(3) GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS. The Guggenheim Fellows named for 2018 include fiction writer China Miéville, nonfiction writer Roxane Gay, and in Fine Arts, Elizabeth LaPensee, a writer, artist and game creator who earlier won a Tiptree Fellowship.
(4) WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. The 34th Annual L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards Gala for the winners of the Writers and Illustrators of the Future will be held in Los Angeles on Sunday, April 8. Celebrities attending include Nancy Cartwright, Marisol Nichols, Catherine Bell, Jade Pettyjohn, Stanley Clarke and Travis Oates.
(5) NESFA SHORT STORY CONTEST. The New England Science Fiction Association is running the fifth annual NESFA Short Story Contest. The deadline for submissions in July 31.
The purpose of this contest is to encourage amateur and semi-professional writers to reach the next level of proficiency.
Mike Sharrow, the 2018 contest administrator, sent this pitch —
Attention aspiring writers! Do you like to write science fiction or fantasy stories? Are you a new writer, but not sure if you’re ready for the big time? Then you’re just the kind of writer we’re looking for! The New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA for short) is running a writing contest. Prizes include free books, and a grand prize of a free membership to Boskone. More important though is that we offer free critiques of your work. Our goal is to help young & aspiring writers to improve their writing, so you can become our new favorite writer! Check out our website for details.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
April 5, 1940 — One Million B.C. premiered
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. Steve Vertlieb reminds everyone, “Bloch would have turned one hundred one (101) years of age today. Wishing one of Horror fiction’s most legendary writers a joyous 101st Birthday in the Heavenly shower stall of The Bates Motel in Heaven.”
Born April 5, 1926 – Roger Corman
(8) COMIC SECTION.
Mike Kennedy says this Tom the Dancing Bug is either a loving tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey or scary as hell. Or maybe both.
(9) KGB READINGS. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Livia Llewellyn and Jon Padgett on Wednesday, April 18, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar in New York.
Livia Llewellyn
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies and two Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections, Engines of Desire and Furnace. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com, and on Instagram and Twitter.
Jon Padgett
Jon Padgett is a professional ventriloquist. His first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine. He has work out or forthcoming in Weird Fiction Review,PseudoPod, Lovecraft eZine, and in the the anthologies A Walk on the Weird Side, Wound of Wounds, Phantasm/Chimera, and For Mortal Things Unsung. Padgett is also a professional voice-over artist with over forty years of theater and twenty-five years of audio narration experience. Cadabra Records will soon be releasing 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, a story written and narrated by Padgett.
(10) AVOIDING UNPRODUCTIVE GENERALIZATIONS. Annalee Flower Horne suggests this is a subject where it helps to get more specific – jump on the thread here.
“The galactic centre is so far away from Earth that those bursts are only strong and bright enough to see about once every 100 to 1,000 years,” said Prof Hailey.
Instead, the Columbia University astrophysicist and his colleagues decided to look for the fainter but steadier X-rays emitted when these binaries are in an inactive state.
“Isolated, unmated black holes are just black – they don’t do anything,” said Prof Hailey.
“But when black holes mate with a low mass star, the marriage emits X-ray bursts that are weaker, but consistent and detectable.”
Over the course of three years, the whales of the Spitsbergen population produced 184 unique song types. The vocalisations were detected 24 hours a day throughout most of the winter each year.
“I really think of humpback whale songs as being like classical music. Very ordered. They might last 20 – 30 minutes. An individual [bowhead] song might only be 45 seconds to 2 minutes long, but they’ll repeat that song over and over again,” the University of Washington researcher added.
A Japanese-American team of engineers is working to send a swarm of bee-inspired drones to the Red Planet with new, exploratory funding from NASA. Yes, bees on Mars. The team calls the concept “Marsbees.”
NASA selected the idea as part of its “Innovative Advanced Concepts” program, which annually supports a handful of early concept ideas for space exploration. The team of researchers will explore the possibility of creating a swarm of bees that could explore the Martian surface autonomously, flying from a rover. The rover would act as centralized, mobile beehive, recharging the Marsbees with electricity, downloading all the information they capture, and relaying it to Earth’s tracking stations. They describe the Marsbees as “robotic flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.” Those oversized wings, in relation to their bodies, compensate for the density of Mars’ atmosphere–which is much thinner than Earth’s.
Marvel’s record-breaking superhero blockbuster — which has already amassed north of $1.2 billion since launching in February — will herald Saudi Arabia’s long-awaited return to the cinema world, becoming the first film to screen to the public in a movie theater in the country since it lifted a 35-year cinema ban.
(15) INCREDIBLES 2. Bravo, Edna is a fresh pitch for Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles 2, which opens in theatres June 15.
Icon. Artist. Legend. Edna Mode is back, dahlings.
(16) ROWAN ATKINSON. Universal Pictures followed up yesterday’s teaser with a full-length Johnny English Strikes Back trailer.
[Thanks to JJ, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Steven J. Vertlieb, Matthew Kressel, Jeff Smith, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]
(1) DEFENDANTS COMMENT ON COMIC CON VERDICT. Bryan Brandenburg has this to say about the verdict in the SDCC v, SLCC lawsuit.
I woke up this morning facing a bright new future. The weight of the world has been lifted from Dan [Farr]’s and my shoulders. We have successfully cleared our names and lifted the cloud of accusation that has been surrounding us for 3 1/2 years.
– We were accused of stealing and hijacking. The jury said we were NOT GUILTY of this. There was no willful infringement.
– We were accused of trying to associate our convention with the San Diego convention. The jury said that we were NOT GUILTY of this. They found no evidence of false designation of origin.
– We were accused of causing $12,000,000 damage to the SDCC brand. They said we were the very worst offender. The jury found no evidence of damage. They awarded San Diego $20,000 in damages, less than .2% of what they asked for sending a clear message that we didn’t hurt the San Diego brand and this is what will be paid out for the worst of the 140 comic cons.
– We were accused of infringing San Diego’s trademarks, along with 140 other “infringers”…other conventions that call themselves “comic con”. The jury said that we were guilty. San Diego said, “They’re all infringers, that we and 140 other conventions that use the term comic con were guilty.” So for now they have 3 valid trademarks. We think that they will still lose “comic-con”. We’re proud to be lumped in with some of the finest comic cons in the country.
Dan and I have no regrets about standing up for ourselves when we took action after receiving a cease and desist. In hindsight, we would not have taken the car down to San Diego. For that we apologize to San Diego Comic Con. They are a great event with great people.
This process helped me realize once again that we truly have the best fans in the world. You have been there for us and it was comforting to have so many pulling for us. We are glad that we were able to clear our names at a minimum. But there are a lot of things moving in the background which I cannot talk about. All good things.
We own the trademark for FanX. There are over 140 comic cons and one FanX. That’s not a booby prize. If we needed to drop comic con from the name and just be FanX we have a trademark for that and a lot of positive brand awareness. Almost all the hundreds of thousands of people that have attended our events are familiar with that brand and name.
We’re not sure exactly how things will play out. We may change our name. We may appeal. But one thing is for certain. 2018 will be our best year yet….
(2) NEW LOGO. Bubonicon 50 takes place August 24-26, 2018 in Albuquerque, NM with Guests of Honor John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, Toastmaster Lee Moyer, and Guest Artist Eric Velhagen. Bubonicon 49 Toastmaster Ursula Vernon has created a special logo:
(3) THE CUTTING ROOM. I was very interested to learn How Star Wars was saved in the edit – speaking here about the original movie.
A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.
(4) EXPAND YOUR MASHUP WARDROBE. Still gift shopping? A lot of places online will be happy to sell you the shirt off their backs!
(5) LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY IS OUT. David Steffen announced the release of the Long List Anthology Volume 3, available as an ebook from Amazon and Kobo, in print from Amazon. He said more ebook vendors are in the works, including Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and others.
This is the third annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the previous year to determine the top five in each category for the final Hugo Award ballot. This is an anthology collecting more of the stories from that nomination list to get them to more readers
There are 20 stories in the volume – see the complete list at the link.
(6) BEYOND PATREON. Here’s the hybrid approach that The Digital Antiquarian will take in the aftermath of Patreon’s problems.
I’ll be rolling out a new pledging system for this site next week. Built on a platform called Memberful, it will let you pledge your support right from the site, without Patreon or anyone else inserting themselves into the conversation. The folks from Memberful have been great to communicate with, and I’m really excited about how this is shaping up. I think it’s going to be a great system that will work really well for many or most of you.
