Interesting Links for 29-12-2015

[andrewducker]

• A Softer Avenger - A Softer World + MCU = Awesome
  • marvel avengers funny comic viaDraxar
• UK government rejected flood risk warnings from climate advisers
  • flooding UK government conservatives viaJennieRigg
• That’s No Moon: The models and miniatures of the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy
  • starwars models movies viaSoonLee
• William Gibson: how I wrote

Comments

[kalimac]

1) William Gibson: That's interesting to me, because I was around at the time: I knew Bill casually then, and heard him read a chunk of the then-unpublished Neuromancer at an SF con. It's also interesting because of the impetus he needed to begin a novel. Most SF writers used to begin with shorts, as he did; but around that time the field began getting an influx of authors who thought nothing of starting out with whole novels and rarely writing shorts at all. But in all these years I've never seen that difference discussed.

2) Scrooge: That's inane, and does not resemble our Earth logic, but I'm used to reading such nonsense from economists.

3) Things Men Hear: I've heard few of these, and am better off for it. If anybody ever said "when men were men" to me, I'd instantly quote Douglas Adams: "Men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." I did once have an intriguing conversation with a traditional housewife type (a woman some years younger than myself, by the way) who was genuinely puzzled as to why some women didn't take their husbands' last names. But she wasn't criticizing B. or anyone else for having not done it.

4) Star Wars: I'm glad that I went ahead and read a plot summary of this movie I'm not in a hurry to see, so that I understand half of these articles, and not have to deal with awkward half-spoilers in the others. Roberts is entertaining, yes, but irritating: a) he's totally wrong about the psychological reasons people hate spoilers; b) he has not discovered something new: the action-adventure movie that's nothing but its trailer plus padding is more common than any of the plot points that Roberts wearily describes TFA rehashing from the original SW; c) his paragraph on Leia contains a sentence with the most awesomely dangling participle I have ever seen.

[soon_lee]

Adam Roberts shakes his cane at clouds! News at eleven!

(Most of the time, I find myself disagreeing with Roberts' columns. This is no exception. He might be the sort of reader who doesn't mind being told the butler did it, but I do. And even if the butler did it, don't tell me how; part of the fun is finding out by reading it for myself, not by someone telling me. What I want from my entertainment (be it books, movies or other media) is clearly very different from what Roberts wants.)

"37 things changed during the production of "The Force Awakens"
That explains some of the disjointedness in the movie.

"William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer"
My favourite bit:
I do remember seeing Terry, some time after I’d turned it in. I hadn’t heard from him, at all. He was descending a curved stair, from the upper to the lower lobby at some convention hotel. Had he gotten my, um, manuscript? Yes, he said. “Is it going to be OK?” I asked, my anxiety phrasing the question. He paused on the stair, gave me a brief, memorably odd look, then smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I definitely think it will,” and then continued down, and on into the bar. I may never have seen him again.

[kalimac]

Terry Carr was a very cool-mannered guy, even when handling as revolutionarily important a manuscript as this one.

The last sentence of the quote may sound less cryptic if you know that he died, regrettably young, a couple of years later.