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Weird Kitties: Best Novel Open Thread

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These’ll be replacing Saturday Waffling for a while.

Right, so, the party continues. I’ll sort this into a landing page and a self-contained website eventually; there’s a whole site redesign coming, and Weird Kitties will get a clear place within it. Until then, you can track this tag. For now, let’s get this show on the road.

Some of the Hugo categories are easier than others. Lots of people read enough new sci-fi/fantasy novels in a year to fill out a ballot. Best Novel was one of the few categories where the Puppies failed to get things on the ballot as opposed to leaving open slots; two, and ultimately three actual candidates made it all on their own last year.

So far, for my part, I’ve gotten through Seveneves, which I thought a good but not great Neal Stephenson novel, and am about a third of the way through The Vorrh, which is very much the sort of novel you’d expect Alan Moore to call “the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre.” The latter will almost certainly make my ballot; the former could be knocked off without too much trouble. I’ll probably not get to The Shepherd’s Crown, since I’ve not read a Discworld novel in decades, but may well nominate it just because a Hugo ballot without it would just feel wrong somehow.

So what novels have you read so far this year, and what did you think? Anything you’ve already pencilled in for your ballot? Any you’ve already penned in?

Here’s the Hugo Nominees 2015 Wikia’s list to get us started.

Next week’s category for discussion will be short story, by the way. There was a Twitter hashtag a few days ago that listed several things one might have a glance at before then. I’ve got Charlie Jane Anders’s latest in an open tab, personally.

And I’ll be back tomorrow with the first bevy of reviews people have submitted, including one from me about Warren Ellis’s eligible Novelette Elektrograd: Rusted Blood. It’s not too late to send me one. Ones you’ve already posted elsewhere are fine; I’m happy to run them with links back to the originals.…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 6: Restoration

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Most Star Trek: The Next Generation stories would have ended by now. Packed things in after the Sztazzan and the Enterprise crew had achieved a peaceful diplomatic resolution to the crisis, maybe given us a nice little pat wrapping-up scene with Captain Picard and Commander Riker looking forward to a more peaceful future.

This series does not tell stories typical of what most Star Trek: The Next Generation looks like.

“Restoration” is every bit as low-stakes and low-key as “The Lesson”, and every bit as memorable to me. First of all it’s an absolute lyrical masterpiece: From Captain Picard’s opening rumination on Plato’s theory that humans and human longing were created when a singular flawless being was split into man and woman at some point in prehistory (and his belief the metaphor need not be gendered to be effective) to Doctor Crusher’s counsel to a shaken Terry Oliver distraught over her actions with the injured Sztazzan crewmember, this issue is crafted out of the sort of wordplay and turns of phrases so haunting they linger with me long, long after the story is done. And also like “The Lesson”, this is more or less an interlocking series of vignettes centred around a specific theme. This time, it’s, very fittingly, reunification and moving forward.

As the Enterprise slowly recovers and rebuilds after its pan-galactic adventures with the Sztazzan, Miles, Keiko and Molly O’Brien watch as their friends, a couple literally separated by the dividing ship sections, happily reunite with each other. Captain Picard checks in on a busy Doctor Crusher in sickbay, her team stretched taking care of the massive casualties sustained during the stardrive section’s numerous battles. Nevertheless, she expresses confidence that sickbay will be “empty again soon”, and they both look forward to a future with the Sztazzan that is “at the very least non-violent”. Geordi tells Data he’s glad to see the engine room again, and the two have a brief discussion about the nature of objective correlatives before Data accidentally tips Geordi off that he has some “unfinished business” to attend to.

