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classic grrm. hosting the hugos and talking about the bad food they had at the hotels 40 years ago at the hugo awards
AARD VARKMAN fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 00:20
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TheAardvark posted:oh god grrm is the host Saudi Arabia bid this year for the 2022 con and lost to Chicago
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Aug 1, 2020 00:23
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Oh noooo they don't know how to do audio
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Aug 1, 2020 00:27
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Teddybear posted:Oh noooo they don't know how to do audio they just left george's mic on while trying to go to the winner's camera and it was just him breathing heavily in to it for a solid 20 seconds. fantastic
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Aug 1, 2020 00:41
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Is this why there hasn't been a new GOT book in a decade, was he writing his patter for this?
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Aug 1, 2020 00:44
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SFL Vol 08 recap final -A humorous or not-humorous attempt to poison the well for a 1985 WorldCon hosting bid gets mentioned or is it just a texan tall tale? This story contains many Texas stereotypes so any Ayes of Texas megafans or/and Texas residents should pre-emptively claim the gently caress down. -Reading the SFL archives chat about Sundiver and Startide Rising has softened my views on David Brin. The David Brin of 37 yrs/30 yrs/20 years ago is not the bitter boomer CHUD David Brin of 2019, clever and tolerant David Brin died off over a decade ago. David Brin's Uplift universe stories are worth reading for the galactic species and Interstellar Universal Library concept in them. For a 2020 reader new to David Brin's Uplift stories, yes there is awkward interspecies sex scenes in each of the Uplift books that -first book of Roger Zelazny's new Amber series gets teased for a 1984 release. Looking back at Zelazny's earlier Amber stories,and the wholesale stealing from Philip Jose Farmer's earlier series, am now thinking that the obvious "written for the money" Amber books mostly exist, ironically, as a way for Zelazny to pay off PJF and confuse people into thinking PJF ripped off Zelazny...which then leads to owing PJF another round of settlement money, etc -Spider Robinson (mega-overrated) gets mentioned for the 872th time as a person of note in the SFF community that every serious SFF fan should be aware of. tldr summary of Spider Robinson: Robert Heinlein was Spider Robinson's God, and Spider Robinson fully embraced the Moses role. -The mailing list moderator(BackStabMod) who did a hostile takeover of the SF-LOVERS Digest lasted a little over 15 months managing the SFL mailing list before giving up, claiming privacy right concerns (a la DolphinFucker) with the ARPANET and the inability to manage future SF-LOVERS mailing list Digests if they have no future ARPANET access are the real reasons why they are stepping down as SF-LOVERS mod. BackStabMod's explanations about privacy concerns were unironically accompanied by lots and lots of personal details of BackStabMod's life and future plans. -Rudy Rucker, 1980s mathematician and scifi author got discussed. Some of the people like RR's work simply because they incorporate mathematics into their stories, others dislike RR for the shoehorned-in mathematics and the kookiness factor in RR's stories. Regardlessly, I had never heard of The Sex Sphere By Rudy Rucker before, and really don't plan on reading it. -Movie chat continued, with Wargames 1983 & the upcoming Dune movie directed by David Lynch being frequent topics of discussion. Nightmares(?) the anthology horror film had a gamer-hell segment that seemed very VR goggles. A weird arthouse movie call Liquid Sky got mentioned for it's scifi elements and unique take on exploitation/horror/scifi/drugs. -For the 5th time or so in SFL archives history, someone asked for lists "SF&F Novels of Literary Merit", and then got pissy at the lack of responses/not enough people doing their homework slash PhD thesis research for them. Basic things like the request being a loaded question, the requestor obviously fishing for data for their PhD thesis on Science Fiction Novels of Literary Merit, and the responder requesting all survey answers being sent to a obscure location confused and angered people similar to Arthur Dent and the house demolition notice (It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'). Additionally defending the merit of SFF is a hill SFF Culture Warrior John S Quarterman is willing to die on (John Quarterman requested people get his name right when referring to him so I did). -Somebodies worse SF novel they can ever recall reading is ARMADA by Michael Jahn, which I have done zero research on,and will probably forget about until the next time I go through my SFL archive Vol 08 bookmarks -Probably only of interest to me and a select few others, but TRAVELLER RPG gets mentioned a few times and this allows me to mention without any hate in my soul additional filksong lyrics chat along with the 300+ odes or verses to a filk-song about "olde time religion" or something similar. I refuse to bookmark filk-chat so you'll have to dig through SFL Vol 08 yourself to find them -private space sector efforts vs government funded space sector SFL archives chat in 1983 aged badly given the 2019/2020 private space sector events -SF vs Sci-fi vs skiffy. AKA a fans of Science Fiction culture war that boils down to (in 2020 terms) how you refer to Science-Fiction in short-hand terms(SF vs Sci-fi vs skiffy) defining your TRUE FAN STATUS versus other people/other Science Fiction fans. -Big time Dr Who