Trying To Catch Up While Running In Place (with IMPORTANT stuff)
27. Jan, 2010 
8 Comments
This is going to be one of those round-up posts – but please pay attention as everything here today is important to someone, and some of them are probably important to a lot of someones.
First: Gary Farber is in need of some assistance. You can read the detail here. If you can spare a few dollars for a subscription to his blog, I urge you to subscribe; Gary is not only an historically relevant fannish figure, and not only a (former) cause celebre on Facebook (see the ‘why has Gary Farber’s account been cancelled’ group), but more often than not is currently – both fannishly and politically – relevant today; he’s always interesting and usually thought provoking. By subscribing, you’ll be helping to sustain one of the longest running blogs on the net as well. And doing so doesn’t have to cost you as much as voting for the Hugos will.
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Second. My friend Fred Kiesche’s father passed away the other day. Fred is also an excellent blogger and reviewer and you can see some of his contributions on the Lensman’s Children blog. My thoughts and sympathies to Fred and his family in this difficult time. If you are so inclined, the family’s wishes regarding memorials are linked to on Fred’s site. I suspect that Fred will be absent from the blog for a bit; in the meantime, please wish him well and remember that he published Sarah Hoyt’s pro-Heinlein screed recently and will likely be producing more of the same once he’s back.
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John Scalzi has put together a dream ticket and platform in his bid for SFWA presidency; Mike over at File 770 points out a VERY interesting factoid regarding this run.
Although not eligible to vote, I am eligible to endorse John’s ticket, and I do so; John (and his running mates) is sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced with the ‘new world’ (internet, rights, POD, etc) and seems to have a sensible handle on them, that I believe he could help usher in a new, more relevant AND effective era over there.
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Speaking of science fiction writers and Fan Writer Hugo Award winners in particular, multiple people are beginning to publish their nominations and/or suggestions for nominations for these awards.
First things first tho: YOU ONLY HAVE UNTIL JAN 31ST to purchase a WSFS membership – which is of course the only way to be eligible to nominate folks. Folks like me, and folks like Fred Pohl, for Best Fan Writer.
Who’s Fred? Oh, just one of those old timey guys who helped build the industry to where it is today. He’s already won plenty of Hugos for all kinds of different things, but now that he’s been blogging, Jo Walton points out (via File 770) that he’s suddenly eligible for the Fan Writer category.
And I’m going to nominate him. Along with myself. Why me? Well, I’m given to understand that I won’t be the only one nominating me and, since I get five slots to fill for each category, I see no reason why I shouldn’t reserve one for myself, especially considering that Fred (or some Aussie dude or dudette) is most likely to win.
I know I’ll be getting at least three nominating votes (not bad considering how low the numbers for some categories are sometimes) – and I certainly don’t expect to make it to the final ballot but heck – everyone else either goes around begging votes or urging people NOT to nominate them – so:
If you’ve got an empty slot in the Fan Writer category, why not throw me a bone? You could do worse (I think). And if you’ve already decided to nominate me – please, please don’t do. I’m not buying into any false modesty here. I’ll take my three or four or five nominations and proudly display Hugo Awards Nominee (long list) on the blog!
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Speaking of Hugos and various and sundry reasons why you might want to consider nominating me: there’s my contributions to the Cordwainer Smith blog, my contributions to several SFSignal Mind Melds (particularly apt example as the question addresses the relevance of the Hugo Awards and I get to pontificate on why they are important), or, more recently, my first quote picked up on the TOR website (other than commentary), where Jo Walton (none other than Jo Walton!) mentions me by name (ooooo, shivers). Not to mention the weird and wacky goodness that are my daily entries here (though of course not everyone will agree with those adjectives – some might substitute ’stupid’: don’t let that stop you from nominating though – every village needs an idiot!). I’ve also risen to the Top 100 over at 42Blips, have been picked up by BoingBoing a couple of times, and get linked to or covered by folks and sites like File 770, Grasping For the Wind, the Haikasoru blog, Biology in Science Fiction and, oh, just about everywhere they’re talking SF.
If you consider quoting or linking to be an endorsement…(unless of course I’m being castigated, in which case, thank me for the entertainment value inherent in public floggings).
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I can’t stop there. Among my other nominations (besides the foregoing) will be Keith Graham’s story The Nigerian Soul (which you read for free here) because I like the story and because we need more representation from works that appear on the web; I’m nominating All You Need Is Kill and The Lord of the Sands of Time from Haikasoru/VIZ because we need to broaden our horizons and consider foreign language works, Finch by VanderMeer because he liked my monkey, File 770 for Fanzine, SFSignal for the regular and unrelenting coverage of the field and others I’ve not quite settled on.
