R.I.P. Harlan Ellison

I was going to do the Hugo Fanzines today, but it will have to wait until Monday.

I was never a fan of Harlan Ellison's original work - "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" disgusted me rather than scaring me.

But I did enjoy "The City at the Edge of Forever," perhaps because it was rewritten heavily by others (the original version was, as one might expect for an author often better known for his horror, too dark). He also did some work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone, Babylon 5 (he co-wrote "A View From The Gallery"and "Objects In Motion" and was a consultant).

He was also, by all accounts - I never met him - a jerk. He hassled fans at conventions...but he also had people who genuinely cared for him. I mean, we're talking about a guy who mailed a publisher a dead gopher in protest...and marched to Montgomery.

But you don't have to like somebody's work to appreciate their talent, and you don't have to like a man to know there are those who will miss him profoundly. The entire field will miss Harlan Ellison.

New Doctor Who Composer

As Chris Chibnall continues to shake up the show, he has hired a new composer.

Murray Gold has scored every episode of the new series, and his announced departure has disappointed many fans.

The BBC has now announced his replacement: Segun Akinola. He will be composing (or already has, given where we are) a new theme song as well as all the incidental music for at least season 11.

Gold will be a loss, but Akinola's website includes streams of some of his past work, including a number of BBC documentaries and several feature films. I gave it a quick listen, and his style seems to be on the mark.

Oumuamua Update

It seems that Oumuamua is accelerating away from the sun.

Which tells us that no matter how much it looked like a piece of rock?

It's not. Oumuamua now appears to be a comet. Its rocklike appearance was likely the result of a layer of debris that had collected over its icy heart during its travels.

It's still from another solar system, though. That part hasn't changed.

Apparently the debris layer was so thick that it didn't outgas that much as it passed the sun...but now is producing enough to have some thrust.

(And no, it's still not an alien spaceship. I wish).

Smog. Light Pollution.

The Royal Observatory became a casualty of these things sixty years ago. The site has been a museum all of this time, with no working telescope and no science being done.

...until now.

With the arrival of the Annie Mauder Astrographic Telescope, the Royal Observatory is an observatory once more. The telescope, a complex of four instruments, will focus primarily on visible light observations of the sun...a tradition of the observatory and the work done by Annie Mauder herself, the first woman to work at the observatory in the late nineteenth century.

Hugo Thoughts: Best Novella

The novella length is becoming more popular lately - and the high quality of this year's nominees shows it.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells - Every so often as a writer you read a work you wish you could have written. All Systems Red has just the kind of snarky humor I often aim for, except better. It also plays with sentience, gender, and civil rights in a quite interesting way.

And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker - A fun science fiction murder mystery, but I couldn't bring myself to like it as much as I like the author. Sorry, Sarah.

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. In my opinion, weaker than the original. The sheer amount of ancient tech lying around in weird places is starting to damage my suspension of disbelief.

The Black Tides Of Heaven by JY Jang. Asian science fiction is on the rise...and rightly so. Jang is Singaporean and calls what he writes "silkpunk." In contrast to All Systems Red, this is a story I would never attempt to write. He too plays with gender, albeit in a very different way, showing a world in which everyone gets to choose their sex in a completely matter of fact style.

Down Among The Sticks And Bones by Seanan McGuire. McGuire, as usual, has the fairytale narrative down, but I didn't find this one of her stronger pieces.

River Of Teeth by Sarah Gailey. You'll either love it or hate it. The ridiculous idea of hippo ranching is played just straight enough to be hilariously funny. I think it might be too subjective to win, though.

My choice: All Systems Red
My prediction: All Systems Red - it's taking the award world by storm this year and everyone is talking about it.

Hugo Thoughts: Best Novel

Here are my thoughts on this year's novels - most of which I only got excerpts of:

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. "Parody" wars with Vox Day aside...this is the first Scalzi I've actually read. And sad to say, I was underwhelmed. I like how he plays with gender, but he doesn't do so nearly as deftly as Ann Leckie or JY Yang (I'll talk more about that when I get to novellas). I liked the idea of this book, I liked the plot. I'll just be honest...I don't like Scalzi's voice. It's just an aesthetic preference.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have a weird relationship with this book - when I had the privilege of reading with Robinson at Balticon 50, he read an excerpt from this work well before it was published. I'm not a huge Robinson fan, but this book is one I like more than most of his and it's a beautiful love letter to New York. I don't think I would have appreciated it as much, though, if I hadn't ever been there.

