Don't know about the plots, but they surely had the 800-word scenes (which principle he picked up from a "how-to-write-fiction" book). Van Vogt on his first story, again from Dream Makers: "It's impossible for an unorganized person [to write 1,000-1,200 "emotional sentences"], but not for somebody who thinks by a system." (Platt on Van Vogt's methods--"...however eccentric he may sound, when he applies his ideas to his own mind, and when he applies his mind to writing fiction, the result works"--italics Platt's.)
Steve Taylor @ 87: Did you know Van Vogt broke into professional writing with confession stories? No, really. Nearly 50 years later, he expounded on the principles of confession writing for Charles Platt for his book Dream Makers--"These stories have to have emotion in every sentence. You don't say, 'I lived at 323 Grand Street.' You say something like, 'Tears came to my eyes as I thought of my little room at 323 Grand Street.'"
About the MWA's notice--I find the Mira angle interesting because they publish the paperback editions of Kate Wilhelm's "Barbara Holloway" legal mysteries. Now none of these have been nominated for Edgars, but it occurs to me that if SFWA should follow RWA's and MWA's lead here...well, it boggles the mind to think of a work by Kate Wilhelm being ineligible for the Nebula (even if it's not sf as such).
Avram @120 & PNH @133: I wasn't aware of the Maoist origins of the phrase "politically correct," but I did know about its use in leftist self-satire before being "kidnapped by right-wingers," and am glad to see that other people remember this. (Stuck in Oklahoma as I am, I don't get to talk with actual leftists all that much.)
I'd love to see the left kidnap the phrase right back, and broaden it to include counterproductively rigid ideological purity on the right as well as the left. (Both of my home state's senators are paragons of right-wing "political correctness," for instance.) Think there's a chance of that happening?
dcb@165: Oops. Sorry for letting my naked provinciality show, and please consider that one statement to begin "Most American teenagers". (I do set myself up as an exception to that characterization, which probably means my view is even more skewed than it is just from spending most of my life in the middle US.)
Touching on points made by Malaclypse @138 and caffeine @156 (not necessarily in that order):
I got into distance biking as a teenager in rural southwest Missouri in the late 1970's. The roads there are mostly narrow, usually steep, but largely devoid of serious traffic; this being the days before mountain bikes were popular, I had to dismount and drag my bike uphill a lot.
(One non-narrow, heavier-traffic road I frequented was I-65 going south into Branson, shoulders only of course, but the memory of that experience resonates with the discussion of what parents used to let their kids get up to back in the day.)
I sometimes joke that I distance-biked as a teen because I needed some way to visit my girlfriend without having my parents give me a lift, but a lot of my biking had nothing to do with my love life, such as it was. Looking back, I think I biked because I just wanted the freedom to get around and do stuff, freedom that I missed as a transplanted city kid.
Most teenagers want that kind of freedom and autonomy, and almost always associate it with learning to drive and getting their first car. I was and am very much an exception. While I'm not sure exactly why, it may be because I got tired of spending so much time in the family car or on the school bus (20 miles every school day for the latter) and never really absorbed the positive associations of driving.
Finally getting to Malaclypse's point, I learned to drive in a cumbersome old Ford pickup with the gearshift lever on the steering column, and almost all the motor vehicles I've driving regularly since then have been manual shift. With enough practice the process of shifting gears becomes second-nature, but it takes longer than it does for automatic shifting. It also requires sensitivity to one's vehicle in unusual driving situations (riding on packed snow, for instance). Whether this makes drivers in general more or less aware of bikers, pedestrians and other objects outside the vehicle, I can't really say from experience.
Incidentally, I recently began commuting to work on bike after my truck's head gasket cracked. So far, I've been lucky not to encounter any unpleasantness with motor vehicles aside from juvenile harassment once in a great while. I mostly take neighborhood roads, put on the lights at night (I usually get off work at 11 pm give or take an hour), and wear a helmet (though I have no problems with those who don't, and follow their arguments with interest). Hope to put up my own pictures as soon as I can get a camera!
Mags @130: I just read and enjoyed Northanger Abbey last year and cracked up over the following dialogue between Isabella and Catherine, which comes shortly after (and ironically contrasts) the high-minded defense of novels you quote:
Isabella: "...But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? -- Have you gone on with Udolpho?"