That said, my feeling after much vacillation over the last several days is that I won’t abandon Patreon either. Some of you doubtless would prefer to stay with them, for perfectly valid reasons: for high pledge amounts, the new fee schedule is much less onerous; some of you really like the ability to pledge per-article rather than on a monthly basis, which is something no other solution I’ve found — including Memberful — can quite duplicate; some of you really want to keep all of your pledges to creators integrated on the same site; etc. And of course it’s possible that Patreon will still do something to mitigate the enormous damage they did to their brand last week. At the risk of introducing a bit more complication, then, I think the best approach is just to clearly explain the pros and cons of the two options and leave the choice in your hands
(7) VIRTUAL BEST OF YEAR – FANTASY EDITION. Jason, at Featured Futures, has completed the set by posting his picks for the Web’s Best Fantasy #1 (2017 Stories).
As with Web’s Best Science Fiction, Web’s Best Fantasy is a 70,000 word “virtual anthology” selected from the fifteen webzines I’ve covered throughout the year, with the contents selected solely for their quality, allowing that some consideration is paid to having variety in the reading experience. The contents were sequenced as best I could with the same concern in mind.
(8) RATIFYING STURGEON’S LAW. Fanac.org has added “Lunacon 15 (1972) – Theodore Sturgeon Guest of Honor speech” to its YouTube channel, a 38-minute audiotape, enhanced with numerous images and photos (including two taken by Andrew Porter.)
Isaac Asimov introduces Theodore Sturgeon’s Guest of Honor speech at the 1972 Lunacon. There are corny puns and jokes from both of them, but primarily the talk is a serious, constructive discussion of Sturgeon’s “best beloved field”, and a defense against those that would marginalize and dismiss it. There are a few poignant minutes at the end about the (1972) US government amassing citizens’ private data, without any ability to challenge it. More than 40 years later, it’s still important, and worth listening.
(9) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Andrew Porter draws our attention to the fact that the German film Münchhausen came out in 1943. As he sees it, “We could have a Nazi film under consideration for a retro-Hugo!”
The complete film is available on YouTube, with English subtitles.
(10) BILLINGS OBIT. Harold Billings (1931-2017), librarian, scholar, and author, died November 29. (The complete Austin American-Statesman obituary is here.)
He spent fifty years at the University of Texas general libraries, rising from cataloger to Director of General Libraries, a position he held for the last twenty-five years of his career. … Harold also edited and wrote extensively about authors Edward Dahlberg and M. P. Shiel. Reflecting a long time interest in Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2006 he received the Morley-Montgomery award for his essay The Materia Medica of Sherlock Holmes. In recent years, Harold had turned to supernatural literary fiction, authoring such stories as “A Dead Church”, “The Monk’s Bible”, and “The Daughters of Lilith”.
In other words, the more the child could distance him or herself from the temptation, the better the focus. “Children who were asked to reflect on the task as if they were another person were less likely to indulge in immediate gratification and more likely to work toward a relatively long-term goal,” the authors wrote in the study called “The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children,” published in Child Development.
(13) WITH ADDED SEASONING. Star Trek: The Jingle Generation.
Darmok and Jalad at the North Pole. Rudolph, his teeth bared, his nose red! Santa, when the walls fell.
— michaelgmunz.bsky.social ???????????????????????????????????????????? (@TheWriteMunz) December 9, 2017
Probably the thing I like the most about The Will to Battle is that we get to know in much more depth the inner workings of the political aspects of the world that Palmer has imagined. We learn much more about things that we have only seen mentioned before (the set-set riots or the difference between Blacklaws, Greylaws and Whitelaws, for instance) and we even witness a trial, a meeting of the Senate and the Olympic Games. I really enjoyed discovering how the author had planned with incredible care every little aspect and finding out that little details that seemed to be arbitrary are, in fact, of crucial importance.
That hope is what drove Bañados, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in California, to the Chilean mountaintop in March. It was not entirely clear whether he’d be able to find a quasar so far away. Supermassive black holes swallow up huge amounts of matter, squeezing the equivalent mass of several hundred thousand suns into a space so small that gravity wraps around it like an invisibility cloak and causes it to vanish. An object like that needs a long time to grow and more matter than might have been available in the young universe.
But the object Bañados and his colleagues discovered, called ULAS J1342+0928, was even bigger than they’d bargained for — suggesting that something might have made black holes grow more quickly. Scientists don’t yet know the underlying reasons for such rapid growth, or whether still older black holes are waiting to be found.
“This is what we are trying to push forward.” Bañados said. “At some point these shouldn’t exist. When is that point? We still don’t know.”
In a companion paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists report another odd finding: The galaxy where ULAS J1342+0928 dwells was generating new stars “like crazy,” Bañados said. Objects the size of our sun were emerging 100 times as frequently as they do in our own galaxy today.
“To build stars you need dust,” Bañados said. “But it’s really hard to form all this dust in such little time on cosmic scales — that requires some generations of supernovae to explode.”
During the universe’s toddler years, there hadn’t been time for several rounds of stars living and dying. So where were the ingredients for all these new stars coming from?
(17) THE RISKS OF TALKING TO THE COPS. I saw Ken White’s “Everybody Lies: FBI Edition” for Popehat linked by a FB friend and found it riveting. While it’s focused on criminal law, a lot of this advice is still good even if you’re only talking to someone about your taxes.
Dumbass, you don’t even know if you’re lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they’re going to ask you. They have the receipts. They’ve listened to the tapes. They’ve read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven’t thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor’s appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with “I’ll just tell the truth,” you’re going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say “I really don’t remember” or “I would have to look at the emails” or “I’m not sure”? That would be smart. But we’ve established you’re not smart, because you’ve set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You’re dumb. So you’re going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you’re going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You’re going to be incorrect about things you wouldn’t lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you’re going to get flustered, because it’s the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.
(18) MRS. PEEL IS NO RELATION. Bananaman: The Musical is on stage at the Southwark Playhouse in the UK through January 20.
Bananaman is one of the flagship characters in the world’s longest running comic, The Beano. He was also the subject of the hugely popular TV cartoon that ran on the BBC during the 1980s. With a useless hero and some equally clueless villains, Bananaman’s riotously funny, slapstick humour has been sealed into the memories of those who saw him first, and will now spark the imagination of a new bunch of Bananafans.
In “A Call To Action” Marc Pickering is playing Bananaman’s nemesis Doctor Gloom. The song comes in the first half when Doctor Gloom is planning ways in which to deal with Bananaman who is thwarting his plans for world domination!!
The first printing, also from Ramble House affiliate Surinam Turtle Press (owned by Dick Lupoff) turned out to have a botched variant of Russell Blackford’s chapter. My fault, I freely confess it! I only learned of this goof after I gave Russell his copy at the recent World Fantasy con in San Antonio.
Russell and I delved into the dark heart of several hard drives and managed to recompile his intended text. With the help of Chum Gavin, a repaired version of the book has now appeared on Amazon (although their website announcement has retained a mistaken pub date from earlier this year). If any Chum purchased a copy of the botched version, do let me know and I will hastily dispatch a Word doc of RB’s True Chapter. For those very few Chums who somehow forgot to rush their order for the book to Amazon, now is your near-Xmas chance to make good that lapse!
(20) OUTSIDE THE STORY. K. C. Alexander describes a variation on the classic writer’s advice in “Don’t Show, Don’t Tell” at Fantasy-Faction.
You’re probably familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, so you’ll recognize the Night Vale Presents line in this incredible and fascinating podcast. The key difference, however, is this one presents more of a focused story, all delivered from a single point of view—Keisha; a truck driver (narrated by the matchless Jasika Nicole) searching for her dead wife. Named, naturally, Alice. (One other POV appears later in season, which I will not spoil here, but it is eerie af.) This is a creeping, haunting, sometimes lonely story about a heartbroken woman struggling with a mental illness—namely, a panic/anxiety disorder, and the paranoia and fear that comes with. After the death of her wife, an experience she was not there to witness, our fearful protagonist hires on with a long-haul trucking service to find answers.
Her story is narrated through snatches of narrative delivered on CB radio.
So what makes this podcast the keystone for “don’t show, don’t tell?”
It’s the outside stuff we never see. What’s going on outside her narration, what the people outside of our view are doing and why they are doing it. The ripples “shown” in Fink’s writing remain so subtle that you may not hear them, understand them, until your second or third listen. They are small ripples, hardly noticeable in black water, bringing with them an expertly woven sense of dread. But why? From where?
We don’t know.
(21) THE CLASSICS. The comments are fun, too. (If you need the reference explained like I did – clicketh here.)
And ye maye aske yowerself, 'How do Ich werke thys?' And ye maye aske yowerself, 'Wher ys that large destrier?' And ye maye tell yowerself, 'Thys nys nat my fayre castel!' And ye maye tell yowerself, 'Thys nys nat my swift goshawk!'
