(1) CANCER SMACKDOWN IN PROGRESS. Pat Cadigan has a great update — “That’s Right, Cancer, I Said You Better Run ‘Cause There Ain’t Nothin’ For You Here”.
Yes, in case you can’t tell, the level of cancer in my body continues to decline. I did a little math and the current level is 3% of what it was when I started chemotherapy in January 2015. I saw one of the doctors on my consultant’s team, a young Asian doctor that I’ve seen before. He was so genuinely happy for me, I kinda choked up.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I had the bad luck to have my cancer recur in the worst possible form but the good luck to have the drugs work better than anyone expected them to. I’d like to tell you attitude is half the battle. I mean, then I could really pat myself on the back (no pun intended, I swear) and say I kicked cancer’s arse. The truth is, I got lucky; the drugs work. My attitude lets me enjoy it.
I would like to be more profound but at the moment, I’m just kinda dazed. Six months ago, I was terminal, at least as far as anyone knew. Today I’m no longer dying of cancer, I’m living with my technicolor Doc Martens boot on its neck.
You know, I don’t think that will ever get old.
(2) OVER TIME. An interview with Lois McMaster Bujold in the New Zealand Herald.
Gentleman Jole And The Red Queen is precisely to do with what happens when a woman refuses to be constrained by the assumptions of the people who think they know her. Cordelia is 76, in a future society where she can expect to live to 120.
“This, of course, has metaphorical import for our own times, with more people living longer. What should we do with ourselves? Is something genuinely new possible, that isn’t just a variant of things we were doing earlier in life?”
It will not spoil the book if I tell you the answer is that it depends on your perspective; which does indeed change with age.
Bujold, 66, remarks she was once part of a book club discussion of her fantasy novel, The Curse Of Chalion, with a group of junior high students, “where it gradually became apparent that the hero was far more alien to them by being an old man of 35 – practically like their parents! – than by being a demon-ridden medieval fantasy nobleman.”
(3) SPECIAL DEFECTS. From LiarTown USA —
(4) SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT SPANISH SF. Science Fiction Studies, published three times per year by DePauw University, is looking for contributions to the monographic issue on Spanish SF, to be guest edited by Sara Martín and Fernando Ángel Moreno. (Via Europa SF.)
By ‘Spanish SF’ we mean SF novels and short fiction written specifically in Spain, excluding other Spanish-language areas.
Science Fiction Studies is particularly interested in articles dealing with writers Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo, Rafael Marín, Rodolfo Martínez or Javier Negrete and with SF women writers (excluding Elia Barceló).
All submissions must be in English and conform to SFS submission policies, which includes a rigorous peer-reviewing process.
Abstracts (150-200 words) are due by March 30, complete papers by 1 September (maximum 7000 words).
Please, email your proposals to Sara Martín : Sara[dot]Martin[at]uab[dot]cat
(5) NEW GAME IN TOWN. The “Storium” play-by-post forum has just gone live. A number of fairly-well-known writers and game companies have kicked in worlds, including File 770 regular Ursula Vernon, Seanan McGuire, Chuck Wendig, etc. Chris Meadows has details in “Storium storytelling game launches for public view” at Teleread.
The Kickstarter game worlds include quite a few intriguing settings, including some by fairly well-known authors or game companies. For example, the default universe for the HERO system “Champions” RPG is one of those worlds—so if you have some favorite old characters from a “Champions” setting, why not bring them back to life? Hugo-winning webcomic artist and author Ursula Vernon has a humorous setting called “Weird Fruit” (pictured above), and multiply-Hugo-nominated author Seanan McGuire has a setting called “Chambers of the Sea” in which merfolk take part in Atlantisian politics. Matt Forbeck has adapted his Monster Academy young-adult series into a Storium setting as well.
And that’s only scratching the surface. Well-known gaming or fiction writers such as Tobias Buckell, Robin D. Laws, N.K. Jemisin, J.C. Hutchins, Richard Dansky, Elizabeth Bear, Sam Sykes, Mur Lafferty, Kenneth Hite, Chuck Wendig, Stephen Blackmoore, Jordan Weisman, and Charles Stross have settings either ready or under preparation. Steve Jackson Games and Green Ronin Publications are also readying Storium worlds based on their “In Nomine” and “Mutants & Masterminds” RPG settings, respectively.
(6) YOUR TUMBLR DEEP THOUGHT OF THE DAY. From Weird Deer, this quote by Erin Bow:
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
(7) HAPPY ANNIVERSARY. Max Florschutz launched his blog Unusual Things a year ago this week.
Views
So, where to start? How about with the number of views Unusual Things has landed in its first year of operation? A quick look at the site’s stats board and some simple addition says …
10,207 Views
Hey, you know what? That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Ten thousand views, while nothing to those with heavy advertising budgets and ten thousand fans, is pretty good for a one-year blog on writing, a subject not a lot of people care about.
Actually, let’s dig into that one a bit more. What’s been the post with the highest number of views, the one that’s caught the most attention?
I’m Not a Fan of Science-Fiction and Fantasy? from May 30th, 2015, with 741 views.
You might remember that post. That was the post where I reacted to a number of statements from the Insular crowd during last year’s Hugo insanity, statements that, well, in line with their given moniker of “Insulars,” was all about how certain “casual” fans needed to be kept out of the Hugos, suggesting that they weren’t “real” fans of Sci-Fi and Fantasy because they hadn’t passed some invisible, societal conscientious litmus test that made them a “real fan.”
(8) CHAINS OF LOVE. There’s everything else, so why wouldn’t there be books where “Science Fiction Romance Goes To Space Prison”? Victoria Scott tells you about several of them at Amazing Stories. Ann Aguirre’s Perdition, for example, gets this valedictory:
OK, I have to warn you that “bleak” is an understatement. This series has some of the darkest stuff I’ve ever read, much more to the horror side than I normally will go (I have nightmare issues, ok?) but I found the characters so fascinating, I was compelled to read on. I was rooting so hard for Dred and Jael to make it – as a couple, out of Perdition, on to a Happily Ever After – that I was willing to stay with them through all the travails. The grim world of Perdition is well drawn and comprehensively thought out, and learning the many details of the worldbuilding backstory was another good reason to continue reading.
(9) NOT PLAN 8 OR PLAN 10. Before he can discuss Plan 9 From Outer Space, Jay McDowell needs to explain what a Bad Movie is:
A real, honest to goodness, grade Z modern Bad Movie is a movie where the creator, be it due to A) technical ineptitude (Manos: The Hands of Fate); B) budget limitations (pretty much anything cranked out by Roger Corman and/or AIP [American International Pictures]); or C) the creator’s overinflated sense of self (vanity projects like Battlefield Earth, Star Trek V, and Glitter), failed spectacularly and inadvertently, made a movie that has become endearing to the viewer. Simple, run-of-the-mill bad movies are, usually, movies that are just bad and not in a fun way; they’re sub-par or heavy handed with their message or, perhaps worst of all, purposely trying to be a true Bad Movie.
(10) WILL SHE PREORDER? My daughter has mentioned several times how excited she is that the eighth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Pts. I & II, is on the way. Will I ever get a clue that I’m supposed to buy it for her? 🙂
Directly following the play’s premiere in London, a play script will be released in both print and digital finally, finally, FINALLY giving readers the story of Harry’s life 19 years after he defeated the Dark Lord.
The book will be published by Little Brown Book Company on July 31, 2016, marking Harry’s 36th birthday.
(11) BAEN NEWS. Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf sent readers a message: they’re going to synchronize the release dates of ebooks and paper books.
From the publication month of April 2016 onward, the release dates will be the same (that is, the ebooks will not be available two weeks earlier than the paper books).
We will not be changing the time the Monthly Bundles are initially offered for sale, we will continue to offer eARCs as usual, and all other policies regarding ebook bundles will remain in place. We will not be making the period you can buy Monthly Bundles shorter, but longer.
The April 2016 bundle contains the ebooks that will be available in print on April 5th. The final versions of these ebooks would have been scheduled to go live as ebooks on all retail venues on March 16, 2015, and will now be available in their entirety April 5, 2016. At that point, the Monthly Bundle will become unavailable for sale.
We will continue to publish two newsletters per month to help you keep track of our offerings, one highlighting the print books which will come out two weeks in advance of the release date, the other highlighting ebook and website offerings on (or very close to) the release date itself.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 3, 1920 – James “Scotty” Doohan
(13) KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY. Rod Roddenberry is executive producing CBS’ new Star Trek series.
Roddenberry Entertainment President Rod Roddenberry and Chief Operating Officer Trevor Roth are serving as executive producers on the new Star Trek television series.
Other executive producers include Alex Kurtzman, Heather Kadin and Bryan Fuller, who was previously announced as showrunner.
(14) AT LSE. Literary Festival 2016 at the London School of Economics featured a number of discussions about sf/f-related topics.
There’s a podcast of “To Boldly Go: what Star Trek tells us about the world”, with participants Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University, London and author, Duncan Barrett, a best-selling author, Barry Buzan, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE, Steven French, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, and Bryan Roberts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE.
And tweets about several other items have been collected at Storify.
.@MikeSav47032563 begins our #LSELitFest event. Says ideas of utopia are crucial to sociological study of inequality pic.twitter.com/5eipZuIgIG
— LSE Inequalities (@LSEInequalities) February 25, 2016
(15) SCOTT KELLY RETURNS FROM THE ISS.
Astronaut Scott Kelly arrived in Houston early this morning where he was reunited with his family after a whirlwind year-long mission in space.
Waiting for Kelly, 52, in Houston were his two daughters and girlfriend, along with his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and his sister-in-law, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
After living for nearly a year aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is two inches taller than his identical twin brother Mark.
One of the main goals of his groundbreaking mission is to study how well humans can endure — mind, body and spirit — on a long-duration spaceflight.
From his perch 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the earth’s surface, Kelly snapped hundreds of beautifully abstract photographs of our planet’s landforms and waterways. He spotted hurricanes ominously swirling on sapphire-blue oceans. He gazed out at the aurora’s glittering fog. He consistently turned Earth’s lands and waters into an abstract artist’s dream, with shots of beaches, deserts, forests, and everything in between.
(16) GHOSTBUSTERS TRAILER BONUS. Russ discovered this website was apparently hidden in the trailer… http://www.paranormalstudieslab.com/#/
(17) THAT’S BAT-MA’AM, TO YOU. In 1974 Yvonne Craig gave an equal pay pitch to a captive audience…
Will Batgirl save Batman and Robin from the bomb? Or will she stand for her rights and get the same pay as a man? If they say no to equal pay…bombs away! 1974 Public Service Announcement by the U.S. Department of Labor–Wage & Hour Division.
[Thanks to Will R., John King Tarpinian, Steven French, JJ, Robotech_master, and robinareid for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]
