Next Line of Dialogue Theater Presents...

Today's Funky Winkerbean:

"...what if there were a database of movies somewhere on the Internet that we could use to look Clifford Anger up? Wouldn't that be a great idea?!"

Cartoonists are as prone to inadvertently assuming their audiences are morons as any other storytellers, I suppose.

Great Example of the Specific Denial

Consumerist, which already delights in smacking Comcast whenever it can -- and why shouldn't they? -- has been digging into a supposed list of "VIPs" that Comcast keeps in the DC area this week. The latest entry is particularly amusing, for the Comcast quote at the end.

Comcast does not and has not offered special service, perks or free upgrades to lawmakers or public officials. Comcast does not and has not operated a dedicated VIP phone number or Web site in any market including the Beltway region.

Note that this, like most denials of the type, does not actually deny what Consumerist was asking about: that Comcast kept up lists of VIPs, prioritized their communications, and went out of their way to make those particular customers happy.

Comcast instead says they don't have a separate phone number or website -- which they don't need, since they can detect incoming phone numbers -- and that they don't offer "special" things to those people. "Special" is a weasel word; if Comcast has ever offered a service, perk, or free upgrade to anyone not on the VIP list -- and I'm sure they do, now and again -- then routinely doing so for VIPs is not "special." And thus they refute Bishop Berkeley.

There's a fine art to denying B when you're accused of A, and Comcast is clearly a master at it.

Trend Pieces

Apparently classic, excellent books are now getting really inappropriate covers! Purely to chase new audiences of actual readers! (Who, clearly, aren't nearly as cultured as the article-writer, and so aren't worthy to read Great Litra'chur.)

This is deeply shocking, particularly since putting inappropriate/lurid/silly/trendy covers of good books has never happened before in the history of the world!!!!!

Award-A-Palooza

I've neglected to mention a bunch of these, so let's strew them about randomly and hope no one notices....


2013 Heinlein Award Winners

This award, for vaguely being Heinleinian and skiffy and pro-space in writings of some kind or another, goes to Allen Steele and Yoji Kondo this year, for no specific works or events.

This award has recently been taken over by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society from the Heinlein Society, according to the Locus Online write-up, which I think implies that Kondo is no longer the chair of the judging committee. But he previously was chair of that committee -- and is still cited as such by the official website of the award -- which is unusual for a winner, to say the least. (Of course, the first winner of the award was Virginia Heinlein, who created the prize and the committee, so there is a tradition to be upheld.)

The award itself will be given out at Balticon 47, in late May in the wilds of Maryland. If you want to see a grown man getting a whopping great sterling silver medallion with another grown man's face on it, this may be your best opportunity.


2013 BSFA Award Nominees

This one is more straightforward: the British Science Fiction Association, which is, as you know Bob, an Association of British people that like Science Fiction, has announced the nominees for their annual awards. Winners will be announced at this year's Eastercon, EightSquared, in scenic Bradford.

There are several categories -- and you can see all of them on the official BSFA blog, but here's the one that everyone cares the most about:

Best Novel
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)
Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)


 2013 Kitschies Nominees

This is a newer, quirkier British award -- which I suspect, like so many other awards, was created because one year the Wrong Things Won -- sponsored by a brand of rum and with three categories with cutesy names. In other words, it's the SF award for the Internet Era, so we'd better get used to it.

This year's nominees:


Red Tentacle:

• Jesse Bullington's The Folly of the World (Orbit)
• Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass (Macmillan)
• Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker (William Heinemann)
• Adam Roberts' Jack Glass (Gollancz)
• Juli Zeh's The Method (Harvill Secker) (Translated by Sally-Ann Spencer)

Golden Tentacle:

• Madeline Ashby's vN (Angry Robot)
• Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (William Heinemann)
• Rachel Hartman's Seraphina (Doubleday)
• Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo (Jo Fletcher Books)
• Tom Pollock's The City's Son (Jo Fletcher Books)

Inky Tentacle:

• La Boca for Ned Beauman's The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)
• Oliver Jeffers for John Boyne's The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket (Doubleday)
• Tom Gauld for Matthew Hughes' Costume Not Included (Angry Robot)
• Peter Mendelsund for Ben Marcus' Flame Alphabet (Granta)
• Dave Shelton for his own A Boy and a Bear in a Boat (David Fickling Books)

If you want explanations of the various naughty, naughty tentacles, check out the Kitschies site. I note that all of these works are distinguished by being "progressive," which I suppose means this is the opposite of the Libertarian's Prometheus Award.