Unlike his previous cover-heavy albums, Meco started from scratch with the music. He and Bongiovi needed Star Wars-themed Christmas songs and they needed them fast, but they weren’t having much luck with the songwriters they approached. Enter a struggling composer named Maury Yeston, who was trying to put together the musical that would become Nine and could use some extra cash. “I met with Meco and I said, ‘Look, this may sound ridiculous to you, but if you want to do a Star Wars Christmas album you have to have a story,” Yeston told the CBC. “This is obviously Christmas in the world of Star Wars, which means this is in a galaxy far, far away, thousands of years ago. It’s not now. So call it Christmas in the Stars.” Meco was sold on the idea of the album having a through-line and recruited Yeston.
Yeston, who would go on to win a Tony Award for Nine and eventually write the smash Broadway musicals Titanic and Grand Hotel, cranked out nearly 20 Yule-appropriate tunes, nine of which made the final lineup. “The Meaning of Christmas,” minus Yoda, was radically retooled from the original version because Lucas didn’t want any of the traditional, religious-themed lyrics to be associated with the Force. It established the story of the album, set in a factory where droids make gifts for one “S. Claus.”
Playlist
[Thanks to JJ, Dave Doering, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Ed Fortune, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
INTRODUCTION. Twenty-five years ago MagiCon was held in Orlando, Florida. A great con, and I thought it would be fun to reprint the report I ran in File 770. Here is the fourth of five daily installments.
The Worldcon was held in the Orange County Convention and Civic Center, The Peabody Hotel, and The Clarion Hotel.
The official 1995 Site Selection results were made public at the Sunday Business Meeting.
GLASGOW’S SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION. Glasgow will host Intersection, the 1995 Worldcon, having outpolled Atlanta by seven percent out of a record-setting 2,544 valid ballots.
Intersection’s Guest of Honor will be Samuel R. Delany, and its Guest of Honour will be Gerry Anderson. Think about it. The committee intends to wait a year before announcing its fan guest. Venue for the con will be the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and the adjacent Moat House International Hotel, from August 24-28, 1995.
1995 SITE SELECTION VOTE
GLASGOW
1,325
ATLANTA
1,166
I-95 in ‘95
12
NEW YORK
1
NO PREFERENCE
32
NONE OF THE ABOVE
2
INVALID
58
TOTAL
2,602
MagiCon avoided repeating last year’s night-long vote count by validating all ballots cast on site as they were turned in to the voting table. (Validation consisted of checking that the voter was a member of MagiCon and had paid the voting fee. Membership transfers were also checked to insure just one vote was cast per membership.)
Debate has broken out whether the record-high vote was actually a financial setback for Glasgow. Proponents may be referring to the extra hundreds of people who joined to vote for Atlanta and having automatically become supporting members must receive convention publications at added cost to the committee. It is expected most such voters will never convert to attending members, leaving it open to question how much of their $20 fees will have to be spent for mailing costs.
1995 NASFIC BIDS. Promptly following the announcement of Glasgow’s victory, the WSFS business meeting switched on its NASFiC selection machinery. The constitution calls for a North American Science Fiction Convention tobe held in years when the Worldcon is awarded overseas, and requires that the choice of site be made in a ridiculously short time, even less than allowed for the three Christmas ghosts to straighten out Ebeneezer Scrooge.
NASFiC site selection administrator Kevin Standlee set a 10 p.m. Sunday deadline for bids to be filed and waited til the last minute at a central location in the Convention Center for the I-95 in ’95 crew to complete its filing. Unlike the losing Atlanta/Don Cook Worldcon bid, the I-95 hoax Worldcon bid (“Roadkillcon”, Christopher O’Shea chair) wanted to enter the NASFiC race. Bids were also filed by an Atlanta/DragonCon committee (Ed Kramer, chair) and a New York City committee (Thom Anderson, chair). Under the rules, a bid is not adequate unless it provides a letter verifying it has facilities reserved for its proposed convention date and Standlee rejected the first I-95 filing on those grounds. According to Standlee, even a reservation for one room-night in a hotel on the proposed date would be “adequate” for filing purposes, but there aren’t many places equipped to reserve a hotel room three years in advance. Finally, at the stroke of 10 o’clock, running across the convention center floor with the same painful urgency as athletes in a slow-motion shot from Chariots of Fire, came the I-95 bidders. In hand was a one-night room reservation they had persuaded the night clerk at a DC beltway hotel to accept and fax to them.
NASFiC site selection voting was conducted on Monday. (To be continued….)
CALLING ALL PROS. The Asimov Memorial Panel, said Tony Lewis, featured Harlan Ellison calling from LA (and making discordant swipes at Andy Porter.) Robert Silverberg offered many warm reminiscences of Isaac. In fact, Lewis asked Silverberg, “Will you say nice things about me at my memorial?” Silverberg agreed, “Certainly, but don’t make it too soon. It’ll take a long time to think up nice things.”
A phone link also brought Arthur C. Clarke together in public conversation with his brother, Fred, who actually attended the con and displayed treasure that Arthur had retrieved from the floor of the Indian Ocean while diving. Two 10-minute phone calls to Sri Lanka were sandwiched around showing a 52-minute video of the Minehead Space Festival, held in the brothers’ birthplace to celebrate Arthur’s 75th birthday.
20th ANNIVERSARY RANQUET: Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of a popular Worldcon event not usually reported in Locus out of deference to the laws of libel: the Ranquet. First held at McDonalds by Elst Weinstein and seven other fans who couldn’t afford $8.00 for the 1972 Worldcon banquet, the Ranquet ironically has outlived traditional Worldcon banquet dinners and typically attracts 50-70 attendees. Spurned by the nearest McDonalds, which already had more tourist trade than it needed, Elst turned to a Sizzler two blocks from the convention center.
Sometime in the past 20 years, the Ranquet acquired a tradition of having pro guests of honor such as Vic Milan, Glen Cook, Steve Barnes, Lawrence Watt-Evans and George Alec Effinger. New York fans, who always turn out in force, and Watt-Evans, used GEnie to persuade Esther Friesner to be this year’s guest.
Esther Friesner seen in 1999 performing Cheeblemancy. (Just the kind of thing you’d expect from a former Ranquet guest of honor.) Photo by Keith Stokes.
Once presented by Elst Weinstein, Friesner began the ceremonies: “It is an honor to be introduced by your toastmaster. Toastmaster is like the Beastmaster, only crummier.” Mentioning her “Ask Aunt Esther” etiquette column for Pulphouse, she launched into a demonstration of Ranquet manners. Advising listeners how to lobby votes for the “Hogu” (a hoax award given at the Ranquet), she said the way to coerce people to vote, politely and correctly, was through bribery. “Always make sure the money is clean — you can always send it out to be laundered.” She paused, “Remember — blackmail is an unreliable method because some of the people might be pleased to have the details published!”
The mixup with the fanzine Hugo had already passed into legend by Sunday. Elst made an intentional mistake announcing I was the recipient of a souvenir certificate, then taking it back and “correctly” presenting it to Dick and Nicki Lynch. And sitting behind the Lynches was Darrell Schweitzer wearing this button: “For all I know, I might have won a Hugo.” [For the full story on the buttons, see Scott Edelman’s blog post.]
The Hogu Ranquet was held at a local Sizzler restaurant (almost makes you long for the bad old days when it was at McDonald’s) and featured Guest of Honor Esther Friesner. The results of the Hogu and Blackhole awards were printed in the hoax zine and a list follows.
(1) BORN ON THE SEVENTH OF JULY. In “Spinning a high-tech web”, the LA Times provides an elaborate, photo-illustrated preview of Tony Stark’s upgrade to the new Spider-Man suit that will be seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming, due in theaters July 7.
(2) FILK HALL OF FAME. The 2017 inductees to the Filk Halll of Fame were announced at FilkOntario this weekend:
Now, HBO is “moving toward a production commitment” (via Variety) on a feature-length adaptation of Bradbury’s 1953 novel starring Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Chronicle, Fantastic Four) as the protagonist Guy Montag and Michael Shannon (Man of Steel, Boardwalk Empire) as Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty.
The film will be directed by Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes, At Any Price), who is co-writing with Amir Naderi (99 Homes, The Runner). David Coatsworth (production manager on Underworld: Evolution, Ender’s Game, My Big Fat Greek Wedding) will serve as producer.
It’s the largest black hole ever discovered and is heavier than our Sun by 40 billion times (40, 000, 000, 000) in the last observation.
If you plug in the equation above, you’ll find that this black hole has a Schwarzschild radius of about… 119 billion kilometers, along with a said diameter of about 236,39 billion km.