Provenance by Ann Leckie. Not, in my mind, one of her better offerings. Still very well done, but I like the Ancillary series a lot better.

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee. The sequel to Ninefox Gambit is, if anything, better. Asian voices are producing some great work of late - give me more. If you like your science fiction nuts and bolts hard, though...this is more science fiction in the vein of Star Wars. Just with math instead of the Force.

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. I'm going to admit a bias here. Lafferty is an awesome person and I wish she hadn't moved out of the area. That said, I intend to buy this book at some point. I need to know who did it! It's an able mystery, a peculiar variation on the concept of the locked door mystery, with some interesting worldbuilding in the background. How does society handle immortality?

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin. I still can't really deal with the second person segments and probably never will. However, each book in this series is better than the past and if you aren't as tweaked by second person as I am.

My choice: Six Wakes. But I'm biased.

My prediction: The Stone Sky.

The Weather on Mars is Frightful

Apparently Mars is currently covered in a dust storm.

Yes.

The entire planet.

This appears to happen every few years and would be a definite challenge for anyone trying to live on the Red Planet.

The lack of a magnetic field and oceans causes weather events on Mars to go "global" pretty easily...

Want to explore Mars?

Red Rover, on Steam, lets you do just that - in virtual reality. It uses NASA's data to accurately recreate the surface of Mars so you can drive around. You apparently can't do much more than that, but it's pretty cheap and seems cool to me.

Back from Origins

I managed to get in on the Pathfinder 2nd Edition preview playtest.

I won't go into huge detail in public just yet, except that I appear likely to be one of the people who will switch over to 2E and never look back. So far I haven't seen anything I don't like. I particularly like the changes to the death and dying rules and the way you can overclock spells...it's actually done in a way that makes it reasonable to overclock spells.

Liking it a lot.

Played a few other games, but nothing huge news wise.

Thoughts on Solo - A Star Wars Story (Spoilers)

(By the way, I already left for Origins. I queued this because I didn't want to wait a week on it).

Solo was a good movie, but not a great one - I found it stronger than the prequels but weaker than any of the other new movies. (But it was definitely not terrible).

The largest problem from my perspective was that Ehrenbach did not carry his own movie well. I was hoping he would do a better job. He Shatnered on occasion...I haven't seen him in anything else, so I don't know how much of it was having to follow Harrison Ford, which has to be nervewracking for any actor. I was also underwhelmed by Clarke (Qi'ra).

Donald Glover was a bang up Lando (and, by the way, if the Ao3 Han/Lando tag doesn't explode, then I don't know what movie you were all watching).

Now for the spoilerriffic stuff.

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I would have liked to see early Han a little bit darker, but he did shoot first in a scene clearly put in there just to give him the opportunity to shoot first. Thanks for the fanservice.

I did not know I needed an explanation for why the Falcon is the only ship we ever see flown without droid assist until I had one. (And Waller-Bridge did a bang up job as a particularly ornery droid). See, the Falcon doesn't need droid assist because she is a droid. And thus semi-sentient. "This is the ship that did the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs."

Btw, they explained that too. In the rather obvious way of "They took a very dangerous shortcut."

And I particularly appreciated the Great Train Robbery in space. (They actually just...did the Great Train Robbery. It was fun).

The complaints about Leia not being Han's first love are, incidentally, ridiculous. He was old enough to have had two or three. The person we end up with isn't usually our first love. Sure, it can happen that way, but...

And the entire wardrobe full of capes was an awesome touch.

Review: The City Of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

There's not enough speculative fiction out there based off of Middle Eastern culture, especially non-Jewish culture.

S.A. Chakraborty's "The City of Brass" helps fill that gap. (Disclaimer: I did get the book for free, although not directly in exchange for a review).

It's the first book in a trilogy, so I can forgive the non-ending. Based off of Arab legends of djinn, the story relies on the familiar fantasy device of having one of the narrators (there are two) be new to the fantasy world and struggling with the transition. This is never a bad idea for a debut novel and for the first novel set in the world (I mean, I did it myself in Lost Guardians, in a sense).

