The Sword and Laser discussion

This thread is a place to share (and discuss) news (or news adjacent) stuff that doesn't rate consideration for the podcast Quick Burns and/or their own thread here in the news section.

Unlike the Quick Burns thread, people can go ahead and just reply at will about whatever.

Ok, here's my first contribution to Slow Burns, a reference from Andrew Liptak's latest newsletter, for those of us with TMTBR (Too Many To Be Read) books...

Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books
an essay by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
https://nesslabs.com/antilibrary

My antilibrary isn't quite up to Umberto Eco's standards yet, but someday, maybe.

A look inside the private library of Umberto Eco

https://youtu.be/Czc_KjWji8E

Thanks Rob.

Forrest J Ackerman had a large library in his basement to which he told people that he had read each and every last word. A difficult feat as many were in foreign languages.

But, being the ham he was, it was a setup. He quickly revealed that he had opened each book, turned to the last page, and read the final word.

Marlon James, author of the July 2020 book pick, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, was on "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me" this week talking about his stories coming to HBO and also trying to break into a place you wouldn't believe. https://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wai...

I thought posts here would be a page long.

It's just a blurb, really, but the NYT notes that all the books added to the fiction bestseller list this week are series installments: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/bo...

I wish they did some more speculation about why. Seems like Hollywood has long since gone the same way. Series often make for compelling reading, but at least for me they also sometimes serve as a barrier to entry. I know I won't be reading the Wheel of Time, for example. I'm even a bit turned off from next month's pick, to be honest. But it also sometimes seems like SciFi and Fantasy are the special preserves of folks who only write in series. To each their own, I suppose, but I wouldn't mind more standalones.

Seth wrote: "I wish they did some more speculation about why."

Series sell better, probably because readers want more of the same. As much as I like standalones, I’m also a fan of series. I bail out of most of them, but the ones I like are ones I *really* like.

They’re also easier for authors. They don’t have to keep creating new worlds, merely add to existing ones, which is infinitely easier.

Interesting:

Whatever happened to Short Round? Ke Huy Quan returns to the big screen

https://ew.com/movies/short-round-eve...

I’m looking forward to Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Trike wrote: "Seth wrote: "I wish they did some more speculation about why."

Series sell better, probably because readers want more of the same. As much as I like standalones, I’m also a fan of series. I bail out of most of them, but the ones I like are ones I *really* like.
"

Yeah, as much as I was just regretting there aren't too many standalones, really I do read plenty of series books and my thoughts are a lot like yours. If I like them, I can't wait for the next installment, but more often than not I don't stick around.

Trike wrote: "Seth wrote: "I wish they did some more speculation about why."

Series sell better, probably because readers want more of the same. As much as I like standalones, I’m also a fan of series. I bail o..."

For me, the nice thing about a series is eliminating some of the risk. I only have so much time to read, so when I'm picking up a new book or series, there's the risk that I'm not going to enjoy it and feel like I should have picked something else. But if I'm continuing a series where I enjoyed the previous book, I'm significantly reducing the risk that I'm going to waste my time.

This is fascinating. A pictorial NY Times article...

How a Book Is Made
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...

The book they follow thru the printing process is Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James

Interview with author Michael Mammay.

https://winteriscoming.net/2022/02/26...

So this news article is from 2019 but I just read it today, how's that for a slow burn? It made my science fiction heart very pleased.
https://www.popsci.com/black-hole-in-...

https://lithub.com/what-should-you-ca...

LitHub has a silly article on using a silly algorithm to help name your book club. Trying to better Sword and Laser came up with few decent suggestions. "Fiction Geek" wasn't bad, "Fiction Verse" is dumb, but suggests Fiction-verse which is maybe good? Anyway, it's sometimes nice to see computers failing to be creative since they're so much smarter than me in every other way.

I was thinking about how to refer to our kind of fiction (sci-fi, fantasy & horror) the other day. Some say "genre", but I feel that's vague & confusing to the uninitiated. Speculative fiction is the fancy term, I believe, but it basically means fiction that asks "What If". Unfortunately, this is now known as a Marvel cartoon (& comics of course), but it would sure be a cool name for a podcast or a bookstore. Queue Trike.

