The PBS video series Blank on Blank creates animated videos from old audio interviews with celebrities, writers, and pop culture icons. Kurt Vonnegut is featured in their most recent production.
Then we came across the tape of Kurt Vonnegut giving a lecture at NYU in 1970. It’s actually more of a talk. Or really a monologue that he delivered with the help of some notes scrawled on a few sheets of paper. Beyond his wise ramblings on family, growing up, being an artist in not-artist-friendly Indianapolis, keys to writing, WWII and life in the infantry, and, of course, The Big Space Fuck…. we loved to hear the response of the students in the room that day. It’s like being a fly on the wall….
Animator/director Pat Smith and I ping-pong a bunch of ideas when production begins on a new episode. Here’s what was going through Pat’s head when he first listened to Vonnegut:
“When I sat down to start drawing Kurt Vonnegut, for some reason I kept thinking about this mixture of Albert Einstein and Mark Twain. Vonnegut struck me as this brilliant, kooky, genius who, maybe, was a tad messy. Like you’d see him with papers coming bulging out of his briefcase. On the tape, you can actually hear him shuffling through his notes as he spoke to the class at NYU…”
And the final result is: “Kurt Vonnegut on Man-Eating Lampreys.”
9) Elizabeth Ann ScarboroughElizabeth Ann Scarborough was an Army nurse during the Vietnam war, an experience she has drawn upon in her fiction on occasion. She is the author of several series, including Acorna and Petaybee, but her modern fantasy novel The Healer’s War is perhaps the most autobiographical. Interviews with Scarborough aren’t easy to find online, but here’s one in which she mentions her nursing experience.
10) Gene Wolfe After serving in the Army during the Korean war, Gene Wolfe returned home and became an engineer. Writing was a hobby that he pursued in his off-hours, but his talent was apparent from the very beginning. He is the author of numerous books, but his The Books of the New Sun series revolutionized fantasy and is a classic of the Dying Earth genre. If you have a literary bucket list then this series belongs at the top. Wolfe spoke about the effect the war had on his fiction during an interview with MIT’s 12 Tomorrows: “It’s a real wake-up call. What military service does is rub off a lot of the pretense and self-deception from a person. You have to keep going, knowing that there are people over there who are trying to kill you. You’re right: they are.”
(2) N. K. Jemisin reacts to dropping the Lovecraft statuette from the World Fantasy Award in “Whew”.
That’s a sigh of relief. One less thing to feel conflicted about. One more thing I can celebrate freely, easily, and without reservation.
I’m talking about the World Fantasy Award, which will now no longer be represented by the head of H. P. Lovecraft. My feeling re the whole thing is a) ’bout time, and b) whew. Because while I have no idea if I’ll ever win a WFA myself — I’ve been nominated twice and that’s awesome — I have watched other anti-racist friends and fellow writers of color win the award. It’s impossible not to feel that visceral clench of empathy when they speak of the awkwardness of Lovecraft, of all people, as the representation of their honor. I’ve heard a number of winners talk about the ways they plan to hide or disguise or otherwise disrespect their own award so that they can reach a place of comfort with it. I’ve contemplated what I would do if I won, myself. (Was planning to put it on full display atop my cat’s litterbox.) I never show off my nomination pins, because I don’t feel like explaining when people ask, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
(3) Rocket Books is running a series of sf author trading cards. Here are the four most recent sf all-stars.
…Since many convention centers outsource functions like their network management, it can be harder for planners to haggle down the price of Internet access, but the arrangement spares the center from having to finance technological upgrades and might provide it with a commission as well….
“Basically, you’re looking at six figures or more to wire up the place, and every couple of years you’ll probably want to do another low six-figure upgrade,” said Ben Yalow, a recently retired information technology professional with experience setting up and configuring networks in hotels and convention centers….
Hospitality industry experts predicted that the F.C.C.’s recent actions would force event facilities to become more competitive in their pricing, so as not to lose out entirely on the Internet revenue stream….
“I think the long-term solution is going to be that convention centers and hotels drop their prices down to someplace reasonable,” Mr. Yalow said. “They’re not going to make money off this the way they used to.”
A member of Britain’s Parliament has been nicknamed “Shoebacca” after using House of Commons letterhead to complain about missing out on Star Wars shoes.
Angela Rayner, 35, a Labor party member who represents Ashton-under-Lyne, used notepaper with House of Commons letterhead to write a letter of complaint to the Irregular Choice shop after the store sold out of Dan Sullivan-designed Star Wars shoes that featured R2-D2 figures as the high heels.
For the past two or three years, when I have been invited to conventions, I have requested that panels be made up of qualified individuals of all genders. While sometimes it happens that a panel ends up as all-male or all-female (as a function of subject matter), con programmers should make every effort to be inclusive.
In the future, I will be expanding that request to include ramps and other appropriate accessibility requirements for disabled participants. Larger conventions should consider having a sign-language interpreter for deaf attendees.