chat. Peter Davidson leaving the role so soon after Tom Baker, and american Public access tv repeating the Doctor Who serials more than Star Trek the Original Series got repeated has driven up the SFL Dr Who Chat. To give some context, the Five Doctors special just came out, which skewed slightly into Douglas Adams chat when Douglas Adam's as a Dr Who writer came up. John Nathan-Turner has been mentioned multiple times promising many things to Doctor Who fans, of which zero point zero zero zero zero three promises will actually happen (the first person of color companion promise took an additional 34 loving years to happen) -Empire of the Petal throne, a D&D setting TSR abandoned in lieu of Greyhawk, then Forgotten Realms, then Mystra, then Forgotten Realms (again) gets mentioned. Empire of the Petal Throne is D&D set in a hybrid China/Japan/Korea/India setting. -On the topic of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, SFL chat was about how the books deviated from the original HHGTTG radio broadcasts and the followup BBC HHGTTG radio sequel programs. Finally Douglas Adams running out of tombstones to swear on while promising each HHGTTG sequel will be the "last one I swear" was the new SFL archives running joke (replacing the previous SFL running jokes of PAC-man puns and before that Indiana Jones sequel pun-names) -Something called the unofficial Wizards and Warriors unathorized future history continuation has been hyped multiple times by one SFL poster. Suspecting that SFL postergot told to knock it off/stop hosting this on the ARPANET, because the last Wizards & Warriors hype pitch in SFL Vol 08 combines a "lost subscriber/please help me find them" with an acknowledgement of getting kicked off their former ARPANET/CSNet host -Convention security run by SFF fans gets mentioned, with Robert Asprin of Myth/Thieves World/IRS back-taxes fame getting mentioned as the leader of the Dorsai Irregulars aka the Klingon Diplomatic Corps. Am pretty certain doing any kind of research into this group will involve cringe factors and discovering covered-up sexual assault -MIT's Science Fiction Society slash private library gets mention-pimped in detail for the first time since 1980-1981. No idea if this exists currently or MIT cracked down on it. As I've said repeatedly before, I bookmark things of interest and very rarely look things up because there is so much stuff in the SFL Digest that if I took the time to look up everything mentioned, I would be much further behind in my SFL archive read-through. -A post about "Death Star population = Imperial Cas" succeasfully predicts one of the events in "The Last Jedi" aka the hyperdrive suicide bombing. e: updated post with a "always skip the awkward interspecies sex scenes/sexual harassment scenes" clarifier on David Brin Uplift universe stories quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 00:44
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So far this is a mess, but a very understandable mess. Talking over winner videos, cutting to the wrong screen, forgetting to unmute folks before putting them on screen... I mean this must be a loving nightmare to produce behind the scenes.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:15
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Teddybear posted:So far this is a mess, but a very understandable mess. Talking over winner videos, cutting to the wrong screen, forgetting to unmute folks before putting them on screen... I mean this must be a loving nightmare to produce behind the scenes. I'm on the Worldcon events team this year (not on the Hugo team, thank god) and yeah it's like an anthill that has been kicked over and also set on fire.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:21
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Teddybear posted:So far this is a mess, but a very understandable mess. Talking over winner videos, cutting to the wrong screen, forgetting to unmute folks before putting them on screen... I mean this must be a loving nightmare to produce behind the scenes. Some of them are hilarious, like when they accidentally cut back to the end of that one presenter's announcement, after they'd finished, where she just was going "AAH" then instantly cut away. The speeches have been really good, though. And GRRM is a complete goober, but he definitely has a lot of related stories and fun history. I didn't think I'd be sitting here through all of it.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:25
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quantumfoam posted:David Brin's Uplift universe stories are worth reading for the galactic species and Interstellar Universal Library concept in them. For a 2020 new to David Brin's Uplift stories, yes there is awkward interspecies sex scenes in each of the Uplift books that can/probably should be skipped over. What's that?...... *high pitched clicking and sqeaking*....... DolphinFucker heavily disagrees with that last statement. I got about four pages into the first Uplift book and there was a bit where the main character was mentally drooling over how hot a woman looked in a bikini and I decided maybe I didn't feel like reading them after all.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:34
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HopperUK posted:I got about four pages into the first Uplift book and there was a bit where the main character was mentally drooling over how hot a woman looked in a bikini and I decided maybe I didn't feel like reading them after all. I reread startide rising about a year ago and the sexual harassment subplot was a whole lot worse than I had remembered
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Aug 1, 2020 01:57
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Good Omens won and Neil Gaiman's entire speech was about Terry Pratchett, and how this is really his first Hugo. 