For further information about the awards, deadlines, the categories & etc go here.
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Work on Electro-Pulp Video Magazine Vol 2, Issue 1 will begin this weekend. I’ll be covering Amazing Stories, April 1926. Found some interesting historical stuff to add to what is already known. Warning – the previous was a teaser.
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Stuff outside of genre considerations is now coming to a head. I’ve done my work, written my stuff and am waiting for the next round of craziness. In the meantime, I’m able to post a little bit more.
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Re-reading Watership Down and intermittently pondering where this work fits into the greater scheme: literary? fantasy? What?
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Most folks have answered my blog round up question and I’ll be posting that soon; the laura Bynum interview is awaiting one follow-up question (which I have not yet sent out); otherwise, once printed, I think you’ll find this new author’s perspective on several issues interesting and informative.
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I could comment all day on stuff I’ve been reading. In particular, I’d like to comment on Sarah Hoyt’s recent piece about musical mechanicals of the obese variety. You’ll have to be content for now to read it yourselves.
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Finally: traffic, (prompted by the rise in status at 42Blips): I link to a lot of you folks and you link to me (mostly); I’d appreciate an add to the blogroll from some of you – especially some of you who have recommended me to others. I’m updating links and blogroll myself today and tomorrow – and please, if you do things alphabetically, drop the ‘THE”.
I can pass this little secret of traffic generating on to you all: right now, if you can figure out a contextual title that has “XXX” and Robert A Heinlein closely associated in it, you’ll draw quite a few extra hits.
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO MY FEED
Thanks muchly. It’s good to know I’m still “historically relevant.”
However: http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&hl=en&q=factoid
“factoid /?fækt??d/ DJ /’fæk?t??d/ KK
*
noun
o
something that is widely accepted as a fact, although it is probably not true”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Factoid
“1 : an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
“A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement formed and asserted as a fact, but with no veracity. The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true.”[1] ”
In other words, that word doesn’t mean what you, and a lot of people, think it means.
Re: Hugo nominations: And not USURPER OF THE SUN? That’s been my favourite of eligible works I’ve read so far.
Okay. I dropped the “The” from the blog name – well, I put it at the end.
Watership Down is a personal favorite, I’ve read it several times at decade or two intervals, and liked and gotten more from it each time. I consider it fantasy, due to the talking animals, but it’s not REAL fantasy, in that it’s really general fiction but the people happen to be rabbits. It’’s a tough call. On my shelves it falls into a category I’d call “nature fiction”, along with such novels as The Cold Moons, Rascal, Winter of the Fisher, Tarka, Watchers at the Pond and Black Fox Running. Not all those books have the animals talking, in fact most do not, but they have a similarity of context. Watership Down is probably the best of them. I guess I got attached to that kind of stuff as a kid when I read the books dog by Albert Payson Terhune. I still have a few of those somewhere around here…
Looking forward to the blog round-up thing. Assume a heads-up so it can be linked to will be given.
I like – and despair about – your traffic tips, but hell, I’ll give it a try…
As for reading, I owndr why the hell I just now discovered James White and his Sector General books. How on earth does this stuff slip past? I’ve read the first two novels, Hospital Station and Star Surgeon, and I like them a lot. Reading #3 Major Operation, now. Look for a post about these on my blog soon.
Richard – might not be the kind of traffic you want, lol. That came about because I was looking at the “search terms” folks used to get to the site and, for quite some time running, “xxx” and “sex” have been at the top or close to the top of the list, while Heinlein (and Ellison) remain at the top among SF-related terms.
Of course, no one would have gotten to my site by searching for XXX if I didn’t have those words in here somewhere (Top XXX Science Fiction this, that or the other thing).
Gary – appreciate the link to the dictionaries – and according to legal definition you are correct – but Dictionaries are notoriously behind the times. Consider my usage to be blogging patois, not standard English, lol.
Colin – you are correct – I think that Usurper is probably the best of the four I’ve read from Haikasoru so far – and I’ll be amending my final list.
“I consider it fantasy, due to the talking animals, but it’s not REAL fantasy, in that it’s really general fiction but the people happen to be rabbits. It’’s a tough call.”
Nah. First you’d have to find a way to define “REAL tantasy,” to be able to hell it from the unreal sort.
“How on earth does this stuff slip past?”
Insufficient attention.
“First you’d have to find a way to define “REAL tantasy,” to be able to hell it from the unreal sort.”
Or “tell it.” Reader’s choice.