I have to make it a request, not a requirement — because some conventions might not have the resources. A convention survives on its attendance. Small cons can’t always afford these things. The rule of thumb is to spend the money where it will serve the most people….
A convention is supposed to be a gathering of the community, a place where we share our love of the genre and go home inspired. We don’t want our friends in fandom going home unhappy. The unwritten rule in fandom has always been that everybody is welcome, everybody is included — but it’s not enough to have that as an ideal, we have to demonstrate it by accessibility and inclusion.
We’ve been discussing the system put forth in naval officer and science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s book, Starship Troopers. For some background see last week’s column. For more background, read the book and spurn the wretched movie.
*****
So why are we – those of us who are in favor – even concerned with radically changing the system that has, and for the most part well enough, seen us through over two centuries? It’s simple: We think that system’s time has run, that we are not the people we were and that our ruling class is no longer worthy. Indeed, it’s not even trustworthy, let alone generally worthy. We observe that our political and economic fate has fallen into the hands of the denationalized rich, who frankly don’t care a fig for us. We see that where once we were an “ask what you can do for your country” people, we are increasingly indistinguishable from the worst third-world kleptocratic and nepotistic hellholes. We see the PC fascisti replacing us with unassimilable foreigners, often enough from cultures that are not just incompatible, but which actively hate us. We see that we are fracturing in ways that are arguably worse than anything we’ve ever seen before, worse even than before and during the Civil War. Yankees and Rebs used to, at least, mostly speak the same language. Our language today, as spoken by left and right from north and south, may sound the same but the words and concepts have changed meanings.
In short, we think that we either, in Brecht’s words, elect a new people, as our denationalized and corrupt rulers seem to be trying to do via immigration, or we fall hard – so hard we’ll never stand again.
Unanswered question, from a thread: what if the World Military Fiction Award were a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Would you consider a black novelist childish for questioning the appropriateness of that choice, or the award committee too PC for considering that maybe he had a point?
Two of the three novellas I will be exploring today are ones that I read at an early age, albeit in modified form as they were incorporated into The Incomplete Enchanter. My reviews here, however, are of the stories as they appeared in their original form published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction. Even though all three were advertised as novels when first published, I have confirmed that all three are of novella length (17,500 to 40,000 words).
Joe Sherry: Two things stand out for me. One: How quickly Kurtz gets into the action of the story and how tight the timeline is here. Everything that happens is so immediate, but it feels appropriate with the political risk of Kelson being able to hold on to a crown he is barely prepared to accept because he is only about to hit his legal majority all the while he is about to face a challenge from an external threat with an internal agent. I’m not sure that stuff really gets old when it’s written so smoothly. Two: This may be colored by how I feel about some of the later novels, but what I like is the minutiae, the details of how things work behind the scenes – the Council sessions, the rituals of the church, the tidbits on Deryni history.
One stop was at Powell’s in Beaverton. It is a great store, and I had a great time with a good crowd. But I saw later on Twitter somebody had apparently seen me there, and taken to Twitter to talk about my pathetic showing, and how nobody was there at the lamest book signing ever, and hashtag something about how I was the saddest puppy of all.
That struck me as odd, since we had over forty people show up, which by most author’s reckonings is great, and we filled the signing area to the side. But then I realized what he’d probably seen (mistakenly thinking that a Puppy Kicker was honest and not just lying about me on Twitter, silly me). I’d gotten there almost an hour early, and had killed time just hanging out in the audience with the seven or eight people who’d shown up really early too. I figured that was what he’d seen, because by seven o’clock we had filled the chairs, and more people kept coming in the whole time. So being my usual diplomatic self, I responded and told him that the “big hand goes on the seven, doofus”. Luckily, some of the fans had taken pictures of the crowd too, and since you guys are so super helpful, you posted the photographic evidence to the dude.
Now, a smart person would say, whoops, my bad. But not a Puppy Kicker. They have that whole narrative about how anybody who disagrees with TRUFAN is irreparably damaging their career, so of course he doubled down. Oh no. He was there at 7:05! And he saw my 40! And that was still horrible garbage failure of suck, because that bookstore ROUTINELY gets 500(!) people at a book signing…
This of course came as a surprise to the people who work there, and my more famous author friends who sell ten times as many books as I do, who only got around 200 there. Basically, you can count the number of mega superstar authors who routinely get five hundred people at a book signing on your hands, and have fingers left over. Puppy kickers are harsh, man. I think the average book signing in America is like five to seven people.
But I don’t make the rules. Five hundred it is! Anything less is shameful garbage.
For the most part. But seriously, this is usually the best solution. Because if you try to do battle with them, be they trolls or individuals/groups in power, you’re basically throwing gas on a flame. It’ll ignite, and sometimes that can catch you on fire as well. If nothing else, a detractor will try their hardest to make sure that if they’re going down, they’re going to take you with them, any way you can.
Now, some detractors can take things to the point where you need to confront them in some way or another. But you know what?
Let them ruin themselves.