I remember the first time I heard that Harlan Ellison was making a big deal about using the term "SF" instead of "Sci-Fi." Apparently in his mind "Sci-Fi" referred to stuff like creature flicks and "SF" was more serious. I thought he was a pompous ass. But then, being a pompous, attention-attracting ass paid off well for him. When I was a young'un "SF" or "Sci-Fi" also included Fantasy. Hence "SFWA" was the Science Fiction Writers of America and included Fantasy by implication.

As for me, I'm fine with SF, SFF, Sci-Fi, Spec-Fic, heck, go all the way back and call it Scientifiction. It's all good.

SFF. Science Fiction And Fantasy. Boom, done.

I wanted to include horror, but thanks.

I think of horror as optionally adjacent to SFF. That is, a book can be horror without SFF, horror with some SFF elements or mostly SFF with horror (and probably other things...).

Whereas "SFF " encompases pure fantasy , hard science fiction and things that blur between those (SF but with fantasy trappings, ala Star Wars or Dune or SF that's science focused but not 'hard' in the sense of using concepts outside of currently known science, i.e. FTL).

SFF has SF and Fantasy under one umbrella. Sometimes Horror walks alongside.

Rick wrote: "Sometimes Horror walks alongside."

...or slightly behind, in the shadows.

I agree to that Horror definition. Just listening to another podcast they had the discussion what distinguishes crime from thriller and how it works alongside fantasy.
And I came to the same conclusion - you can have crime stories in SFF, or you can have Horror stories in SFF - but that doesn't mean a podcast about SFF needs to cover ALL horror and crime stories.

Nils wrote: "I agree to that Horror definition. Just listening to another podcast they had the discussion what distinguishes crime from thriller and how it works alongside fantasy.
And I came to the same concl..."

I define Horror into two camps: with supernatural or science fictional elements and without.

For the “scary fantasy” version of Horror, I call them Chillers. Examples: The Shining, Maplecroft, The Walking Dead, Book One. Science Fiction also has Chillers: Alien, Mexican Gothic, I Am Legend.

For the “scary fiction” side, I call those Thrillers. Examples: We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lord of the Flies, No Country for Old Men.

Thank you, Trike! I'm 100 x more interested in Chillers, but I do enjoy a detective story. I haven't read or watched any of those Thrillers, but No Country for Old Men is on my movie watch list.

A decade-old article from NK Jemison's blog about magic:
https://nkjemisin.com/2012/06/but-but...

Some other article pointed to it and this was more interesting than that article. Is D+D responsible for taking the magic out of magic?

She's right - the intricate system of magic stuff is game logic and its use, especially its rigorous application, doesn't belong in fantasy writing.

I think what she skips over is that if magic has no rules in a book a less than really good author can and often does use it as an almost literal deus ex machina. Oh, the heroes are trapped on top of a tower with no way down and the bad guys closing in? All of a sudden someone wishes really hard and they vanish and reappear in the forest despite no inkling of that power being in the book to that point.

In Mistborn, Sanderson trod a middle ground that seems pretty reasonable. Some people could burn different metals to do differnt things. Talents were specialized - people couldn't use all of the metals, just (usually) two. How this 'burning' worked was unexplained, why those two likewise, etc.

Bujold, in the Chalion novels, does similar things but more toward the mystical side. Using death magic rebounds on the caster, which keeps its use limited and there's some way to sort souls so they go to the right of five gods... but there are exceptions. The gods sometimes meddle but infrequently.

But mostly I agree with Nora - magic should be wild, unexplainable and beyond science. It takes a good author not to fall into using it as a crutch, but that's ok - it just gives us another way to measure fantasy authors.

Seth wrote: "A decade-old article from NK Jemison's blog about magic:
https://nkjemisin.com/2012/06/but-but...

Some other article pointed to it and this was more interesting than that article. Is D+D responsible for taking the magic out of magic?..."

I’ve been saying this for… let’s see… carry the 2… several decades now. (Publicly on Usenet back in the mid 1990s, so it’s probably still available if Google hasn’t trashed everything yet. I’m sure there are several posts I’ve made here on Goodreads saying the same.)

I attribute the rise of Hard Fantasy to two things: games and daily tech.