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Aug 1, 2020 02:28
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Neil Gaiman's looking pretty dreadful. Having a failing marriage and living in a lonely castle while all your neighbors hate you for traveling during lockdown seems to have taken its tole.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:29
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Kinda amazing that Jeannette Ng won the best new writer award, called out the award for being named after a loving fascist, and then won another award the next year for calling him out.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:43
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Teddybear posted:Kinda amazing that Jeannette Ng won the best new writer award, called out the award for being named after a loving fascist, and then won another award the next year for calling him out. very happy with this. especially since GRRM has been unapologetically namedropping him all night
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Aug 1, 2020 02:44
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No disagreements here. The sex scenes in David Brin's Uplift stories are the worst parts of the Uplift books, especially the sexual harassment dolphin in Startide Rising. Uplift War goes deep, ugh into chimpanzee sex life. The refugee planet books sort of improve about that but not really thinking back. Upgrade my original comment to "always skip the awkward interspecies sex scenes/sexual harrassment" in Brin's Uplift books. In between finishing SFL Vol 08, I read James P Hogan's Inherit the Stars, Eando Binder's Anton York, Immortal, and touched Donald Barr's Space Relations a bit more. That Donald Barr book Space Relations I mentioned before.....[SARCASM MODE]you can tell the main character in it is deep because they always mutter a line or two of poetry before going back to their sex slave duties[/SARCASM MODE] https://youtu.be/j6QOn686Whc (Sex Farm Woman song by Spinal Tap). More seriously, Donald Barr tried to tie a previously unknown hostile alien race had visited the sex-slave planet repeatedly before humans colonized it plot into Space Relations but kept getting distracted by writing out just one more bdsm kink scenario over and over again until the book had 8 pages left to wrap everything up. While Anton York, Immortal was wish-fullfillment, benevolent solar system terraforming, and needing 20000+ yr old villains or travelling to another dimension for anything to pose as a threat to the main character; Inherit the Stars was really actively bad. Every chapter in ITS had exactly one sentence of plot advancement (everything else was filler), the characters inside ITS were as deep as 2018 John Scalzi (that is not a compliment on either side), and the main character of ITS was a hyper-genius with the magic gift of "networking" and "sharing a database of findings to everyone". I can see how James P Hogan got obsessed with the Inherit The Stars setting for the rest of life after the cosmological work Hogan did for the big "reveals" in ITS.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:49
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Emergency Skin and This Is How You Lose the Time War both winning is good as hell, both of those were excellent.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:07
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I swear to god this is like having your granddad present the awards.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:12
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A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine won Best Novel. I liked it a lot but the "slow" comments were right. I think I'd have been happier with Thousand Doors or Gideon.
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Aug 1, 2020 03:17
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Ornamented Death posted:I swear to god this is like having your granddad present the awards. 
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Aug 1, 2020 03:30
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Teddybear posted:Kinda amazing that Jeannette Ng won the best new writer award, called out the award for being named after a loving fascist, and then won another award the next year for calling him out. Came here to post this, such powerful energy
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Aug 1, 2020 04:15
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quantumfoam posted:-MIT's Science Fiction Society slash private library gets mention-pimped in detail for the first time since 1980-1981. No idea if this exists currently or MIT cracked down on it. As I've said repeatedly before, I bookmark things of interest and very rarely look things up because there is so much stuff in the SFL Digest that if I took the time to look up everything mentioned, I would be much further behind in my SFL archive read-through. MITSFS still exists, they have a (terribly old-fashioned) website including their library catalogue, and they're on Twitter
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Aug 1, 2020 11:50
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TheAardvark posted:very happy with this. especially since GRRM has been unapologetically namedropping him all night https://twitter.com/TheHugoAwards/status/1288615184399925248
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Aug 1, 2020 11:59
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Teddybear posted:Kinda amazing that Jeannette Ng won the best new writer award, called out the award for being named after a loving fascist, and then won another award the next year for calling him out. That's very surprising, considering that Worldcon this year has been blanking writers for supporting BLM. Still better than FinnCon, which has literal Nazis on the ConCom, but come the gently caress on.
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Aug 1, 2020 14:26
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What is the general feel about Gideon the Ninth? Im about 20 pages in and want to know if its a slow starter or if it is just the writing that hasn't caught me yet.
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Aug 1, 2020 14:42
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KKKLIP ART posted:What is the general feel about Gideon the Ninth? Im about 20 pages in and want to know if its a slow starter or if it is just the writing that hasn't caught me yet. Some people really like it (I did) and some people find it a little cloying. Not to spoil too much, but after some setup it eventually turns into a haunted house spooky mystery story. I think the tone of the narration and Gideon's personality in the first 20 pages is pretty representative though.
