currently selling for just $3.82 as a Kindle ebook (US Amazon).
[delurking]
rcade The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin is the most hugoworthy thing I have read this year so far.
[relurking]
Anna, NelC
Rochita has written about this herself, so this is the short version: BS wanted to put the boot into Tricia Sullivan for her novel ‘Shadowboxer’, but putting the boot in didn’t go with BS’s new persona; accordingly BS&B decided that they needed someone with a brown skin to put the boot in for them.
Rochita honourably declined to do so, notwithstanding veiled and not so veiled threats that failure to comply would result in her never getting another story published, since Rochita’s heritage is from the Phillipines and accordingly she has no knowledge of Thailand.
I find it stomach turning just to think about it; experiencing it must have been truly horrendous. I can only acknowledge the grace and dignity with which she behaved, whilst noting that it is profoundly racist to treat an individual with a brown skin as interchangeable with every other individual with a brown skin…
@Camestros — Obviously, I can’t read the book without knowing whether the dog dies or not. (This is leaving aside the fact I don’t do Bleak and Depressing these days, which rules out most post-apocalyptic fiction…)
Someone in the last day or two posted a link to an Elizabeth Bear story currently free online, and I wasn’t able to follow up at the time. Does anyone have it handy?
Headed off to IMDB to find out that she played Ada in “The Crimson Horror” toward the end of Matt Smith’s run. And Diana Rigg played Ada’s mother in that episode–I had no idea they were actually related! That is a hoot.
She wore enough makeup in that episode (she played a blind and disfigured woman) that she could show back up as the Doctor and many would never make the connection.
@Vasha,
It’s Han Solo upselling the abilities of the Millennium Falcon.
https://youtu.be/bosSsgzgenA
ETA: Han shot first.