Said unfinished business is not the billiards tournament with Miles O’Brien, however. If you will recall, Geordi was called away from the game at a crucial moment when the artificial moon relay station was first discovered, and Miles had subbed in Deanna Troi at the last second. Geordi and Miles decided it would have been unfair to ask for her help and then turn her away when it became convenient, so Miles kept Deanna on as his partner, despite her warning that “Betazoids do not play pool”, as a point of honour. Deanna then proceeds to shock everyone at the table by winning the game singlehandedly. It seems that while Betazoids do not play billiards, humans do, and she is, after all half-human.…

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Weird Kitties: An Organized Anti-Slate For The 2016 Hugos

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Weird Kitties is an organized anti-slate with a simple goal: to try to make sure every work on the 2016 Hugo ballot is there because of fans who nominated it because they liked it, and not because some bigoted jerk told them to nominate it.
This isn’t going to be easy. We already know Vox Day has 540 nominations for anything he wants to put on the ballot. John C. Wright’s got a novella out. SJWs Always Lie will surely be up for Best Related Work. And I’m sure a little thing like forgetting the existence of the number four isn’t going to keep the Voice of God from proclaiming himself best editor again. Given this, George R.R. Martin’s advice to ignore Vox Day is not going to accomplish anything other than letting a fascist jerk set the ballot. Again. 
In practical terms, anything that the majority of Hugo voters might actually prefer to No Award is going to need at least 541 nominations to be on the ballot. And that’s not going to be easy bar for anything to clear, especially not without sinking to the ugly and bullying tactic of slates.
The good news is that there are five thousand of us, united, if nothing else, by the facts that 1) We voted in the Hugos, and 2) We are not Puppies of any stripe. We are not a campaign. We are not a political movement. We are not playing some elaborate game of four-dimensional chess in order to topple Christendom. Indeed we, in the sense of “me and everyone reading this,” are not even all five thousand voters. But nevertheless, we are a bunch of fans defined by the simple fact that we’re eligible to nominate things for Hugos next year, and we’re not Vox Day’s pack of rabid dogs.
One of the most helpful things, then, would be if all five thousand of us nominated, and if we nominated a full ballot. Among us, we’ve got 25,000 open slots on our ballots in every category with which to push a work over the slate-busting threshold of 541. That’s doable, but it’s also hard. A lot of us, myself included, don’t identify five eligible Hugo-worthy items in every category in a normal year’s reading. In many categories, a lot of us don’t identify one. We don’t all have writing Winds of Winter to be distracted from, after all. And we could use some help.
So I’m creating Weird Kitties for exactly that. It’s going to be an ongoing conversation about awesome science fiction and fantasy that’s come out and is coming out in 2015, conducted for people who want to fill in their Hugo ballots with things they love.
First off, some promises. Weird Kitties is not and never will be a slate. It will never be some sort of stealth “slate by another name.” It will never have an official list of suggestions, of recommendations, or of anything else like that. It’s also not going to just reflect my taste, although I’ll obviously be contributing to it.
…

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Comics Reviews (September 2nd, 2015)

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You know the drill; worst to best of what I bought.

But first, something I didn’t buy, because it’s free.

Electricomics

Out today for free for iPad, this is the digital comics platform Leah Moore and company have been working on, featuring, among other things, Alan Moore and Coleen Doran’s “Big Nemo.” Which is unsurprisingly the highlight of the package here, with a series of clever uses of the virtual page and its mutability that evoke the playful wonder of McCay’s work in a new medium. It feels like it ends on the title page of what should have been a much longer comic, though. The Garth Ennis strip is also neat, but the other two feel more interested in their own whizz-bang gimmicks than in actually being interesting, and the app is still a bit sluggish, resulting in frustrating reading experiences for both of them. Still, well worth the price, and they’re apparently still smoothing it out, so hopefully it’ll end up as a more functional package in a few weeks. Still hard to see this having much in the way of legs as a platform, but a fun little oddity of the world.

As for paid stuff…

18 Days #3

The art takes a turn towards abject mediocrity, the plot seems to wander off completely from anything it had been doing, and Grant Morrison’s not even in the credits as doing anything but “creating” a series that’s just a retelling of classical Hindu mythology. Wretched.

Daredevil #18

Fine, in the sense that there’s little wrong with it as such, and it’s nice that Waid was given leave to avoid there only being Secret Wars at the end of his run, but the truth of the matter is that he stayed on this book at least a year too long, and probably closer to two. It’s never been bad, but the energy had long since drained, and the denouement, despite bringing Kingpin in, did very little to change that. And the Shroud’s plot seems totally unresolved.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4

This lost rather a lot of pace for me, with an ending that’s much more “what’s happening” than “what’s going to happen” and the limitations of Neil Edwards’s art getting in the way of the story sometimes. (His Tennant and Smith can be very indistinguishable in the middle distance.) There are fun bits, but this event is starting to look like it’s going to underwhelm.