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Aug 1, 2020 15:14
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I bailed after 50 pages.
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Aug 1, 2020 15:56
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KKKLIP ART posted:What is the general feel about Gideon the Ninth? Im about 20 pages in and want to know if its a slow starter or if it is just the writing that hasn't caught me yet. It didn't grab me, but a lot of people around here loved it, so don't go by me. (added: This is sad but funny. Short form: editor decides to revive beloved swords-and-sorcery anthology; writers contribute stories; editor collects the stories and then adds an introduction that's one long chuddy rant about feminism; writers find out about the introduction when the book shows up on Amazon and start demanding their stories be removed; publisher pulls the book from Amazon and frantically tries to cover his rear end.) Selachian fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 16:10
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The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N390U59/ The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J5X5LVQ/ The Dragon Republic (Poppy War #2) by RF Kuang - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CRKXQ1Y/
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Aug 1, 2020 17:36
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Selachian posted:(This is sad but funny. Short form: editor decides to revive beloved swords-and-sorcery anthology; writers contribute stories; editor collects the stories and then adds an introduction that's one long chuddy rant about feminism; writers find out about the introduction when the book shows up on Amazon and start demanding their stories be removed; publisher pulls the book from Amazon and frantically tries to cover his rear end.) drat it, I was looking forward to this anthology quite a bit: Flashing Swords had some great swords & sorcery stuff back in the day, when Lin Carter was still alive. Robert Price pulled something similar in Lovecraftian circles (in an event speech, IIRC), which is the work he's mostly known for, and was largely excommunicated from there as well.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:30
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That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. I've read mountains of horror short stories but I think Gene Wolfe is the only time I've ventured in to SF short fiction much.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:39
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pradmer posted:The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner - $1.99 An very good book, one of 4 or 5 must-reads of Brunner, but really depressing. Like perhaps in the "2020 not a good time to read this book"-level depressing. Edit: TheAardvark posted:That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. Try Phil K. Dick's collections. I think he works rather better at short-story length than his novels. Hobnob fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Aug 1, 2020 |
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Aug 1, 2020 18:45
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TheAardvark posted:That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. I also like: Greg Egan's Axiomatic, any of M. John Harrison's collections, Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:50
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TheAardvark posted:That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. Ursula K. Le Guin has couple of absolutely solid short fiction collections. There’s omnibus edition with both Compass Rose and Wind’s Twelve Quarters in print quite recently. Just going through Harlan Ellison’s (editor) Dangerous Visions and enjoying it. It came out at very transformative period for genre literature and is probably worth a read just for the perspective.
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Aug 1, 2020 19:16
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pradmer posted:The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman - $1.99 I really enjoyed this. I also enjoyed the sequel though it has some major issues.
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Aug 1, 2020 19:19
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So! One of my presents for my birthday was the Illustrated Ursula Le Guin Earthsea omnibus and I have never owned a bigger book. Some come close but this is ridiculous. I love it. It's strictly a book I read in the morning in front of my lightbox because it is NOT a mobile book. This is also weirdly convenient because if I'd gotten the paperbacks I would've put them in the stack to wait until I finish reading Dragonsbane and now instead I'll just read everything at once. ps her retrospective on feminism and how Tehanu was received as being TOO political was fascinating, loved that preface.
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Aug 1, 2020 19:26
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Llamadeus posted:Obvious suggestion: both of Ted Chiang's collections. It’s this, how long till black future month and At the Mouth Of the River of Bees by Kiji Johnson. Also any old Zelazny collection, and the James Tiptree Jr omnibus.
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Aug 1, 2020 19:29
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StrixNebulosa posted:So! One of my presents for my birthday was the Illustrated Ursula Le Guin Earthsea omnibus and I have never owned a bigger book. Some come close but this is ridiculous. I love it. It's strictly a book I read in the morning in front of my lightbox because it is NOT a mobile book. This is also weirdly convenient because if I'd gotten the paperbacks I would've put them in the stack to wait until I finish reading Dragonsbane and now instead I'll just read everything at once. Enjoy. I love UKL, and now I have something to throw on the birthday list. Thanks for the rec!
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Aug 1, 2020 19:32
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Anias posted:Enjoy. I love UKL, and now I have something to throw on the birthday list. Thanks for the rec!  You could kill a man by dropping this on him. The one caveat I have about this omnibus aside from the size is that the illustrations are sparse. As in they're lovely but there aren't very many of them. If you're still okay with that, this thing is like, candy to me. Huge and indulgent.
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Aug 1, 2020 19:51
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TheAardvark posted:That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. How Long Til Black Future Month by NK Jemsin. The Best of Glen Cook by guess who Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee, or any other of their anthologies. Bolo ! and Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer, being Bolo and Retief stories respectively.
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Aug 1, 2020 20:02
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