The worldbuilding in this book is deft. I don't know quite enough about the mythology it is based off of to know if Chakraborty got everything right, but she did get the few things I know right and everything else felt as if it was made on a solid foundation.

Characterization is, slightly, the weak point, although that isn't to say the characters are wooden or one-dimensional, just slightly thinner than I would like. Chakraborty makes up for this, though, with her deft touch for plot and the fact that in Daevabad, nobody is quite who or what they seem.

Nobody. She avoids the unreliable narrator by having her narrators, Nahri, and Ali, be honest with the reader, just not with each other.

The City of Brass feels pleasantly alien to western readers, and gives a glimpse into Arab legends and Islamic sensibilities (I would not call it "Islamic fantasy" but it may be the closest to that I have read, although without drifting into the preachiness so sadly common in the Christian version).

Highly recommended and I look forward to the next volume.

Hugo Thoughts - Best Fancast

Some fancasts seem to get nominated every year, others are a little newer.

As I don't have a commute, I don't have a lot of time to listen to podcasts, so I base my vote off of the sample episodes provided.

As usual, the highest quality was Ditch Diggers, but I doubt that a podcast aimed entirely at professional writers is going to actually win.

Also high quality, the Verity Podcast (Doctor Who specific, but there might be enough fans) and Sword & Laser. Fangirl Happy Hour went a bit too political with the submission I listened to (I dislike politics in Hugo submissions even if I agree with them).

As always, I was disappointed with Galactic Suburbia. Their cast is over 90 minutes long and usually contains about an hour of material. In other words, tighten up.

I was also somewhat disappointed with The Coode Street Podcast. The episode I listened to was an interesting interview, but it had no intro or outro, no real use of the medium.

My choice: Ditch Diggers.

My prediction: Eh. Probably Sword & Laser. Hard to tell.

Hugo Thoughts - Dramatic Presentation

Long

This was a difficult year for me.

I did not see either Get Out or The Shape of Water because both "read" as too much category romance for my taste. The Shape of Water is obviously an excellent movie.

Of the four movies I did see, ranking them was extremely tough. It was a good year.

My choice: Thor: Ragnarok (narrowly beating out Blade Runner 2047 and Wonder Woman).

Wonder Woman would have taken it if it hadn't been for the pacing issues at the start.

My prediction: Between Thor: Ragnarok and The Shape of Water - hard to tell.

Short

Short presentation has sucked for me lately. I don't have time to watch the shows I am watching so I'm avoiding subscribing to streaming services, and everything is on streaming services. I've only watched one of the five shows nominated (five? I'll get to that in a second) so that gets my vote unless I can somehow legally track down the Discovery and Black Mirror episodes. The Good Place might be a bit easier, but time is a concern.

The sixth nomination was...a song? I've been reminding people for the last couple of years that dramatic presentation does not have to mean Movie or TV Show (I'd love to see Big Finish get a nod for one of their audio dramas, for example).

It made sense to allow "The Deep" as eligible because it is a song that involves multiple voices and tells a story. The fact that it was included in the packet gives it an advantage.

I don't see it winning, in part because man is that thing going to make most white people who listen to it uncomfortable. But it's nice to see it in there. Maybe we can see more off beat nominations in the future.

My choice: Twice Upon A Time.

My prediction: Twice Upon A Time.

I dunno. I still think shows on an actual network, albeit a "second tier" one, have more viewers than on the streaming services, but I could be wrong. And without having heard the others, this is a very, very shaky prediction.

Review: Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter

I found this book...disappointing.

Like too many short story writers making the jump to novel length, Lostetter tells her story in a series of chunks. For the type of story it is that would work well, but she needed to smooth out her transitions. Noumenon is, to be blunt, a little choppy.

That, though, is not the biggest problem. Lostetter has chosen for her plotline something novel - a generation ship built not to colonize but to research a distant solar system and return to Earth with its results. And she crews her ship with carefully chosen and prepared clones.

It's a fascinating idea and she does a decent job of extrapolating the sociological ramifications of, well, crewing your ship with clones. Of determining jobs and aptitudes purely based off of DNA. Spoiler: It doesn't go well.

Then we get close to the end and it all falls apart.