Silver Surfer #14

There’s really not such a thing as a Michael Allred comic that’s not fun to look at, but this has to be the most one note comic I’ve seen in a while; it starts with a tone, carries that same tone to the end of the comic, and then, well, ends, generally without doing much. Strange and lazy-feeling, frankly.

Miracleman #1

The best part of this comic is the edit to Neil Gaiman’s script to refer to “The Original Writer.” So nice to see the project still haunted by its past.…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 5: Strange Bedfellows

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Out of options, Commander Riker turns to the last one he has: Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from. The Sztazzan are predictably boisterous and recalcitrant, but Will reminds them that its his people who have the coordinates to the station, and he’s likely to erase them should the Sztazzan try to invade the saucer.

Alexander is depressed and wants nothing except to be reunited with his father. Similarly Worf thinks only about getting his son back, to the point he puts it above his mission and the rest of his crewmates. It seems at first a perhaps shallow form of characterization, but it builds upon the turmoil both characters have been through over the past few stories. Alexander has already lost one parent and now faces the prospect of being completely orphaned, while Worf lost not only K’Heleyr as well, but almost lost his closest friend in Commander Riker in The Return of Okona. Mott comes to visit Alexander in his quarters and offers a suggestion. He’s come up with a tactical plan he thinks might help the crew, and asks if Alexander would like to come with him to tell Commander Riker about it, so long as he thinks it’s a good plan (Alexander of course being a superior tactician). Mott’s idea is to…Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from.

We cut to a scene on the Sztazzan ship, where we at last get to see a little more of their own cultures and beliefs. As Miles O’Brien guessed last month, the Sztazzan see humans as dangerous and untrustworthy with no set of morals or code of honour (a perhaps not unjustified assumption given what we’ve seen of how humans organise themselves in the 24th century at large). The Sztazzan are all ready to say no to the saucer crew, but one officer pleads the case that perhaps not all humans are as bad as all that, as he had personally witnessed the heroism of one human who went out of her way to rescue an injured Sztazzan when the two away teams had clashed on the planet’s surface earlier. Swayed by the story of Terry Oliver’s act of selflessness, the Sztazzan agree to Commander Riker’s plan, just before Alexander and Mott come to the bridge to tell him about it.

And it couldn’t have come at a better time too, as things aren’t looking so good for Captain Picard, Ro Laren and Deanna Troi back on the battle bridge. Outmanned and outgunned by the Sztazzan fleet and with multiple hull breaches to contend with, they’re about to be forced to abandon the saucer section to its fate and retreat with Geordi, Worf and Data.…

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I Can Lock All My Doors (Super Mario Kart)

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It feels as though we are only ever going in circles or hurtling off cliffs.

For most of the Super Nintendo originals so far we have seen series that originated on the NES, and then found more refined forms in the 16-bit era. Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Contra, and Zelda all had fantastic games on the Super Nintendo that were either the equal of their NES forebearers or their better. 
Here we have something new; a franchise that begins on the Super Nintendo. These days Mario Kart is one of the tentpole releases for a Nintendo platform; just as they all must have a Zelda and a Smash Bros. Here it exists in its primal form, as much a piece of history as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. 
Time has done it no favors. Almost everything there is to hate about later Mario Kart games is here, along with flaws idiosyncratic to this version, while little of what makes some of the later games classics had been honed here. The rubberbanded AI is at its most cloying, adding a sense of futility to the player’s actions. The race is as capricious as ever, not just in the way that small mistakes are amplified brutally, but in the same infuriating “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” way that makes every game in the series such a hazard to controllers. Here it’s  aggravated by the way in which AI opponents can simply spam you with infinite projectiles, often leaping over yours in ways you can’t do to theirs, an asymmetry that gnaws constantly, as opposed to things like the last lap blue shell, which is at least a rare occurrence. 
Unique to Super Mario Kart, the increase in difficulty from 50cc and 100cc is completely out of whack. at 50cc the race is tolerant of numerous small mistakes like clipping a wall, and often even of a big one like falling off the course. At 100cc, even small mistakes are likely to cost you victory. Meanwhile, the handling is sloppy; the drifting mechanic that would define every subsequent iteration of the game did not exist yet. Played today, it has a frustrating roughness that is not so much difficulty as alienation. It’s just not much fun.
In 1992, it was a very different kettle of fish. For one thing, not only was it not yet the progenitor of a classic line of games, it was a sequel in all but name. Like F-Zero before it, it is a racing game based on using Mode 7 for the track, creating a pseudo-3D effect that was quite striking for the time. But F-Zero was something of an empty suit of a game; a tech demo without content that became a classic almost in spite of itself, much as Anna described. 
Super Mario Kart, then, is the refined attempt – the same gameplay mechanic, only fine-tuned so as to entrance the player far more deeply in it’s spell.
…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 4: Second Chances!

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“Second Chances” is perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation.

…Oh no, not the goofy episode from next season where the transporter retroactively cloned Commander Riker on his previous post that fucks up Will’s relationship with Deanna Troi and Mae Jemison is the best part of it. That’s ridiculous. I’m talking about this comic book that’s the fourth part of Separation Anxiety.

You know it’s going to be a good story, or at least noteworthy, when it opens with a “chief medical officer’s log”. And this one doesn’t disappoint, with a lengthy portion of its runtime dedicated to just letting us watch Beverly Crusher be awesome leading an away team mission. Any Beverly Crusher, Science Officer fan will be spoiled by scene after scene in this book of her being unflappably competent, whip-smart and quippy. And continuing a thread introduced in The Return of Okona, Bev is also portrayed as having a manifestly different style of leadership than Commander Riker, though still compelling in its own right: She’s far more involved in the nitty-gritty of the technical research, not issuing orders to her team but managing, delegating and actively working with them to help gather as much information as they can. Seeing how effortlessly and perfectly she slides into this role here only makes you wish all the harder that this had been her role on the TV show much, much more often than it really was.

But we barely have time to appreciate that before we’re treated to a scene so defining it could have come from “The Wounded”. Which, incidentally, is what it’s positioned as a sequel to. Miles O’Brien and Terry Oliver are investigating a computer room the away team discovered on the planet they beamed down to last issue. Doctor Crusher has learned there aren’t any sentient life-forms still around who could help, but figures the computer banks are probably still intact and could yield some clues. Terry expresses concern that time is of the essence as the Sztazzan no doubt know of their whereabouts and will probably send a team of their own down. What follows is an exchange between her and Chief O’Brien so priceless and air-pumping I had to repeat it in its entirety here.

“After all, it won’t take long for those Sztazzan filth to find our coordinates and beam down after us!” 
“’Filth’, eh?” 
“You’d call them that too, if they’d murdered your friends the way they murdered mine!” 
“I see. Funny…You sound the way I did not so long ago. Except it wasn’t the Sztazzan I had a hate for – It was the Cardassians! I’d witnessed the kind of slaughter they’re inclined towards – First hand!” 
“Then you know how I feel!” 
“Sure – But that doesn’t mean I approve of it! Not so long ago, we had some Cardassians on the Enterprise – Making some wild charges about my old captain.
…

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Streaming Update (and a Brief Treatise on Crap Home Video Standards)

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Hey Dirty Pair fans! All three of you! Guess what?

I just found out something really exciting: It turns out Nozomi Entertainment, one of the rights-holders to the English language version of the Classic Anime Series, has been putting up complete, *subtitled* versions of Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, Original Dirty Pair and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy on its official YouTube channel all summer! You may recall that these were among the releases Manga Entertainment chose not to include in subtitled form among its own uploads of the Classic Anime Series, so it’s a really big deal to finally get these versions in free, legal streaming form.

The TV show never received an English dub because it was localized on the cheap and only very recently, so this doesn’t apply to the Manga Entertainment releases of those episodes,  but this is, to my knowledge at least, the first time folks who prefer to stream their visual media over the Internet have had to watch these later Classic Series Dirty Pair anime productions with the original Japanese language track and English subtitles. I’ve updated the video embeds on all my posts about those episodes and movies to these new uploads, and I do very much hope you’ll consider taking this opportunity to give them a second look. I mean my work is surely rubbish and will make me cringe with embarrassment over a year later, but Dirty Pair itself still holds up!

If you were turned off checking out the OVA Series and movies because of the unavailability of a proper subtitled version through steaming services, I hope you’ll go back and watch them now that there is one. And even if you were kind enough to follow along with my coverage of Original Dirty Pair and the film series, I hope you’ll still think about giving them one more go-around now that you have the chance to see the original actors’ performances. I’m not sure if this applies to the versions that are available on Hulu as well, so I’ve left that disclaimer on The Ultimate Dirty Pair Episode Guide Master Post, but I can now conclusively say for certain the YouTube versions are subtitled ones.

So what are you waiting for? The very best English language versions of some of the greatest sci-fi or anime ever made is now just out there waiting to be seen in all its glory! You can find a playlist of the OVA Series here and one for the movies here. And if you’re for some reason still interested in hearing me go on about Dirty Pair after all that, you can always catch up with my more recent ruminations on the Lovely Angels at this humble side blog of mine. It’s sadly been dormant for the past few months because of stupid life reasons (though I thankfully managed to update in time for the 30th Anniversary of the TV series on July 15), but I’m hoping to get back into it in the near future.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 29th, 2015)

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Those inclined towards more of me nattering on about the Hugos will enjoy the video blog I just did for the wonderful Aric Clark. Embedded below.

Those who want to talk about something different, well, let’s do the Hannibal finale, which airs properly tonight (next week UK, I believe), although I do the same thing I do with Doctor Who and buy the iTunes Season Pass then torrent the episodes.
Anyway, I thought it was brilliant. Fun Shabcast with Jack coming where we talk about it and many other things. How’d you like it, if you watched it?
…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 3

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Picking up where we left off last month, this issue opens with Captain Picard and Ro Laren trying to figure out where the hell the saucer section went. It obviously wasn’t destroyed, but somehow it’s been picked up and moved somewhere without any indication of how it was moved or where it ended up. One thing they can be reasonably certain of is that it likely *wasn’t* the Sztazzan, as one of their ships has apparently gone missing too. Thankfully the battle bridge crew soon receives word from Geordi, Worf and Data, and it turns out they may have found a clue as to what happened.

They figure the artificial moon is actually some kind of large-scale relay transporter device meant to move entire ships across huge distances instantaneously. Reasoning it must have been triggered by the energy discharge from the Sztazzan’s weaponry, they think they might be able to tease out how to make it work on command and bring the saucer section and the other Sztazzan ship back if they had some time. Unfortunately time is not something our heroes have in abundance, as the Sztazzan are a bit rattled and trigger happy about what happened, and, to make matters worse, there is naturally an energy buildup inside the moon that will cause the whole thing to go up in flames if Geordi and Data can’t shut it off. Meanwhile, at the other end of the galaxy, the saucer section crew has come to the same conclusion and have problems of their own. They too are dogged by a Sztazzan ship with an equally itchy trigger finger, and don’t have the benefit of a nearby relay station to work with. What they do have is a seemingly uninhabited planet, presumably one the builders of the moon intended to send people to, so Commander Riker sends an away team down to see if there are any clues still to be found on its surface.

One thing that’s immediately somewhat of a concern with the way this serial is shaping up is that it’s already bearing a worrying number of similarities with The Star Lost. Once again, we have a huge portion of the crew flung across the galaxy by unknown forces, giving us two discrete teams each with their own unique dynamics. It’s not that Separation Anxiety is doing this poorly or is coming across as a pale imitation of The Star Lost so much as we’ve seen a lot of this before already and it simply can’t be as effective the second time around. However it must be said this serial gives a significantly different weight to certain thematic aspects such that it still feels relatively fresh: In The Star Lost, for example, the Enterprise was eventually forced to give up on the Albert Einstein and leave its crew for dead. The story thus became one about loss, grieving and moving on. Here though there’s never any indication this situation is anything other than temporary-The whole crux of the motivation for everyone involved is reunification.…

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