It may look simple enough on the box, but The Lord Of The Rings’ Tower Of Orthanc is actually a real tough cookie. Because most of its 2,359 pieces are jet black and slim, working out which bit goes where is the stuff of nightmares (in, um, a good way). The Treebeard that comes with it will make the struggle worth it… honest.
Pays tribute to authors and books and their social and cultural contribution to the world
(7) DID YOU KNOW? Last year the International Costumers’ Guild participated in a “friend of the court” brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, joining Public Knowledge, the American Library Association, and others, asking the Court to protect the rights of clothing designers and costumers to freely practice their craft.
Netflix is betting that filming closer to home will produce better content. In 2015, the streaming giant has announced that it would be doubling its output of original content, and it is aiming to have original productions make up half of its of its streaming catalog in the coming years. The goal is to entice users to come to the service by providing content that can’t be found elsewhere, but that goal is proving to be a strain on the existing film studio infrastructure. To cope, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos announced that the company would be investing $6 billion to expand infrastructure in California, rather than chase tax incentives offered by states.
Sarandos explained to The Wrap that the company determined that going after the incentives leads to diminishing returns when it comes to their final products. Filming out of state is hard on the actors and crew of a project, and the move will help bring projects back home to California. That could prove to be costly for the company, even as California has increased its own tax incentive program in recent years. While remaining in the state will likely cost Netflix more, Sarandos seems to think that the extra cost will be worth spending.
(9) SQUEAK UP. YouTube’s TheBackyardScientist set up 10 megaphones end-to-end to see how loud a noise he could make.
The video, posted to YouTube by TheBackyardScientist, features Kevin Kohler explaining he was inspired by Bart Simpson‘s prank in the season 8 Simpsons episode The Secret War of Lisa Simpson to place 10 megaphones end-to-end and test the results.
Bart’s experiment led to a shock wave that shattered all of the windows in town — as well as Homer’s fridge full of beer — but Kohler quickly ran into a problem Bart didn’t face: a feedback loop.
Basically, you don’t want Fido in a situation where a battery could hiss and explode in its mouth. It’s obviously possible that a child could bite through the battery as well, but the likelihood of him / her piercing through the battery is lower.
(11) ARTIFICIAL DOG INTELLIGENCE. Amazing. How is it mine doesn’t do that?
You know you've been writing about the Hugo Awards too much when your autocorrect capitalises "puppy" by default.
(12) FIX THE SLATING PROBLEM FOREVER. That’s what Greg Hullender would like to do. At Rocket Stack Rank he summarizes his views about the effectiveness of 3SV, EPH(+) and their combination. He says, “I think it makes it really clear that we need both 3SV and either EPH or EPH+. Otherwise, even small slates (100 to 200 people) will be able to control a significant amount of the final ballot, including adding embarrassing nominees.”
For each year, we produced two theoretical maximum graphs. A “finalist graph,” which shows what percentage of finalists a slate could have captured for a given number of slate voters, and a “sweeps” graph, which shows what percentage of entire categories a slate could have captured.
Looking at those four pairs of graphs (2.1-2.4 below), we will draw the following conclusions;
Std (5/6) by itself is far too weak.
EPH doesn’t protect enough finalists, but it is excellent at preventing sweeps.
EPH+ is an improvement on EPH, but it’s still not enough by itself.
3SV is much stronger for protecting finalists, especially for modest numbers of slate voters, but it’s vulnerable to sweeps, and it breaks down for slates above about 300 people.
The 3SV/EPH and 3SV/EPH+ combinations are far, far stronger than either component alone. Either combination is probably sufficient, but the second one is stronger.
Accordingly, we conclude that the Business Meeting should ratify both EPH+ and 3SV. That should protect the Hugos from slating interference for the nonce.
(13) DREAM CASTING. Enjoy “Miles To Go” hosted at Archive of Our Own. Note – Password = Vorkosigan (as it says at the post).
There once was a man who dreamt of the stars…
A fanvid based on the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.
…Obviously, it’s not so easy to make a feast for a fandom with no existing visual source. But where there’s a will, or in my case an enormous and driving folly, there’s a way. It was always going to be an ensemble vid, with Miles as the star, but the question was how to cast it. I did eventually solve that problem, and I won’t discuss my solution in detail here because… spoilers.
[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Robin Reid, JJ, Doctor Science, Greg Hullender, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]
“We’ve determined that most of the gas ever present in the Mars atmosphere has been lost to space,” Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator of the MAVEN mission, explains. That lost gas — somewhere in the neighborhood of 65% — greatly depleted the planet’s atmosphere, causing oceans, lakes, and rivers to dry up as the vital elements were swept away into space by intense radiation and solar wind.
The count. Nine planets, 100 planets. Why stop there Redefine a sun, redefine a moon, redefine an asteroid. Go all the way and redefine life.
Most of us grew up learning that there are nine planets in our solar system. Back in 2006 that all changed, when Pluto was demoted from being labeled a proper planet to its new classification as a dwarf planet, leaving just eight true planets in our celestial neighborhood. Now, a group of scientists says Pluto should definitely be added back to the planet list — oh, and that there are over 100 other objects in our solar system that should also be called planets.
Do you like Earth? Yeah, it’s pretty neat, huh? Well despite living on a planet as awesome as our own, astronomers are super eager to find more Earths, just for fun. A planet called Gliese 1132 B (GJ 1132b if you feel like making it slightly shorter) is one such planet. It’s called a “Super Earth” because it’s larger than our own planet, but is thought to be made of similar stuff, and researchers just discovered something extremely awesome that makes GJ 1132b the most Earth-like exoplanet humans have ever found: it has an atmosphere.
Using data from the SkyMapper telescope at the Australian National University, nearly 21,000 citizen volunteers browsed an astounding 100,000 images of the region of the solar system where the mythical Planet Nine is thought to exist. The group labeled over five million objects, and rapidly completed the classifications in just a few days, instead of the years upon years that it would have taken a single astronomer to perform the same task.
Disturbance in the force 11,000 neighboring galaxies fizzle out.
When we think about the survival of the human race we often focus on making sure our planet stays alive and habitable, but out there in the depths of space there are entire galaxies being killed off in a manner that is utterly perplexing scientists. A new paper (PDF) from researchers working at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research addresses the odd and extremely troubling trend and attempts to propose an answer for what exactly is leading literally thousands of galaxies to die premature deaths.
There goes the neighborhood. The Borg, solar flares, crashing meteors, now a traveling black hole. The universe just isn’t safe any more.
Supermassive black holes are one of the scariest, most destructive and utterly intimidating forces in the universe, but the good news is that they usually don’t do a whole lot of moving around. They often reside at the center of large galaxies, like our own Milky Way, with a gravitational pull keeps us all swirling around it. So what could be more frightening than a stationary black hole? How about one that is flying through space like a colossal vacuum, sucking up whatever it happens upon? Astronomers think they’ve spotted one doing exactly that.
The closest astronomers have come to directly “seeing” a black hole happened last year, when the LIGO observatory detected the spacetime-warping gravitational waves radiating from a pair of black holes that collided some 1.3 billion years ago.
That’s cool. But for astronomers, it’s not enough. What’s eluded them is a view of the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole from which, when crossed, there is no return. After the event horizon, gravity is so intense that not even light can escape.
We’ve never seen a direct image of a black hole. But if an audacious experiment called the Event Horizon Telescope is successful, we’ll see one for the first time.
At 10:49pm Western Australian time on February 2 this year, cosmic gamma rays hit the Nasa satellite, Swift, orbiting the Earth. Within seconds of the detection, an alert was automatically sent to the University of WA’s Zadko Telescope. It swung into robotic action, taking images of the sky location in the constellation Ophiuchus.
(1) NAME THAT TRILOGY. The game show where you figure out the title of the third movie based on the first two! And who is our contestant today, George?
Hideous and amazing! Let us begin. Leo does, of course, send off the telegraph and soon after Doc Savage calls on the phone. He points out certain subtleties we might have missed earlier:
The mysterious circumstances surrounding the appearance of the message then came out. Dr. Savage heard it through without comment then advised, “There is probably no A. N. Onymous listed in your directory.”
Leo Bell looked in the directory.
“No,” he said. “There is not.”
“The name was the result of a trick writing of the word ‘anonymous,’” Doc pointed out. “The dictionary defines an anonymous work as one of unknown authorship, which seems to fit in this case.”
Lemony Snickett has nothing on Lester Dent. Leo and the night manager discuss the mysterious telegram and then vanish from the book, never to be seen again.
We think we know what black holes look like. NASA renderings and sci-fi special effects artists usually imagine the eerie glowing ring of an event horizon around what appears to be an impenetrable dark chasm. It happens that they aren’t so far off from the truth — and a groundbreaking (sky-breaking?) telescope is about to prove it.