D&D was a niche activity, but its influence was huge, especially on video games. Games of any kind, from checkers to chess, poker to euchre, only work if they have rules. Once rules were applied to Fantasy worlds that kinda-sorta resembled Middle Earth, people started conflating the two. And it’s nice to have constraints on your game and your fiction; it’s makes the world explicable and repeatable for the former, while enhancing the reader engagement in the latter.

Hard Fantasy has been around for a while — my first exposure to it was the 1980 Lyndon Hardy novel, Master of the Five Magics — but it really took off after video games set in Fantasy worlds became popular. It was the killer app of the idea to treat magic like science.

The second part is that on some basic level even people with no scientific or technical know-how are aware that the world obeys natural laws. They may not be able to explain those laws, but there’s an awareness that there are some rules that everything follows. This is becoming ever more apparent as technology becomes more personal and we are forced to become conversant with the operating systems that run our phones, cars, and everything else. That kind of exposure spills over into our art and entertainment and people start expecting rules in their fiction.

Which is not to say that this is universal. As Jemisin points out, lots of people resist this tendency. Largely because it “takes the fun out of it”.

Brandon Sanderson is probably the foremost practitioner of Hard Fantasy today, and he once told a story about one of his earliest invitations to speak on a panel about how magic works. He was all prepared to discuss the rules of magic, how the system should be understandable enough for the reader to follow, all of that… when the other panelists said something similar to Jemisin’s post: magic doesn’t have rules!

I think this is one of those instances where we’re seeing a bifurcation of a genre in real time. Asimov always bemoaned the fact that the atomic bomb divided Science Fiction into old-fashioned blue-sky gee-whiz stuff versus ripped-from-tomorrow’s-headlines stories, and readers were suddenly far more interested in the latter. Jemisin, and others like her, are doing the same thing when they prefer the older Tolkien way of using magic. Neither way is right or wrong, it merely comes down to preference,

Personally I don’t mind either approach, although I admit I prefer rules-based magic systems over the anything-goes version because the degree of difficulty is higher. It’s harder to obey internal consistency when telling a story rather than just say “then a miracle happened”.

Trike wrote: "Seth wrote: "A decade-old article from NK Jemison's blog about magic:
https://nkjemisin.com/2012/06/but-but...

Some other article pointed to it and this was mor..."

Thanks for the reminder about Master of the five magics... I remembered reading it but could never remember the title...

I liken "no rules" magic to the early days of technology. A blacksmith somewhere figured out adding carbon to iron makes a better sword. This is accidental discovery is not based on some fundamental understanding of how the world works and appears to be magical (alchemy).

It could be just part of of high fantasy existing in a pre-industrial world.

Chaos on the other hand is an interesting way of looking at magic. Scientifically chaos is not random but classical physics resulting in unpredictable outcomes due to small changes (butterfly effect and three body problem). Magic could be viewed as an emergent phenomena: small changes in "spells" lead to widely different results.

I suspect everything I have written would drive Jemsin nuts.

Iain wrote: "I liken "no rules" magic to the early days of technology. A blacksmith somewhere figured out adding carbon to iron makes a better sword. This is accidental discovery is not based on some fundamental understanding of how the world works and appears to be magical (alchemy)...."

Except that's not magic and I don't think people would have attributed it to magic. It may well have been a fortuitous discovery but if they thought about it, they might well have realized that somehow the charcoal that they added somehow and the hardness were related and experimented further.

Science doesn't have to start with a fundamental understanding of how the world works first - it can absolutely proceed from experimental evidence to theory and the explanation doesn't really need to be precisely correct to qualify as science, just precise enough to allow advancement.

While WE know that the element responsible is carbon, the early smiths could well have just said "we add some charcoal and it changes the resulting metal" and as an explanation that suffices. The fact that charcoal is mostly carbon and that we really just need the pure carbon is more precise but that's all.

From Town & Country magazine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The 35 Best Books About Time Travel
Here's what to read after you finish Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/lei...

The tagline is significant. Many of these books feature romance of some sort. There are several past S&L picks on the list.

Aliens: Vasquez to reveal backstory of beloved Alien franchise character
https://ew.com/books/aliens-vasquez-n...

Aliens: Vasquez written by V. Castro will be published by Titan Books on October 25

Does this mean we'll get Aliens: Hicks someday?

