Flyttandets elände

Nej, jag flyttar inte, men vi håller på och tömmer mammas hus....

Loudon Wainwrights beskrivning av flyttandet och dess elände är mitt i prick:


Min fritid (??) består just nu av:
Kartonger, kartonger och ännu fler kartonger...
Bära möbler och allt möjligt annat...
Osorterade pappershögar...
Vad ska slängas-dilemma...
Flyttdamm....
Spindelväv...
och...
så vansinnigt mycket kvar...!!!

Ideal Jobs

I've seen several people whose job title includes "Evangelist," implying that what they get paid to do is be enthusiastic about things.

That sounded like a cushy job, but I'm really not that good at enthusiasm -- my talents lie much more in the other direction.

So I'm wondering now if there's any company who wants to hire an Anti-Evangelist, a guy who explains why every new idea is horrible and won't work -- I'd be great at it!

(If this were 2000 years ago, I could get the gig to tell Julius "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." That would be right up my alley.)

Obama - Whatever happened?

Barack Obama besöker Sverige... Idag bryr jag mig inte märkvärdigt mycket. Obama var presidenten som skulle bryta mönstret, men någonting har hänt... Vem förväntar sig några stordåd längre?

Jag vet att han inte kan göra allt själv utan att ha senaten och andra instanser med sig. Jag tycker även att han är mycket vettigare än de alternativ som gavs. Men ändå: Menade han något av allt det han sa om att skapa fred när han tillträdde, så skulle han nu kunna utmana och göra något annorlunda. Nu när han ändå inte kan bli återvald skulle han kunna ta steg som skulle sätta spår i världshistorien, istället förfaller han till gamla "lösningar" som att anfalla och kriga. Vad sägs om att kräva tillbaka fredspriset?



Maybe somewhere along the road you just stopped dreaming
Maybe the pain of life just squeezed the love out of your heart
Maybe the fire in your soul just stopped burning
Or maybe you just forgot that you ever used to give a damn
- Dick Gaughan

2013 Hugo Award Winners!

In past years, I've engaged a lot more with the Hugos -- posted annotated lists of the nominees, posted what I did or would have nominated, tried to read and evaluate everything, (badly) predicted the winners, argued with the results -- but these year I've been much less engaged. (To the point of not even bothering to post the nominees, I see.)

Still, the Hugos are the premier SFnal awards, and they were announced yesterday at the usual gala ceremony at the annual Worldcon (this year in San Antonio, Texas). And even when we don't agree with the winners -- which is pretty regularly, since that's how popularly-voted awards work -- it's worth celebrating those winners and the fans that made the Hugos happen every year.

And this year's winners are:

BEST NOVEL: Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

Other people clearly like that book much better than I do, so I merely shrug.

BEST NOVELLA: The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon)
BEST NOVELETTE: "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi", Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)
BEST SHORT STORY: "Mono no Aware", Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

I haven't read these or any of their fellow nominees, so I can be purely happy for Sanderson, Cadigan, and Liu.

BEST RELATED WORK: Writing Excuses, Season Seven, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler & Jordan Sanderson

This is a podcast, and I can't stand having people talking at me (talk radio, audiobooks, podcasts -- it's all the same to me), so it would not be my choice for that idiosyncratic reason. I also note that the "Chicks Dig" series -- which won a Hugo for their first Dr. Who book a couple of years back -- either is slipping in popularity or digging into less-popular areas of fandom, since they had two nominees.

BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Saga, Volume One, Brian K. Vaughn, art by Fiona Staples (Image)

I have it, and intend to read it. This category is looking healthier -- Talbot's Grandville and Tayler's Schlock Mercenary are repeat nominees, but the rest are new and well-regarded.

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – LONG: The Avengers

As if it would have been anything else. (So sorry, Peter Jackson -- you should have reconsidered the plan of turning a short zippy book into an SFX-laden bloated trilogy.)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – SHORT: Game of Thrones: ‘‘Blackwater’’

And the home of sexposition has now officially lapped Dr. Who as the default favorite in the category.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR LONG FORM: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

It's his third win in the six years this has been a category, which could be a sign for the future (given Hugo voters' long-term inclinations to grab a favorite and cling tight for decades at a time). Or it may be an indication that he's well-known as Scalzi's editor, and this is a big year for Scalzi. Or maybe sunspots -- you can never discount the power of the sun, especially in Texas.

BEST PROFESSIONAL EDITOR SHORT FORM: Stanley Schmidt

Nominated thirty-three years in a row in this and the predecessor category; only won after he retired. It's hard to avoid seeing it as a Lifetime Achievement Award, which the Hugos aren't supposed to be -- but Stan certainly deserved at least one Hugo for his work over the past 34 years at Analog.

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: John Picacio

Well-deserved. He's only the 17th person to win one of these in the 58 years this category has existed -- the average winner has nearly three and a half of them. (An average driven up by Michael Whelan's 13 and Frank Kelly Freas's 10 -- not to mention Bob Eggleton's 8.) It would be nice, he said delicately, to see this category not get stuck in such a rut so often.

I will note that no previous winners were nominated this year, so the voters had to pick a new one -- and they had a bunch of great artists to choose from.

Edit: Cheryl (see comments) pointed out that Picacio won last year, so he is a previous winner. This is completely true, and implies that Picacio will be the default winner of this category for the next few years, if Hugo voters continue their past patterns. It also makes my comments immediately above wrong, not to put a too-fine point on it.

BEST SEMIPROZINE: Clarkesworld

Congrats to my NJ compatriot Neil Clarke and his crew. The reconfiguration of this category has driven out the criticalzines, which may have been the purpose -- it's now all fiction publications.