Supermassive black holes have long been suspected to lurk at the center of every galaxy, including ours. These mysterious phenomena were initially predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Gravity over a hundred years ago. Don’t get any time-travel ideas yet, but their gravitational power is intense enough to warp space-time. Activity that occurs at the edge of one of these dark leviathans can actually ripple through the entire galaxy it resides in. Despite their awe-inspiring power that has fueled pages and pages of brilliant science fiction and even an iconic Muse song, no one has actually ever seen one.
(4) SAVING TED’S HOME. Ted White’s appeal “Save My House” has funded. He asked for $15,000, and within two days 352 donors have given $17,948.
(5) LAWLESS AND DISORDERLY. “Stories ripped from the headlines” as it’s famously said about one TV franchise. Amanda Bressler tells readers of the HWA Blog how to profit from this strategy in her post “Horror in the Headlines: Using the News for Novel Ideas”.
Multiple points of view While good journalism tries to cover a story in a balanced way, you really never get the whole picture. Everyone involved in a tragedy or mysterious event will have a slightly different version of what happened. Fiction gives authors the ability to explore and create those various angles through multiple points of view. School shooting novels especially use this tactic as these encounters are so personal—the gunman, the victims, the bystanders are the friends, teachers, siblings, and classmates with whom there is history and relationships. Allowing for many first person accounts gives a fuller picture of this tangled web of high school connections and emotions that culminate in a horrific and terrifying event.
The book Violent Ends takes a unique approach to multiple points of view by giving 17 YA authors one chapter each to write from the perspective of a student in a high school that has been taken hostage by a fellow classmate. It achieves an even more complex study into what would drive a person to such violence, and the variety of styles throughout the book make for a more interesting reading experience.
(6) WHO KNEW? The President of SFWA may be mighty but she is not in charge of your Wikipedia entry.
Mystery solved, vanity press angry someone keeps making their Wikipedia page point to a Writer Beware warning about them.
Over at Inverse, writer Ryan Britt is annoyed that two of his favorite science fiction books of the year, Death’s End by Cixin Liu, and Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey, are not on the Nebula list of nominees for Best Novel. His argument for both basically boils down to they’re both amazing so they should be obvious nominees, obviously, which to be fair is the same general argument anyone makes when they complain about something they love getting what they perceive to be a snub for whatever award they think the thing the love should be up for….
…It’s pretty much 100% certain this didn’t happen here; instead, people just voted for the novels they preferred, and preferred other books.
But Death’s End and Babylon’s Ashes were good books! Indeed they were. But there were five Best Novel slots available on this year’s Nebula ballot and dozens of SF/F novels (at least!) of sufficient quality to make the ballot. The two novels that Britt points out are only a couple of the novels that could have been on the ballot, from the perspective of quality, but aren’t. There are — thankfully — always more good SF/F novels in a year than may fit on a Nebula ballot.
And not just novels but novellas, novelettes, short stories, YA novels and screenplays, those being categories that SFWA awards annually. I mean, let me use me as an example: My novella The Dispatcher was eligible for the Novella category this year. It was very well reviewed, had a huge audience, and is already up for other awards. I’m a well-known and (mostly) liked science fiction writer, and former president of SFWA, so I’m also familiar to the folks who nominate for the Nebula. The Dispatcher should be a shoo-in for a nomination, yes? Yes! I say yes! A thousand times!
(8) THE FLY STRIKES BACK. Swatted is just a metaphor, of course, for while people were reading Scalzi’s fine-tuned mocking, his target, Ryan Britt, was busily (buzzily?) typing a reaction piece, “Science Fiction Awards are Basically Bullshit”. But he writes as if he suffered an actual rather than metaphorical concussion. Today, for a brief and shining moment, Britt seemed to understand how works get shortlisted for the Nebula, something he misstated in Tuesday’s post (“Two Huge Sci-Fi Novels Were Snubbed by the Nebula Awards”) —
In order for something to make it on the ballot of the Nebulas, it has to be nominated by members or associate members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This is a little better than the Hugo nominating process, which is loose enough to create loopholes that let all sorts of bigoted groups to hijack the process. But still, the non-insider fan gets bamboozled: SFWA ignores great science fiction writing published outside of the places they usual look. The Nebulas and Hugos will nominate books about fantasy worlds and spaceships, but when the technological sci-fi speculation gets closer to home, those types of books tend to be overlooked. And this doesn’t mean they aren’t finding really obscure, indie sci-fi authors. Just the opposite. Mainstream literary fiction — which is totally sci-fi — gets snubbed by the Nebulas and the Hugos completely.
Unfortunately, by the last paragraph he was again telling people the Nebula finalists are the product of a “nominating committee.” His syntax was pretty groggy, too —
This year, the Nebula Nominations have proven again that they’re nominating committee is only seeing half the picture. With two huge science fiction novels nowhere on the list — Death’s End and Babylon’s Ashes — it feels like a good time for fans can start looking elsewhere for good science fiction book recommendations.
On encouraging more women and minorities to enter math and science
I think that there are really important things that we have to do with students to get them to succeed in science, to go on and stay with careers. And that includes the idea of being exposed to something.
So if you know that those things exist, it makes it easier for you to get involved. For example, it helps to know what an engineer is. It helps to know what a biotechnician is, so you’re not afraid of it.
Then, it’s experience. When you do hands-on science, you learn to — you learn about electricity by wiring a flashlight. And then it’s expectation. And that expectation is, we should expect our kids to succeed and to achieve. Children live up or down to our expectations. And so, I always call it the three E’s: experience, expectation and exposure.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
February 23, 1896 — Tootsie Roll introduced by Leo Hirshfield.
(11) YESTERDAY IN HISTORY
February 22, 1957 — Incredible Shrinking Man premieres.
(12) COMIC SECTION. John King Tarpinian recommends the LOTR joke in today’s Brevity.
So when a controversial figure’s book deal is suddenly canceled because of a manufactured furor (not even over the content of the lies used to create that furor because the publisher has printed and supported far worse from those who happen to have not had the howling mobs roused against them) it impacts all of us readers and authors.
For the record, I don’t give a flying fuck what that – or any other author – does in privacy with consenting partners. Even if I would be squicked to high heaven by the details if anyone was crass enough to tell the world. I don’t care what he – or anyone else – believes as long as it’s not being shoved down my throat and nobody is being damaged by it. If I don’t like the author’s behavior or politics I don’t have to buy their books and I certainly don’t have to read them. I am sufficiently mature that I do not see the need for a legion of sensitivity readers to take their works and massage them into bland, tasteless pap.
What I care about is that someone who has – objectively – done not one damn thing wrong is the subject of a coordinated effort to not merely silence him, but disappear him. I’ve seen this happen in the past. It happened to Larry Correia. To Brad Torgersen. I didn’t get the full force of it last year, but instead got the cold shoulder of people doing their best to pretend I’d already been disappeared
LaLa Land may be the heavy favorite to sweep the Oscars this year, but on February 19 the Writers Guild of America (WGA) awarded Best Adapted Screenplay to the underdog science fiction film Arrival.
Does this mean the time and money I spent last year as a large-press author traveling to signings and conventions and doing online promotion was completely wasted? Not necessarily. We’re looking at overall trends, and any individual data point might buck a given trend. (Also, correlation =/= causation. I think I’ve said that on every post so far.)
There’s also the question about how you’re spending that time. 20 hours spent standing on a street corner wearing a BUY LIBRIOMANCER! sign probably wasn’t as effective as 20 hours spent researching reviewers and sending out targeted review copies of my book.
(16) SPACE STATION OF THE APES. First there were snakes on a plane. Now there’s a gorilla on the ISS.
Astronauts aboard the international space station recently had a surprise visitor, but it wasn’t an alien.
In a video posted on Twitter, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly dresses up in a gorilla suit and chases his colleagues around the space station.
Kelly’s brother, Mark Kelly, posted a video of the incident on Monday with the hashtag #ApeInSpace.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day bookworm1398.]
(1) EYEING EARTHSEA. Ursula K. Le Guin talks about working with Charles Vess, illustrator of The Big Book of Earthsea, in a post for Book View Café.
…So, this is how it’s been going:
Charles begins the conversation, emailing me occasonally with questions, remarks, while reading the books. I answer as usefully as I can. Also, we chat. I find out that he has sailed all around Scotland. He tells me about Neil Gunn’s novel The Silver Darlings, which I read with vast pleasure. I don’t know what I tell him, but slowly and at easy intervals a friendship is being established.
Suddenly Charles sends me a sketch of a dragon.
It is an excellent dragon. But it isn’t an Earthsea dragon.