You see, the thing about these detractors is that they’re toxic individuals to one degree or another. And one way or another, unless they change, they’ll end up poisoning whatever atmosphere they’re involved in. Eventually, people catch on. It might take years, but eventually, one way or another, time has a way of catching up with those who’ve made their hobby tearing down everyone else and eating away at their own pyramid. And as long as you haven’t let them catch you in their claws, they probably won’t take you with them when they fall. Ignore them, work with those critics and individuals who are concerned with making your work the best it can be, and detractors will remove themselves from the creative pool; exercising a form of social Darwinism.
The official parody guide to the unaired eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, based on the popular @TNG_S8 Twitter account from creator Mike McMahan!In the basement of the Star Trek archives, behind shelves of U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D models, bags of wigs, and bins of plastic phasers, sits a dusty cardboard box. Inside is a pile of VHS tapes that contain never-before-seen episodes and behind-the-scenes footage for something truly amazing. The world thinks there are only seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but there’s one more. A secret season.
(18) Marvel’s Jessica Jones – Official Trailer #2, coming on Netflix. Suvudu gives a detailed rundown.
[Thanks to Ryan H., JJ, Daniel Dern, The G., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
Highlights include a true first edition of The Time Machine and a first edition of The Invisible Man, signed by the author. [Also] a first edition of Tales of Space and Time (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), inscribed by Wells to Henry James with an original drawing of Ugh-lomi, protagonist of “A Story of the Stone Age.”
McMurtry, winner of a Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove and an Oscar for his co-adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, is also a legend among booksellers as the owner of Booked Up in Archer City, TX. Edd Vick wrote about his visit there in 2012 when the business still occupied four buildings around the town square. That year McMurtry auctioned off 300,000 books, however, Booked Up No. 1 is still open today with a vast inventory of more than 150,000 volumes.
Separate from his bookstore business he has assembled many collections, including the Larry McMurtry Collection of H. G. Wells, part of Heritage Auction’s Rare Book Auction #6117 in New York on April 8-9. As Zachary Stacy explained in a recent article —
Several other sf collectibles will be sold at the April 8 auction, such as a first edition, first printing of Dune, inscribed to John Pierce by Frank Herbert. And a presentation copy of Slaughterhouse-Fiveinscribed to the owner of Lord John press, Herb Yellin by Kurt Vonnegut, with a little improvised decoration: “Around this inscription, Vonnegut has drawn ten stars.” (Yellin, who passed away in 2014, published limited editions, some of them by Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, Dan Simmons and Ray Bradbury.)
People are expected to respond as if it’s the height of irony when they’re told Vonnegut’s novel, ranked by the Modern Library as #18 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, lost both the 1970 Hugo and Nebula awards to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I like both books, and see no reason 1970’s award voters need to blush.
Letters of Note has reproduced Kurt Vonnegut’s typewritten letter to the folks back home giving his personal account of several months spent as a POW, when he was shot at by Germans, Americans, British, and Russian aircraft, starved, beaten, marched on foot without food sixty miles, and assigned to forced labor at the underground Dresden slaughterhouse known in German as Schlachthof Fünf. It was an awful job, but nevertheless led to his surviving one of the deadliest attacks of the war. He laconically explained:
On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.
“Look at the Birdie” is the title story of the collection to be released next week, two and a half years after his death.
The same post treats readers to a reprint of Harlan Ellison’s 1969 review of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with this self-revealing verdict:
Which is not to say it is anywhere near “The Naked and the Dead” or “From Here to Eternity.” Vonnegut fights his wars with feathers rather than with jackhammers. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is funny, satirical, compelling, outrageous, fanciful, mordant, fecund and at the bottom-line, simply stoned-out-of-its-mind.
It is about Billy Pilgrim who travels to the planet Tralfamadore in a flying saucer, but no tilted-nose critic would cop to Vonnegut’s being a science-fiction writer: “It’s too good to be science-fiction,” they would say. But Vonnegut doesn’t care, and you won’t care, either, because this is a writer who leaps over genres.
No doubt as he typed these words Ellison seethed with frustration because the literary establishment was refusing to recognize that he, too, the author of ingenious satirical fables like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”, was a writer able to leap over genres.
A few years later Ellison tried to force the issue when he turned his guest-of-honor speech at the 1975 NASFiC into an I’m-quitting-sf announcement. He made the point often at other times and places down the years without ever persuading fandom to loosen its coils, until the message became part of the black humor of the genre.
Eventually Ellison himself participated in the joke. When Coraline was up for a Nebula, Ellison promised that if it won he’d read the acceptance speech Gaiman had written. It did win. And in those remarks Gaiman played with the illusion that this promise gave him the power to make Ellison say literally anything he’d written:
I could write down the words “I, Harlan Ellison, am actually a science fiction writer” in my awards speech, and he’d have to say them. I wouldn’t actually do any of this, though, because Harlan’s revenge would be swift in coming and incredibly funny whenever he told people about it. Well, incredibly funny for everyone except me, anyway.