Catherine: "Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil."
I: "Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?"
C: "Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? -- But do not tell me -- I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world."
I: "Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
C: "Have you, indeed! How glad I am! -- What are they all?"
I: "I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time."
C: "Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?"
I: "Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them...."
C. Wingate @142: Did you know Ingmar Bergman's preferred version of Fanny and Alexander was 312 minutes long? (It was broadcast in this form on Swedish television, I believe over several nights.) If you've only seen the theatrical version (188 minutes), your "sense that there was an awful lot more to it than could be grasped by simply watching it" was on target; obviously there was more that needed to be watched!
It almost seems to mean something, but I can't figure out what.
PNH @ #31: Correct writing credits for "You're No Good"
Serge @ #27: Correct spelling of "Ronstadt"
OK, drive-by nit-pick over. Carry on.
I'm not well-versed in the ways of con panels, but one possible group of panelists keeps nagging at me. Will someone hipper than I am please tell me what this panel was called and how the discussion might have went? The panelists are:
Alice Liddell
Dorothy Gale
Lucy Pevensie
Chihiro Ogino
Coraline Jones
Is Making Light turning into an irony board?
Minor point--the record would not be an LP but a 78, as LP's (and 45 RPM singles) were not developed until after WWII.[/niggling pedant]
Before I figured out that it was rot13'd, I found myself wondering how to pronounce the "Raplpybcrqvn Qenzngvpn" referred to above. (It sort of looks like an attempt at transcribing mumbled cartoon cussing.)
Patrick @2: Was the allusion to Tom Lehrer's "The Old Dope Peddler" ("doing well by doing good") deliberate? I mean, one can view the publishing industry as an engine for creating (and making money off of) book addicts, but I didn't expect an actual publisher to put it quite that way, even indirectly.
As for the possibility of charging to delete crap "randomly and without warning", you should charge twice as much to do so non-randomly at the behest of the consumer. There's a fortune to be made here!
Paula @875, I did notice this, and Avram @878, I did not know about that theory. Taken together, both points remind me about Rosalind Russell's classically catty remark at the 1969 Oscars that "the only female thing in 2001 is a computer with a noticeable lisp." (To be fair, it was in the context of the presentation of the "best director" awards, in which the female stars who collectively presented the award were bemoaning the lack of female stars in the year's nominated movies.)
Serge @ 861: The 2001 discussion took place at the Internet Movie Database, so we were discussing the ratings there (voted upon by IMDb users, ranging from 1 for worst to 10 for best). The current average rating for 2001 is 8.4, but among women it's 7.4. In contrast, the current average rating for Forbidden Planet is 7.8, but among women it's 7.9. (The average for men is about the same as the overall average for both movies.)
These aren't scientific surveys of course--for one thing, men participate at a far greater rate than women (about ten times as many for both of these movies)--but they're certainly useful for considering the tastes of IMDb users (and by extension, most computer-literate film fanatics inclined to keep track of their faves/unfaves). Thanks for your question!
On gender and the "Ice Age" movies--species extinction is a fairly important subtext in those movies, and from time to time the question comes up as to whether extinction might be averted by finding a suitable mate. (Thus much of the plot of the second movie, as well as the jokes revolving around Sid the sloth's inability to get laid to save his life, or at least his genes.) It would be kind of hard to bring in the subject of mates without bringing in gender differentiation.
Now I'm not saying the makers of the "Ice Age" movies handle this especially well, or that it couldn't be done better, just that there's a case for giving gender differences a prominent role in those movies--more so than in, say, WALL-E. (Which I love, but gendered robots bother me more than stereotyped gendered animal characters.)
On a related note, during an online discussion of why men seem to enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey more than women do, it occurred to me that there's no sex in the movie to speak of--not just lovemaking as such, but all the weird and wonderful stuff that happens between men and women on the way to that point. Sexual selection, as it's called. Not that 2001 isn't still one of my own favorite movies, but it did seem a curious omission from a movie about human evolution.
(I would love to see someone write an answer to 2001 incorporating sexual selection. Preferably a comic/romantic take on evolution, and preferably by someone as smart and funny as Connie Willis if not Connie Willis herself.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2009 | 25 |
| 2008 | 5 |
| 2007 | 6 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 5 |
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