Why?
Well . . . an Earthsea dragon wouldn’t have this, see? but it would have that . . . And the tail isn’t exactly right, and about those bristly things —
So I send Charles an email full of whines and niggles and what-if-you-trieds-such-and-suches. I realize how inadequate are my attempts to describe in words the fierce and beautiful being I see so clearly.
Brief pause.
The dragon reappears. Now it looks more like an Earthsea dragon….
(2) QUINN KICKSTARTER REACHES TARGET. Jameson Quinn’s YouCaring appeal today passed the $1,300 goal. I, for one, am glad to see that news.
With the popularity of dark comedies, it should be no surprise that horror and humor can be a compelling mix. However, when it comes to young adult books, few succeed at the balance that keeps a funny horror book from losing its edge or appearing to try too hard. Here are a few humorous elements used in YA horror to enhance the story, characters, or setting without sacrificing their horror-ness.
A poem by J.R.R. Tolkien that’s been out of print since the year World War II ended will be published this fall for the first time in 70 years, the Guardian reports.
And even if you were around in 1945, you likely didn’t see the poem unless you were a dedicated reader of literary journal The Welsh Review. That’s where “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” (Breton for “lord and lady”) was published, based on a work Tolkien had started around 1930.
Why should modern readers care? The poem suggests an early version of elf queen Galadriel from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion.” The poem tells of a couple that cannot have children until visiting a witch known as the Corrigan, who grants them twins, but later demands a price be paid for her assistance.
Once two galaxies merge, their black holes – now forced to live in one new mega-galaxy – will either banish their rival with a gravitational kick that flings their opponent out of the galaxy, or eventually merge into an even bigger black hole.
In OJ 287, the smaller black hole is en route to becoming a snack for the larger one. The larger one is also growing from a surrounding disc of gas and dust, the material from which slowly swirls down the drain. Each time the smaller black hole completes an orbit, it comes crashing through this disc at supersonic speeds.
That violent impact blows bubbles of hot gas that expand, thin out, and then unleash a flood of ultraviolet radiation – releasing as much energy as 20,000 supernova explosions in the same spot. You could stand 36 light years away and tan faster than you would from the sun on Earth.
Even with all this thrashing, the smaller black hole has no chance of escape. Energy leaches away from the binary orbit, bringing the pair closer together and making each cycle around the behemoth a little shorter than the last.
Although the outbursts may be impressive, the black holes’ orbital dance emits tens of thousands of times more energy as undulations in space time called gravitational waves.
Last year, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US offered a preview of the endgame of OJ 287 in miniature. Twice in 2015, LIGO heard gravitational waves from the final orbits of black-hole pairs in which each black hole was a few dozen times the size of the sun, and then the reverberations of the single one left behind.
(6) SFWA CHAT HOUR. In SFWA Chat Hour Episode 4: Special Pokémon Go Edition, SFWA board and staff members Kate Baker, Oz Drummond, M.C.A. Hogarth, Cat Rambo, and Bud Sparhawk as they discuss the latest doings and news of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) as well as F&SF news, recent reads, Readercon, Westercon, and more.
This is a piece of flash fiction written last year – I just got around to going through the notebook it was in lately and transcribing the fictional bits. This didn’t take too much cleaning up. For context, think of the hills of southern California, and a writing retreat with no other human beings around, and thinking a great deal about fantasy and epic fantasy at the time.
(8) LIVE CLASSES. Rambo also reminds writers that July is the last month in 2016 that she’ll be offering her live classes (aside from one special one that’s still in the works). Get full details at her site.
I’ll start doing the live ones again in 2017, but I’m taking the rest of the year to focus on the on demand school (http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/on-demand-classes/), which will adding classes by Juliette Wade and Rachel Swirsky in the next couple of months.
(9) FREE CHICON 7 PROGRAM BOOKS. Steven H Silver announced: “I’m about to recycle several boxes of Chicon 7 Program Books. If anyone is interested in adding a copy of the book to their collection, I’d be happy to send them one (for the cost of postage). People should get in touch with me at [email protected], but I need to hear from them before the end of the month.”
(10) DETAILS, DETAILS. In 1939, sneak preview of The Wizard of Oz, producers debated about removing one of the songs because it seemed to slow things down. The song: “Over the Rainbow.”
However, according to writer/director James Cameron, most people at that time tried to convince him not to make the movie.
After all, they reasoned, any positive elements of the film would be attributed to “Alien” director Ridley Scott, and all the negative parts would be viewed as Cameron’s fault.
“I said, ‘Yeah, but I really want to do it. It’ll be cool,'” he said in an interview. “It was like this ridiculous, stupid thing. It wasn’t strategic at all, but I knew it would be cool.”
A lot of other SFF nominations and awards have been handed out in the past few weeks. These are good indication of who will win the eventual Hugo—every award nomination raises visibility, and the awards that using votes are often good predictors of who will win the Hugo. Lastly, the full range of SFF awards gives us a better sense of what the “major” books of the year than the Hugo or Nebula alone. Since each award is idiosyncratic, a book that emerges across all 14 is doing something right.
(14) VANCE FAN. Dave Freer tells what he admires about Jack Vance, and tries to emulate in his own writing, in “Out of Chocolate Error” for Mad Genius Club. Freer, while straightforward as ever about his worldview, makes an unexpected acknowledgement that another view could be embodied in a good story. Under these conditions —
There are at least four ‘meanings’ and stories that I’ve spotted in this particular book. I’m probably missing a few. Because I wanted to write like this myself, I’ve tried hard to pick up the techniques. I think the first key is that there must be a very strong and clear plot-line. You’re asking it to balance a lot of subtle and quite possibly overpowering elements. The second of course is that your characters cannot be mere PC-token stereotypes. Yes, of course you can have a black lesbian hero, or whatever (it actually doesn’t matter)– but if that stereotype is in the face of the reader rather than the character themselves, that becomes a compound, rather than the portmanteau. The third is that you cannot preach, or tell, your reader your ‘message’. Not ever. You can show it, you can let them derive it. If they fail to: well they still got a good story. And finally – if your audience leaves your book saying ‘that was about feminism… you, as a writer, are a failure, at least at writing entertainment or portmanteau books. There is a market for message, but like the market for sermons: it is small, and largely the converted. If they finish with a smile: you’ve done well. If they leave your book with a smile thinking: “yeah, true… I hadn’t thought of it like that. Look at (someone the reader knows). I could see them in that character (and the character happens to be a woman who is as capable as her male compatriots) then, my writer friend, you are a talent, and I wish I was more like you… Out of chocolate error…
(15) GOTCHA AGAIN. Chuck Tingle announces his retirement.
(16) HE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE. Rue Morgue reports Guillermo del Toro told Fantasia ’16 attendees that he’s retiring from producing and will stick to directing from now on.
(17) GRAPHIC STORY SLATE. Doris V. Sutherland discusses the impact of the slate on The Best Graphic Story Hugo nominees in “Comics and Controversy at the 2016 Hugo Awards” for Women Write About Comics.
After a reasonably strong set of graphic novels, the Best Graphic Story category starts to go downhill when we arrive at the webcomics. When Vox Day posted his provisional choices for the category, the list consisted entirely of online strips: Katie Tiedrich’s Awkward Zombie, Tom Siddell’s Gunnerkrig Court, Kukuruyo’s Gamergate Life, Aaron Williams’ Full Frontal Nerdity, and Grey Carter and Cory Rydell’s Erin Dies Alone.
Comprising strip after strip of anti-SJW caricatures, Gamergate Life obviously fits Day’s ideology; I have also heard it suggested that he chose Erin Dies Alone as a dig at Alexandra Erin, who wrote a short e-book spoofing him. Beyond this, it is hard to discern the exact criteria behind his choices. One of the comics, Gunnerkrig Court, proved controversial within Day’s comments section: “Gunnerkrigg Court recently gave us not one, but two big, fat, awful, in-your-face gay/lesbian subplots (involving the main characters no less!) and so I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending it anywhere these days,” wrote one poster.
The final Rabid Puppies slate—and, consequently, the final ballot—included only two of the above strips: Full Frontal Nerdity and Erin Dies Alone.
…This sounds impressive until you remember that Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, is fitted with early ’70s scientific instruments, cameras and sensors and has been voyaging for almost 40 years.
Before mankind attempts to send another probe out towards interstellar space, engineers hope to figure out a way to get there a lot faster and, ideally, within their working lifetime.
There are several options on the table. Some favour solar sails – giant mirrored sheets pushed along by the force of photons from the Sun. Others – including Stephen Hawking – suggest flying these sails on tightly focused beams of photons generated by lasers fired from Earth or satellites in orbit.