Winners will be announced on February 26th at a random event space in London, because the Internet has nothing to do with boring old crotchety convention fandom! Anarchy Now!



Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees. (Note: this is possibly the only non-sarcastic sentence in the whole post.)

An Appropriate Level of Sarcasm

Unfortunately, the people who most need the message are sarcasm-deaf, but, anyway...

Only a Dozen People in the World Will Know What This Means, But That's Fine

kids. kids. kids. kids. kids. kids. kids. KIDSKIDSKIDSKIDSKIDSKIDKIDS!!!!!!!!!

Now I feel better.

Happy No Itzkoff Day!

Today is the one-year anniversary of Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" SF column for The New York Times Book Review, and thus marks one full year of No Itzkoff. I'm declaring it to be a national holiday.

Sure, some could say that perhaps the global financial crisis, and subsequent nosedive in print advertising, had something to do with it, but I prefer to believe that Sam Tanenhaus came to his senses and has barred Itzkoff forevermore from reviewing SF for the gray lady. That's a great first step, Sam, but now you have to move on: hire someone who actually understands the field to review it for you. I can recommend a few names if you'd like...

Seen: the Perfect Right-Wing Thriller!

Football

+

scary Muslims

=

Blown Coverage!

(At the library today. There was another right-wing Christian-looking book about football and some kind of disaster, too, but that one seemed light on the scary, scary Other.)

The Elusive Itzkoff

While poking through the New York Times Book Review this morning -- parenthetically, Josh Beazell's Beat the Reaper looks like a lot of fun; I'll have to read that -- I noticed that Marilyn Stasio, the stalwart mysteries columnist, was back with reviews of another three new books (and three reissues).

And that led me to wonder what happened to Our Man Itzkoff, last seen emitting a review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in mid-October. So I looked him up: for the year 2008, he appeared in the Book Review six times, twice writing about music and once about Cerwiden Dovey's possibly-fantastic novel Blood Kin.

That left a mere three "Across the Universe" columns -- the aforementioned Anathem review in October, a look at Michael Moorcock's Elric reissues in July, and his famously wrong-footed look at Young Adult novels in February.

I still don't think that NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus reads this blog, but, if anyone out there knows him, please whisper in his ear that this Itzkoff fellow is a serious slacker. He's not even managing to get his column in quarterly, when Stasio has had six since Itzkoff's last column. Either make him work harder -- which would be more entertaining for me, at least -- or just admit that he's a decent music writer but not strong on SFF.

C'mon -- there are at least a dozen bloggers that are better SFF reviewers than Itzy. (And I tactfully leave myself out of the running.) Surely the NYTBR can either make him work or send him home?

The Times When You Wonder If Any Of It Is Worth It

1) You dither for seven weeks, thinking and writing about an interesting but not-completely-successful novel.

2) You finally finish a complicated, seventeen-hundred word review of that novel, highlighting some aspects of the author's style and career that don't seem to have been noted before.

3) One of your readers boils that down to "Andrew Wheeler thinks you're into bondage."

4) Shrug and move on.

In Which I Fail To Get It

A couple of days ago (I was lackadaisical about keeping up with my feeds this weekend), Jay Lake wrote the below paragraph, in linking to a news story about that West Texas polygamist sect that is completely different from every other religious group, because they are evil, and everyone else is good:

"Girls in the west Texas polygamous sect enter into underage marriages without resistance because they are ruthlessly indoctrinated from birth to believe disobedience will lead to their damnation[.]" How is this different from any other religion? That's a serious question, not snark. The followers of virtually all religions raise their children within their religious framework, and impose the moral and behavioral rules of their faith on their children. Why is this different? If you're going to give social approval to religious upbringing, where does the line fall in picking-and-choosing? From my atheistic point of view, it's all indoctrination, after all.

Various people immediately jumped on Lake for being nasty and anti-religion and mean to cuddly little bunnies and unappreciative of their personal soulful connection to Invisible Pink Unicorns and Lake, being a polite man, backed off and apologized.

I, however, am not polite. This was also the weekend in which an old man, selected by a bunch of other old men (of which he was then one) to be head of a huge organization, came to my area to insist that everybody just shut up, stop thinking for themselves, and do what he says. (Or else they'll be tortured for all eternity by an all-loving supernatural being who created everyone and knows everything.)