BEST FANZINE: SF Signal

I'm sure there's grumbling in certain sectors of SMOFdom today, since SF Signal is "not a fanzine" to many of them -- it doesn't have staples or the smell of mimeo about it. But I'm an occasional contributor (they ask me more often, and I've punted a couple of things due to press of day job work), and they're more-or-less the hometown boys at this Worldcon, so it's great to see them win.

BEST FANCAST: SF Squeecast

Again, I can't stand spoken-word audio, so I can't judge this category. Very fannish name though, which I like to see.

BEST FAN WRITER: Tansy Rayner Roberts
BEST FAN ARTIST: Galen Dara

Not familiar with the work of either of them, and I think they're both new nominees in their categories. Since these are usually the least-nominated and least-voted categories, it's great to see new names and new energy here.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER [NOT A HUGO AWARD]: Mur Lafferty

Please -- never refer to the Campbell as a Hugo! Whatever corporate entity that currently publishes Asimov's and Analog would never forgive you.


And congratulations to all of the winners (and nominees), despite any snark above -- winning or being nominated for a Hugo is a huge deal, and should be celebrated.

(via Locus Online)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/31

My US readers will be celebrating Labor Day when this goes live, and those of you in the rest of the world will have to console yourselves (assuming that you're working that day) with the knowledge that nearly all of you get more generous time off, medical care, and other benefits than we don't-need-no-guv'mint! American types have.

There's no mail delivery today, but there was mail and packages last week, which left me the following interesting items. I might make fun of them here -- I'll try not to, but the spirit is week, and every piece of art has something that's easy to parody -- but that doesn't mean that they might not be your favorite book of the year. And, in any case, I haven't read any of these -- so please assume that any fact you don't like is just me getting it wrong.

I'll start off with two standalone manga volumes -- yes, they do exist! -- both from Vertical this month.

Tropic of The Sea is an older manga than we usually see; Satoshi Kon's story was originally serialized in Young Magazine in 1990. A small seaside town has a tradition -- their local shrine holds a "mermaid's egg," a large pearl-like ball, changing its sea water every week and returning it to the sea after sixty years of gestation, to get a new egg soon after. And, of course, old traditions that come in conflict with an energetic modern society -- this is Japan in 1990, remember, before the crash and the lost decade; a society on the crest of a wave that looked to make it the most powerful economy in the world -- are likely to get crushed by the forces of modernity.Caught in the middle is the family that runs the shrine: the old traditionalist grandfather, the middle-aged modern father, and the teenage son who must choose a direction.

The other book from Vertical is a bit newer: Kyoko Okazaki's Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly was serialized from 1995 to 1996 and published in book from in 2003 -- delayed by the author's serious injury (according to Wikipedia, she was hit by a drunk driver while walking) and subsequent long recovery. Helter Skelter is a fashion manga -- drawn in a quick, impressionistic style like classic fashion illustration -- about a top model who underwent years of rigorous treatments and surgery to be perfect...and is now sliding down the other side of that height.

Switching gears, I have a bound galley of Jack Campell's upcoming space opera, The Lost Stars: Perilous Shield. (It's the second book in a spin-off from Campbell's Lost Fleet series, after Tarnished Knight -- looking at Campbell's list of previous books, he has so many lost things that he might want to invest in some of those little Bluetooth dongles and attach them to all of his fleets and stars.) The villains of this series seem to be evil spacefaring CEOs, which is a bit out of the ordinary for military SF -- that sub-genre is more likely to go the other way and focus on blowing up nasty alien collectivists. (There do also seem to be mysterious aliens lurking in the background of this series -- or sending huge battle fleets in to help with the endings of each book, more likely -- so those might end up being the evil collectivists that force the honor-bound space navy heroes and the rapacious space capitalists to work together to save each other. Perilous Shield is an Ace hardcover, and hits stores at the beginning of October.

The Lost Prince is the second in a contemporary fantasy series by Edward Lazellari, after Awakenings. It's a Tor hardcover that published on August 20, and, unlike the standard urban fantasy, it's not about a single main character. (Old habits die hard; I looked at the cover and was mentally composing a sentence along the lines of "XX is not just an NYPD cop, but also a paladin/werewolf/vampire/faerie/boggart/demon/angel/troll" -- but that's not what's going on here.) This series is actually a reverse portal fantasy: a group of protectors came through a gate from a fantasy world, Aandor, thirteen years ago, to protect an infant prince against the usual evil forces that wanted to kill him. But things went wrong, and the supposed protectors were scattered with no memories of their mission. So if any of you are looking for portal fantasies, derring-do, large casts, lost princes, and stakes involving the fates of multiple worlds, The Lost Prince is looking back at you, pointing at itself.

Last for this week is Stephen Hunt by Jack Cloudie -- I'm sorry, Jack Cloudie by Stephen Hunt. (I do hope there's an author out there named Jack Cloudie to complete the Nick Lowe/David Bowie echo.) This is the fifth novel in Hunt's loosely-linked steampunk world centered on the Kingdom of Jackals, in which a young not-British man is impressed into Somebody's Majesty's Steam-ship Navy, and travels to "Cassarabia," where a religious sect has been outlawed and a the true villains are "the sickness at the heart of the caliph's court: the mysterious cult that hides the deadly secret to the origins of the gas being used to float Cassarabia's new aerial navy?" I'm sure there's no parallels to any modern wars in this book, no sir. This also is a Tor hardcover, and is available now.