I would've thought Aliens character backstories would be one-shot comic books, but I'll listen if they do audiobooks.
I just installed an Aliens game that was just added to Game Pass on XBox.

3d audio dramas.

Mark wrote: "Does this mean we'll get Aliens: Hicks someday?"

Right now, deep in the Disney dungeons, an accountant is determining if it would make money, and if so you'll definitely see it.

Ok, this is a very important listicle...

Five Books Where Giant Insects Ruin Everyone’s Day
https://www.tor.com/2022/03/24/five-b...

Only five?!? I suppose the qualifier "giant" makes a difference when discussing science-fictional bugs.

So I was suffering from some serious FOMO re: the Sanderson Kickstarter, and wanted to see if he was worth the investment. So I took out Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection thinking it would be a good sampler of his work. Unfortunately, I also just read this slow burns thread and the linked blog:
Seth wrote: "A decade-old article from NK Jemison's blog about magic..."
This made me hyper-aware of how hard Sanderson leaned into "hard fantasy" and "complex magic systems". The first story, which also had multiple award noms, was The Emperor's Soul, and I couldn't help but notice that a significant proportion of the story was centred around how the magic system, "Forgery" worked and whether the Forger could perform a super-hard Forgery. It was so magic-system centric, that this thread was all I could think about.
It was like being told your breathing sounds funny, and now all you can think about is the sound of your breathing, or being told that you say a word too often. I couldn't read the darn story without thinking "oh here's another magic rule, there's another stipulation, this dialogue is explaining the limits of the magic system..." It kind of ruined the story for me, but now I don't know if it would've bugged me anyways or if it was just because of N. K. Jemesin!
Truth be told, I have no problem with complex magic systems. I quite like them. Rothfuss' "sympathy", Jemesin's own "orogeny"... But just being so aware of the mechanism really messed with my reading of this story. Ah well, at least I know longer have Sanderson FOMO, and I can save a few hundred dollars! I won't give up on him yet (and thanks Veronica for recommending Elantris), but I think I'll sit out joining the fan club.

I take Sanderson in small doses and am not a mega-fan (I've read Way of Kings but nothing else in the Stormlight Archives... and I DNFed WoK). But I liked Elantris a lot and the Mistborn series as well.

I haven't paid too much attention to the details of the kickstarter - will the books be available only there or through regular channels too?

Rick wrote: "will the books be available only there or through regular channels too?"

All Sanderson is offering is that the backers get the books first and a premium version of the books plus swag.

They will be released, eventually, through normal means, in normal versions. Minus the swag.

Felicia Day posted this newsletter celebrating the 10th anniversary of Geek and Sundry, with a nod to Veronica and the book club.

https://felicitations.substack.com/p/...

New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movies and TV Shows Coming in April 2022

https://www.cbr.com/new-scifi-fantasy...

Dick or Dune?

I have that edition of the PKD novel. I just looked and it says it was published in 1974 by Manor Books, where the original story is 1965. I can't believe that I had never noticed that it was obviously an Omnicopter on the front. The back even has a bigger image of it, along with a Harvester.

I'll be honest it has been 25 years since I read that story, and don't remember if the imagery makes sense for it as well. Or it was just something they already had the license too, and just recolored.

The PKD coloring looks more appropriate for Dune if you ask me.

I read the Dick book (snicker) last year and, if I recall correctly, the image kind of makes sense for a very specific part of the story.

THE 1,800-YEAR-OLD HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION EXPLAINED


https://www.grunge.com/829734/the-180...

Tolkien on the importance of fantasy and science fiction

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/tol...

Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel on creative recklessness, time travel and her favourite science fiction novels

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/...

Trike wrote: " Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel on creative recklessness, time travel and her favourite science fiction novels."

Good article on her thinking about genre - liked this paragraph:

The Quote wrote: "
Yet before Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction in 2015, Mandel didn’t consider herself a sci-fi writer, she told The Globe in an interview. “It doesn’t contain science fictional technology, so it can’t be science fiction,” a literary agent had told her. But gradually, Mandel came to understand that kind of prescriptive thinking was offensive to sci-fi readers. And more importantly, she realized a more obvious point: Books can be multiple genres and putting them into silos does a disservice to both writers and readers."

That's a more mature view than a lot of other "literary" writers seem to have.