Nasa engineer Bruce Wiegmann, however, is investigating the possibility of flying to the stars using a propulsion system that resembles a giant broken umbrella or wiry jellyfish. The concept is known as electric, or e-sail, propulsion and consists of a space probe positioned at the centre of a fan of metal wires….
(19) HORNBLOWERS. Did John Williams tell these kids to get off his lawn? Watch and find out.
This is what happened when 2 guys with horns made a spontaneous decision to set up and play the Star Wars theme in front of John Williams’ house on 7/11/2016!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, Chip Hitchcock, Steven H Silver, and Xtifr for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kendall.]
(1) THE PUPPET’S INSIDE STORY. Mary Robinette Kowal livestreamed “Ask a puppet about publishing” today. The answer to the old standby “Where do you get your ideas?” got perhaps the truest answer that has ever been given to this question.
A later memory I have of the store is hearing Neil Gaiman read his book The Day ISwapped My Dadfor Two Goldfish there upon the book’s rerelease in 2004. I remember maybe 35 or 40 people in the store, which can’t be correct—there must have been more than that to see Neil Gaiman—though I’m certain it was a number far smaller than you’d expect to see today, in the age of expanded cons, fandom, and the Internet social-media grapevine. Except for running into Gaiman a few weeks later at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival (and a few other places, actually—that was a weird summer), I wouldn’t see him again in the flesh until an MPR Wits show last year, crammed into the Fitzgerald Theater with over 1,000 other fans. That show was a little closer to what one would expect of a Gaiman sighting, where Neil is a smudge, his pale face and customary black clothes treating us to an impromptu and sparsely populated Mummenschanz show against the stage’s dark backdrop, not at all the mild, T-shirted man with the roiling mind, reading to us about the best deal you could get in a trade for your dad.
… Last April, DreamHaven returned to normal store hours with the help of Alice Bentley, a former business partner of Ketter’s. The two co-founded the Chicago bookstore The Stars Our Destination in 1998, which Bentley ran by herself from 1994 until 2004, when she closed the store, moved to Seattle, and got out of the book business. Says Ketter of Bentley, “She had been out of books for a while, and she really wanted to get back in. So, she moved to [Minneapolis] from Seattle and she’s partnering with me . . . She’s very knowledgeable; in the last 11 or 12 years since she left, things have changed a great deal [but] she’s been very happily relearning the book business.” The two now run the business as partners, with Ketter as the “go-to guy for questions” and Bentley employing her “love of spreadsheets” to keep the business on track.
(3) SPURNING PASSION. Andrew Porter recalls, “I wanted to reprint a Tolkien poem first published in the 1940s, and Tolkien refused me permission — and then he refused a whole bunch of other people including Ballantine Books, and it’s still not been ‘officially’ published. But some people got tired of waiting for “official” publication, and here it is, on the web: “The lay of Aotrou and Itroun” (1945).
A witch there was, who webs could weave
to snare the heart and wits to reave,
who span dark spells with spider-craft,
and as she span she softly laughed;
a drink she brewed of strength and dread
to bind the quick and stir the dead;
In a cave she housed where winging bats
their harbour sought, and owls and cats
from hunting came with mournful cries,
night-stalking near with needle-eyes.
Lost in Space’s creator Irwin Allen liked to recycle props, but one of his most notable ones was reused by another iconic ’60s TV show. The neosaurus disguise first appeared in Lost in Space:
(5) NEW SAWYER NOVEL. Robert J. Sawyer’s 23rd novel Quantum Night will be released March 1 in hardcover, ebook (all formats), and as an audiobook from Audible.
What if the person next to you was a psychopath? And that person over there? And your boss? Your spouse? That’s the chilling possibility brought forth in bestselling author Robert J. Sawyer‘s new novel Quantum Night. Psychopaths aren’t just murdering monsters: anyone devoid of empathy and conscience fits the bill, and Sawyer’s new science-fiction thriller suggests that there are as many as two billion psychopaths worldwide.
A far-out notion? Not at all. As Oxford Professor Kevin Dutton, the bestselling author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, says, “Sawyer has certainly done his homework about psychopaths and he understands well that, far from being just the occasional headline-grabbing serial killer, they’re everywhere.”
Sawyer says: “Reviewers often call me an optimistic writer — one of the few positive voices left in a science-fiction field that has grown increasingly dystopian. I like to view my optimism as a rational position rather than just naïveté, and so I felt it was necessary to devote a novel to confronting the question of evil head on: what causes it, why it flourishes, why there seems to be more and more of it — and what we can do about it. The theme is simple: the worst lie humanity has ever told itself is, ‘You can’t change human nature.’”
Click to read the opening chapters. Details of the Canadian and U.S. stops on Sawyer’s book tour can be found here.
(6) OSHIRO STORY CONTINUES. Here are links to new posts dealing with Mark Oshiro’s published harassment complaint.
The Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, Inc. (KaCSFFS) is the sponsor of ConQuesT, the oldest convention in the central states region. The KaCSFFS Board of Directors oversees ConQuesT, but the day-to-day operations of the convention are done by the volunteer chairs and convention committee, who change from year to year.
In light of recent issues we feel that more oversight of the convention committee as a whole is necessary by the KaCSFFS Board of Directors. This is being addressed by the current Board of Directors as we speak.
KaCSFFS is profoundly sorry that these issues arose, and the policies in place were not followed through to completion. We are taking steps to ensure that future complaints are addressed appropriately and in compliance with current policies and procedures in place.
Posted by Jan Gephardt
The KaCSFFS Board of Directors is: Margene Bahm, President, Earline “Cricket” Beebe, Treasurer, Kristina Hiner, Secretary, Jan Gephardt, Communications Officer, Keri O’Brien, ConQuesT Chairperson for 2016, and Diana Bailey, Registered Agent.
From SFF and romance convention attendees alike. To the point that I’ve applied some probably unfair stereotyping of my own, in deciding that media and writers’ conventions in Those Four States (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri) are probably off limits to me. If I won a lottery tomorrow and travel costs were not an issue…I probably wouldn’t change my decision.
I get told, rightfully so: ‘That’s unfair. We have lovely, diverse people at X convention or Y festival! By not attending, you are letting the bad people win!”
True. I know some good people in those places. I’d love to visit them. There is a large romance convention in Texas and an even bigger SFF gathering in Kansas City that I *should* attend for career reasons. (Except that the romance con has a dismal record respecting M/M romance authors, and I’m not sure I’m at the professional level to go to the SFF con yet.)
By not attending, I’m not validating some indefensible behavior from con committees who keep getting away with this shit, and use fans and sane staffers as their human shields. I’m not paying into the tax coffers of hotels, cities, and corrupt hypocritical legislatures who still seem to be stuck in Pre-Civil Rights America. By myself, I’m a nobody, and I only have power over what I personally spend and buy.
I was unlucky enough to get tapped for a self-pub panel at CONQuest (Kansas City 2013) that consisted of me and two gatekeepers who bloviated the entire time, talking over anything I had to say. Lawrence M. Schoen was the moderator who opened his introductory email to me with a declaration that nobody should self publish unless they’d already been vetted by the publishing industry. He also used the term “politically correct” which prompted the following response from me:
“Please do not use the term ‘politically correct’ in my presence. My colleagues and mentors include survivors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Soviet GULag. Current American usage of this term trivializes these mass atrocities in the service of defending lazy-minded reflexive bigotry.”
In response, he doubled down on his insistence on right to say anything he liked.
On the panel, Silena Rosen was particularly notable for her crude, hostile manner as well as rant about how self-pub was shit, fanfic was public masturbation, yadda yadda yadda. Schoen wasn’t so much a moderator as a partner in the pile-on. I had quality assurance experience from multiple industry jobs, and a whole list of suggestions for editorial collectives and the like. They talked right over me as loudly as they could. None of that stuff even got said.
I felt the whole time as if I were fighting with both hands tied behind my back. I was there to give the audience new ideas and perspectives and to present myself with courtesy and professionalism; they were there to beat me up in public.
I don’t know anything about the Oshiro thing. Is that the one where the guy was the GoH at a con and didn’t get treated well? I’ve seen that in passing is all. I can only assume that if File 770 is upset over it, they’re either on the wrong side, or just plain stupid.
A bunch of comments from File 770 are reproduced in that same thread. Which is great, because it proves how many of Larry’s fans find this blog despite his refusing to allow pingbacks from my posts, and how they force the rest to read the material anyway.
I get it. It’s one thing to write up policies on harassment and appropriate behavior for a convention. It’s another to find yourself in the midst of a mess where you have to enforce them.