In other words, he taught that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

All other Christian denominations that I know of also teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

The Muslim sects that I'm familiar with teach that "disobedience will lead to damnation."

Judaism is built on a vast interlocking set of detailed rules, and "disobedience will lead to damnation."

So is the problem merely that Lake is pointing at the most egregious example, and nobody likes to see their own ox being gored? Because it certainly looks to me as if every major religious tradition comes down to "these are the rules you have to follow, and if you don't you'll be tormented for all eternity." And that's exactly what the crazy Texas polygamists are saying, only with their own specific set of rules...but every group has a slightly different set of rules.

The responses all seem to be "well, all the people I know would never play the eternal damnation card...oh, sure, it's there, hidden in the religion somewhere, but only Republicans would actually mention it to the darling little children." Which is hogwash. All Catholics get a solid diet of hell, and so do Muslims. It varies by Protestant denomination, but, unless you get way out to Unitarian Universalists, there's some hell in the mix. Hell is part of the religious equation.

Look, I won the Bible Olympics two years running at my Church in my mis-spent youth; I know what a happy, positive, non-Hell-centric religion looks like. But Hell is still there; damnation is one of the underlying themes. If you don't like that, perhaps you need to reconsider your allegiance to a Supreme Being that insists on it.

Itzkoff Level Now Orange

Dave Itzkoff is a hard man to track down -- he's supposed to be the SF reviewer for the New York Times, but he's more often found doing other things. If he's not reviewing literary fiction, he's interviewing a scientist. If he's not searching for the "new Arthur C. Clarke," he's providing reading suggestions for presidential candidates. Where, oh where will the Itzkoff turn up next?

This week finds Itzkoff on the Times's PaperCuts blog, using Charton Heston's recent death as a springboard to quote the ending of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!

It's nice to see that there is another SF novel that he's read -- even if it is one that's thirty-plus years old -- but, in typical PaperCuts style, the post is really just an excuse for a blogger to grab a YouTube clip, retype something out of a book he already owns, and call it journalism. And Make Room!'s trendy dystopian environmentalism is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected the young Itzkoff to have gravitated towards.

So I still stand by my original characterization of Itzkoff: "the guy who read some SF in college, and didn't engage in it terribly deeply." Although, if he comes back with a passioned defense of A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, he may have a chance to convince me otherwise.

It's a Novel, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Since Certain Persons seem to expect this blog to immediately jump on any appearances of the fiend David Itzkoff in a well-known broadsheet published from West 40th Street -- and I am loathe to disappoint anyone -- the following bit is dedicated to you, my dear readers:

Itzkoff reviewed a novel in this week's New York Times Book Review, yclept Blood Kin by Cerwidden Dovey. Don't bother looking it up at Locus; it's not SF or Fantasy. It does seem to have some pomo qualities -- unspecified location, unnamed narrators, written as a "master's thesis in creative writing" -- for those seeking such things.

I haven't read it, or even heard of it before today, so I can't speak to Itzkoff's critical judgment. And only a weaker man than I would note that he wrote 800 words, and got paid for them, for reading a 183-page novel by an unknown. I will also not be so bold as to suggest that he is, once again, shirking his primary job of reviewing SF for The Times.

No, no. Perish the thought.

The Much-Vaunted Copy-Editing of The New Yorker

One sentence from the article "The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer," by Nick Paumgarten, in the current (December 10th) issue of The New Yorker, on page 80:

Cuomo, the son of the former governor Mario Cuomo, who was a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration, ran unsuccessfully for governor five years ago.

So -- who exactly was a Clinton HUD Secretary? I don't expect that kind of muddy referent from the New Yorker...

Self-Admitted SF Writer Wins Nobel, World To End

Today The Swedish Academy took the last necessary step for the destruction of all life on Earth by awarding this year's Nobel Literature Prize to Doris Lessing. Lessing has not only written several novels of science fiction -- primarily the "Canopus in Argo" series -- but was a Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention.

Since SF is, by definition, disreputable, awarding a Nobel to a writer for a corpus including self-admitted SF proves that the laws of the universe are crumbling. The utter destruction of the Earth itself is soon to follow.

It's been nice, friends...

Great American What?

Nick Mamatas weeps for the state of the American taffy pull.