Spoiler: Lostetter handles the changes on the convoy fine. But her extrapolation of events on Earth is...

...poor. Not to mention coming over as an indictment of sociological changes that I believe are not going to be nearly the problem she claims.

I'm not going to say which ones because that would be too much of a spoiler.

It's a shame, because her idea is fascinating, and while she does not do the job of exploring nature vs nurture that Cherryh does in Cyteen (a far more experienced writer), she handles it in a way that reminds us humans will never actually change.

Just that ending.

And no.

I just don't see any plausibility in what she postulates whatsoever. Which means I can't give this book much of a recommendation, I'm afraid.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Reviews are highly subjective and most of the book is just fine. She brilliantly gets around the question of "who narrates a story that lasts two thousand years" and her characters are great.

But a poor ending can ruin an otherwise good book.

Deadpool 2 Thoughts - Spoilerriffic

First, the non spoiler thoughts.

The sequel stood up to the original, but was a bit darker. Yes, darker. In fact, it probably makes me a horrible person that I liked it so much.

Kind of in the Cards Against Humanity sense.

The movie had two messages.

One was the importance of family.

The other, laced through the jokes, was "Just because you don't like somebody doesn't make you a bigot." I can think of quite a few people who need to learn that particular lesson.

Additionally, I loved their Domino. She was awesome.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it stay to the end. The VERY end. Stay until they literally run out of "film." Or you'll miss something that probably has John Cleese in his retirement home going "Why didn't I think of THAT?"

Now for the spoilers.

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Still here?

Okay.

Spoilerrific thing #1: Vanessa.

They fridged her.

Except they really didn't.

First of all, it was obvious to anyone who saw the first movie and understands the particular brand of humor here that...well...Vanessa was not going to stay dead.

Second of all, almost nothing in the movie would have changed if she had not died.

They fridged Vanessa...to make a point about fridging characters. (And also likely because Bacharin is rather busy dating the Riddler...about which I'm quite disappointed there weren't any jokes).

To make the point that it's not necessary, because hey, we can use time travel to fix it and it doesn't make that much difference.

Spoileriffic thing #2: Sexuality.

You could squint sideways at Deadpool 1 and make an argument that Wade is straight.

Not the case this time. They were much more relaxed about Deadpool's sexuality. He hits on Colossus and there is just...nothing...heterosexual about his interactions with Cable. (Some of the coding might have been too subtle for people who don't know Deadpool has a thing for Cable).

And then there was Teenaged Negasonic Warhead showing up with a girlfriend. Specifically, Yukio, a rather obscure X char (although not as obscure as the comics version of Nega). Which gave an opportunity for one of those points about "Don't assume everything negative said is racist/homophobic/whatever" this movie liked to make. Other than that, it was just two teenagers dating. Nothing more, nothing less.

Spoileriffic thing #3: Did they really kill off Shatterstar or did Deadpool fix that too?

Spoileriffic thing #4: Why do I get the impression that at some point in this rather off timeline Deadpool maaaay just have done it with Wolverine? Or is that just me? Ahem.

Oh...my.

As all of my friends know, I keep my funny bone in a rather odd place. The first Deadpool movie really got to me. So did parts of Thor: Ragnarok.

Now, part of it was growing up on British comedy, which is not the same as American comedy.

One of the shows I grew up with was a sitcom called 'Allo 'Allo. It was set during World War II in occupied France...and a lot of people would be offended by the very idea.

'Allo 'Allo was hilarious. It mocked the Nazis and the French resistance. It featured such gems as a French shopkeeper wearing a necklace of onions, a British spy who spoke English with a bad French accent so as to code for speaking French with a bad English accent.

For the Gestapo agents in town they cast a man with a limp and the most Jewish looking Jew that ever did Jew.

Was it offensive? Sort of...but it was a grand tradition of Nazi mocking that nobody has matched to this day. And right now, we need some Nazi mocking.

And apparently Taika Waititi agrees with me.

His next movie is an anti-war satire set during World War II.

In which Waititi himself will play.

Hitler.

Laughing at evil reduces its power. The very idea of a Polynesian guy playing Hitler already has me shaking slightly in my seat. (I mean, he's Hitler as the protagonist's imaginary friend, but...still...)

I don't do comedies.

But I might have to check out this one.