Emotions are running high. The person accused of violating the policy isn’t a mustache-twirling villain, but someone who’s been attending your con for years. They’ve got a lot of friends at the con — possibly including you. If you enforce the consequences spelled out in your policies, someone’s going to be upset. Someone’s going to be angry. Someone’s going to feel hurt. It feels like a no-win situation.
And it is, in a way. There’s nothing you can do to make everyone happy. But we’ve seen again and again that there’s a clear losing strategy, and that is to do nothing. To try to ignore your harassment policy and hope the problem goes away on its own.
It won’t. As unpleasant as it is to be dealing with a report of harassment, doing nothing will make it worse. Here are just a few examples from recent years.
(8) THE F IN SF IS NOT FILLET. Seeing a comment on File 770 about all the fiction with “bone” in the title, Fred Coppersmith recommended:
Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. Nothing can escape one, not even light.
But even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one….
We do have indirect images of black holes, however
Some of the best indirect images of black holes come from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, where Edmonds works. “The friction and the high velocities of material forming out of a black hole naturally produces X-rays,” he says. And Chandra is a space telescope specially designed to see those X-rays.
For example, the Chandra observatory documented these X-ray “burps” emanating from the merger of two galaxies around 26 million light-years away. The astrophysicists suspect that these burps came from a massive black hole: …
Similarly, the fuchsia blobs on this image are regions of intense X-ray radiation, thought to be black holes that formed when two galaxies (the blue and pink rings) collided: …
Be sure to check out the fuzzy but fascinating video showing the proper motion of stars around an apparent black hole.
(10) YES THERE IS A DRAGON. Pete’s Dragon official teaser trailer.
There’s never going to be a Back to the Future sequel or reboot—at least as long as director Robert Zemeckis is alive. With that in mind, what if there was a prequel? Didn’t think of that, did you? I sure didn’t, but after seeing the trailer above, I’d totally be on board.
If you’ve never seen BTTF (what’s wrong with you?), it begins with Doc Brown revealing to Marty that the only way to produce the 1.21 Gigawatts necessary to time travel is to use plutonium. The prequel would be a story about how Doc Brown gets hands on the plutonium, which he only mentions in passing in the original film.
The prequel trailer was brilliantly edited together by Tyler Hopkins, who used footage from various movies featuring Christopher Lloyd (the actor who played Dr. Emmett Brown).
In Los Angeles to celebrate the 30th Anniversary Edition of the book’s release, Miller sat down with IGN to talk about The Dark Knight Returns’ enduring legacy, what makes Batman relevant, and why he keeps coming back to the character. He then took the stage for a Q&A moderated by DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, where he discussed his initial apprehension at reinventing such an established character, the impact he’s had on future creators, and who would win in a fight between Batman and Captain America.
The evening took an unexpected turn right out the gate as Miller’s panel was interrupted by an audience heckler. That heckler turned out to be none other than Marvel Comics legend/cameo king Stan Lee, who was on hand to celebrate pal Miller’s accomplishments. Lee of course demanded to know who would win in a showdown between publisher mainstays Batman and Captain America, to which Miller slyly responded “Robin.”
A comic-book Methuselah, Lee is also, to a great degree, the single most significant author of the pop-culture universe in which we all now live. This is a guy who, in a manic burst of imagination a half-century ago, helped bring into being The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and the dozens of other Marvel titles he so famously and consequentially penned at Marvel Comics in his axial epoch of 1961 to 1972. That world-shaking run revolutionized entertainment and the then-dying superhero-comics industry by introducing flawed, multidimensional, and relatably human heroes — many of whom have enjoyed cultural staying power beyond anything in contemporary fiction, to rival the most enduring icons of the movies (an industry they’ve since proceeded to almost entirely remake in their own image). And in revitalizing the comics business, Lee also reinvented its language: His rhythmic, vernacular approach to dialogue transformed superhero storytelling from a litany of bland declarations to a sensational symphony of jittery word-jazz — a language that spoke directly and fluidly to comics readers, enfolding them in a common ecstatic idiom that became the bedrock of what we think of now as “fan culture.” Perhaps most important for today’s Hollywood, he crafted the concept of an intricate, interlinked “shared universe,” in which characters from individually important franchises interact with and affect one another to form an immersive fictional tapestry — a blueprint from which Marvel built its cinematic empire, driving nearly every other studio to feverishly do the same. And which enabled comics to ascend from something like cultural bankruptcy to the coarse-sacred status they enjoy now, as American kitsch myth.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Moshe Feder, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
We long ago surrendered our dreams of Bradbury’s rainy Venus and Burroughs’ canal-riven Mars to the advances of science. Is the same thing on the verge of happening to science fiction’s tales involving black holes?
Alert SFWA – Condition Red!
Black holes have been appearing in sf stories for a long time. A conversation with Stephen Hawking decades ago led Larry Niven to write a story involving quantum black holes, 1975 Hugo winner “The Borderland of Sol.”
But on his 70th birthday this month, Hawking said he regards his idea that information was destroyed by black holes as his “biggest blunder.”
It all boils down to a conflict between two fundamental ideas in physics that control the very fabric of our Universe; the clash of Einstein’s general relativity and quantum dynamics. And it just so happens that the extreme environment in and around a black hole makes for the perfect “fight club” for the two theories to duke it out.
Black holes have not been read out of the cosmology, but their behavior may be less absolute than Hawking originally argued.
Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful events in the universe, surpassed only by the energy discharged when Bob Eggleton leaps onstage to accept a Hugo and does That Thing With His Hair. Astronomers theorize collapsing stars produce black holes, sending gamma rays shooting across space. The bursts are short-lived, much like Arnie Katz’ fanzine titles, so it’s not easy for astronomers to react and make observations. Now NASA has sent the fastest-swiveling space science observatory ever built into orbit, launched November 20, to scan for the “birth screams” of black holes.
“Black hole” is a phrase coined by American John Wheeler in 1968 to describe an object with a gravitational force so powerful that not even light could escape its pull. (Fans who don’t know the difference between a black hole and a neutron star will see that date and be wondering how Larry Niven won a Hugo for something before scientists gave it a name.)
NASA’s new orbital observatory, named Swift for its speedy pivoting and pointing, finally made it off the pad after weeks of delays caused by hurricanes and a three-day postponement due to rocket trouble.
The concept of something like a black hole dates back to the 18th century, when the English and French rivaled each other for world leadership in science as well as war. Either England’s John Mitchell or France’s Laplace first thought of the notion. Historians know Mitchell used Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity and corpuscular light to calculate that a star 500 times larger than the sun would have enough gravity to prevent light from escaping.
Astronomers have never seen a black hole directly, but infer their existence the radiation created as material feeds the object, not unlike the way fans know Bob Tucker is present in a crowded room party, although blocked from view, after everyone suddenly calls out “ Smoooooth!”
In contrast to astronomers, who like to study these things from a safe distance, science fiction writers make their characters drive right up to the edge of black holes and fall in. Of course, for writers this is simply a word picture of their careers as they send manuscripts off to publishers whose interminable response times make it seem like their work has disappeared into a singularity with a New York zip code.
Stories are certainly the easiest way for people to visualize the experience of entering a black hole. Otherwise, what constitutes “falling in” can only be fully understood after years spent studying advanced equations (an unlikely choice among people squandering time by clicking on articles at Trufen.net.) How long does it take to fall in? Ted Bunn answers:
“Let’s say you start at rest from a point whose distance from the singularity is ten times the black hole’s radius. Then for a million-solar-mass black hole, it takes you about 8 minutes to reach the horizon. Once you’ve gotten that far, it takes you only another seven seconds to hit the singularity…. Once you’ve crossed the horizon, in your remaining seven seconds, you might panic and start to fire your rockets in a desperate attempt to avoid the singularity. Unfortunately, it’s hopeless, since the singularity lies in your future, and there’s no way to avoid your future. In fact, the harder you fire your rockets, the sooner you hit the singularity. It’s best just to sit back and enjoy the ride.”
It’s just human nature to poke and prod and try to find out things man was not meant to know. So stubborn astronomers continue to learn all kinds of trivia about black holes. (1) The x-ray radiation emanating from black holes has two components. (2) The Hubble telescope
has detected the noise of gas being slurped into a black hole (and it bears no resemblance to Joe Haldeman slipping into that tub of lime jello; and most remarkable of all, (3) Stephen Hawking and Roger Ebert now agree that nothing escapes from a black hole.
NASA’s Swift observatory is a $250 million collaboration by NASA, Italy and Britain. Unless you think Santa is bringing you one for Christmas, you may have to settle for what you can afford and research black holes the old-fashioned way, by downloading the free board game based on the international Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry Program (SVLBI).
(2) USAGE. How many Lego is two? Ann Leckie gives her answer. The thread starts here:
