Cora Buhlert shares her thoughts on the Nebula winners. Like me, she hasn’t read many of them. Unlike me, she’s probably going to.
The universe might be bigger on the inside.
There is a Dyson Sphere science fiction writing contest, hosted by the SciFiIdea Writing Center of Singapore. The deadline for submissions is August 31. The word count is 30,000 to 100,000. Yes, that’s what it says. Read the part about publication rights carefully. (Thanks to File770.)
Writer Beware shares another scam, this one connected to marketing your book.
A former editor of Publishers Weekly writes about the dangers of book-banning. He believes it is the worst now it has ever been in the USA.
Our next destination vacation spot? Ars Technica introduces the latest exo-planet, which might be earth-like, kinda.
Those of you who’ve been searching for a cozy-mystery-shapeshifter-urban-fantasy trilogy, check out this review.
Scott Fulford writes that the pandemic years resulted in better financial outcomes for many households in the USA. Over on Whatever, he introduces this theme, the main one of his new book The Pandemic Paradox. What do you think?
Have you ever made a call, all the while hoping the person you’re calling won’t answer? Brandon Crilly talks about this experience in his “Favorite Bit” of his new novel Catalyst, on Mary Robinelle Kowal’s blog.
I met Carlie St. George a couple of weeks ago, and had to check out her short fiction. If you like dark elegiac horror with a generous shot of horror-movie homage, check out her work.
Not sure I can be persuaded on two of these articles.
When I was young book-banning meant you couldn’t sell a book without being charged with obscenity, with the definition for that being pretty nebulous. In 1964 prosecutors were told the work could only be deemed obscene if it was “utterly without redeeming social value”, so over the next decade enforcement of the obscenity laws decreased pretty steadily. But these were laws with actual criminal penalties for the publishers and importers, and Dahlin is not providing examples of that. What seems to be happening now, in contrast, is that institutions that spend tax money on books or other media are being told not to make purchases of certain ones by the legislature or school boards. Or to withdraw ones from circulation in publicly funded institutions. The books are not banned, in the sense that no one will be prosecuted for selling them, and anyone can buy them online. I can’t see the present situation as comparable to the years before 1964. Now the US Supreme Court may still return us to the bad old days, given that they have skewed more and more right-wing over the last few decades, but that hasn’t happened yet. There’s also the other danger of publishers self-censoring by reissuing books with changes to the original text to remove “offensive” language, which is more of an issue for ebooks than dead tree ones already on the shelves.
Fulford’s reliance on “average household” financials also seems not totally convincing to me. In an economy with such concentrations of wealth at the very top, averages are likely to be distorted as a measure of what’s really going on. Not only are the obscenely wealthy distorting the picture, but the “work from home” white collar employees who make up the bulk of the Democrat-turned-Rockefeller-Republican party’s constituency also have benefited disproportionately from the pandemic. To simplify, those who have the assets are the ones who benefit from an asset inflation bubble, which is what our economy has chiefly relied on to simulate “prosperity” during economic expansions. Those with no or few assets just find their chances of obtaining future assets get slimmer and slimmer. The economic relief provided by government during the pandemic helped (some) people tread water, while spending funneled through contractors on government projects mostly advantaged the companies and their owners. And the federalist system of having states administer programs to help those on the lowest end helped some people, but ended up with large pools of money unspent because of excessive and confusing administrative hoops that the recipients were supposed to jump through in order to obtain aid. So it seems more accurate to me to say we muddled through the crisis with the usual (since the 1970s) side-effect that the rich got richer while running up an even higher level of debt for the nation.
The correct and more accurate term for the book thing is “challenged,” I think. Frankly, the intentional removal of books from libraries and schools worries me more than the “old” definition of book-banning. (In states like Florida, there has been a suggestion of legal penalties for libraries and teachers. I don’t think any of that legislation has passed yet. Teachers have been fired, though.)
I thought Fulford’s use of “average household” was a bit misleading for the reasons you mentioned. It may just be an oversimplification on his part. What struck me about the whole pandemic thing was that, to paraphrase William Gibson, at all aspects–medical care, employment, education, money–the “future was unequally distributed.”