Tag: John Scalzi

WisCon 40 and the Tiptree Award

Me with my parents on the night of the the Tiptree Award ceremony. Photo by John Scalzi.

This post is long overdue, having been constantly delayed by other life stuff. But WisCon 40 was special, and I want to record some of it here. WisCon is always special to me; it was my first con and the one I still attend every year. Attending as a Tiptree winner though is a unique experience, and one I’m very grateful to have had.

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A warm reception at dinner

I made it to Madison on Thursday just in time to race to the hotel and change into a suit for the Tiptree Motherboard dinner at Cento. I was very nearly on time but still the last to arrive, which produced the weekend’s first moment of atypical celebration when the already assembled group applauded my arrival. I took a stunned and bashful moment, then asked them to do it again so I could snap a picture. I was sure to take time during dinner to move down that long table and introduce myself to everyone, and met many people I was to keep interacting with for the rest of the weekend.

Me and Pat Murphy, founder of the Tiptree Awards

With Pat Murphy, who founded the award in her GoH speech in 1991

The next day was the official start of the convention, with my first programming of the weekend: a reading with Meghan McCarron, Jen Volant, and Anthony Ha. My co-readers shared some great stories, and everyone laughed at the funny parts of mine and seemed interested in the philosophy bits, so I think it went fairly well. After that was dinner, and then the Opening Ceremonies. As it was the occasion of WisCon’s 40th anniversary, many people spoke of what the con and its community meant to them. Then the three guests of honor, Justine Larbalestier, Sofia Samatar, and returning GoH Nalo Hopkinson were introduced.  To close things out I was presented with the Tiptree tiara by founding mother Pat Murphy, and crowned by Eleanor Arnason, the winner of the very first Tiptree Award.

Doing my best Space Babe impression

Doing my best Space Babe impression. This was, obviously, before I got the tiara. Photo by Jeanne Gomoll.

Saturday was my day without any programming, allowing me to simply float about and marvel over how absurdly kind everyone was to me. Cath Schaff-Stump invited me to do an interview for the Unreliable Narrators podcast, which you can listen to here for a sense of how overwhelmed by it all I was. There was a cake for me to cut featuring a mashup of the cover of my Asimov’s issue and the cover of Lizard Radio, the other Tiptree winner. There were many long and pleasant talks with friends. And, for the first time, there were my parents, who showed up that evening and took me out to a steak dinner at Rare, a fancy restaurant around the corner from the hotel. After that was the Tiptree auction, where my mother won me a first edition copy of Patternmaster. The night finished, of course, with the Floomp, perennially a WisCon high point.

Sunday was the big day. I spent the morning in my room working on my acceptance speech, then went downstairs for my first ever WisCon panels: Exposition in SF/F, and Writing Near Future SF. While I was empaneled, my aunt and uncle drove up from Chicago to join my parents and myself at the dessert banquet and subsequent ceremonies. First came the three excellent Guest of Honor speeches, including Nalo Hopkinson’s establishment of the Lemonade Award for kindness in science fiction communities. Then, when those were over, the Tiptree Award presentation. This included receiving the award, a check, a box of chocolates, a commissioned artwork based on “The New Mother,” and a serenade from audience. Some pictures:

Then it was time for me to give the speech I’d spent the morning writing. Just as with the the picture of my loss of composure in the gallery above, John Scalzi managed to snap an action shot:

This is an overwhelming honor. I owe so much gratitude to so many people for the success of “The New Mother”—readers, jurors, friends old and new— that, even if I restricted myself to just people who are in this room, I would outlast any reasonable person’s patience before I could individually thank them all with the thoroughness their generosity merits. Doing so may well be less the work of an acceptance speech and more a permanent life project. Special recognition is due, though, to my parents, Jean Stein and Michael Fischer, who traveled from Texas to be here tonight, who raised me in a house full of science fiction novels and have been the most constant supporters of my own writing. Beyond that, I’d like to briefly explain how instrumental the entire WisCon community was in enabling me to write “The New Mother.” When I attended Clarion in 2008, I had already been sitting on the idea for this story for two years, certain that the concept was strong, and equally certain I didn’t have the knowledge or skill to do it justice. During the last week of the workshop I mentioned to Nalo Hopkinson that my recent, brief visit to San Diego Comicon had given me a panic attack, and that I was unsure the whole con thing was really for me. She told me that not all cons are like that, and specifically made me promise to give WisCon a try before I made up my mind. I attended for the first time in 2009, and when I got home I sent Nalo flowers in Canada to thank her for pushing me in this direction. I’ve been coming every year since, listening to all of you and your important, challenging ideas. I could not have written “The New Mother” without access to the vibrant polyphony I encounter annually in this building. So I thank you, WisCon, both for celebrating me this weekend and for educating me over the last seven years. I hope to continue learning from you for a long time to come.

After that came hugs and laughs and, as I recall, a very great deal of tequila. My hangover the next morning was pristine, the sort of hangover where anyplace you put your body feels like littering. Fortunately it began to abate by the time I had to make my way to the airport shuttle, because I ended up sharing that ride with Pat Murphy. We were on the same outbound flight, and so I got to cap my Tiptree experience by debriefing with the woman who was there from the very start. A more perfect close I couldn’t imagine.

Two Tweeks in Review

I was at WisCon this weekend, so didn’t do my normal roundup of favorited tweets last friday. Here’s two weeks worth instead.


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Congratulations to all the Hugo winners

I just got back from San Antonio and LoneStarCon 3. It was a delight to have a major convention in my home town; when I was starting to feel conventioned-out on Saturday I was able to take a break and spend a day with my family. I also got to see the Hugo awards for the third time, and continue to find it thrilling. Congratulations to all the winners, and special congratulations to John Scalzi who won Best Novel for his book Redshirts. This was especially exciting for me, as I appear in the book as a minor character. (It’s worth noting that, so far, 100% of novels in which I die have gone on to win Hugo awards. Do with this information what you will.)

The Continuing Adventures of My Haiku

Remember how I wrote a haiku last week for a contest to have my name given to a character in John Scalzi’s next novel?

I won.

That’ll do, haiku. That’ll do.

I Have Written A Haiku

This is not common practice for me, but I have been drawn out of my poetry-opaque shell.  You see, John Scalzi is currently running a contest the winner of which will be Tuckerized in his next book. The challenge:

For the contest, write a haiku from the point of view of some who is either about to die or has just died, from one (or more!) of the following:

1. A spider monkey or monkeys;
2. LASERS
3. Poor GPS directions
4. And, of course, Spontaneous Human Combustion.

The most popular choice appears to be a death that combines all of these elements, but I chose to focus on just one.  You can see my contribution in the comments at #16.

As Monty Python Taught Us, SPAM = Instant Comedy

So I posted to Twitter/Facebook

Never tasted SPAM before, but I was just gifted a tin of it. Wild and ill-advised experimentation shall ensue.

I got many amusing responses.  First, from Nalo Hopkinson,

@glorioushubris Try frying slices of it. Also helps if you’re pre-menstrual, but that might be more difficult to achieve.

Then, on facebook where I can’t link to it, from John Scalzi,

Your spam virginity is gone! Now you will never catch the processed meat food product unicorn!

Finally, from Claude Ramey. the most unashamedly low-brow recipe I’ve ever seen.

Corn Patch Casserole:
2 cans of Spam
1 large can of corn
1 large bag of egg noodles
1 jar of cheez whiz

Boil the noodles, dice the Spam, and mix everything in a casserole dish. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

My mom used to make this for me when I was a kid. It’s delicious.

I ended up dicing it, frying it up with some yellow onions and eating it over white rice with aged soy sauce.  It wasn’t great, but it was edible.  I’d certainly take it over starvation, or a third consecutive meal of ramen noodles.

A Strange Horizons Fund Drive Update

For one day only, John and Kristine Scalzi will match donations made to Strange Horizons, up to $500.  I got to meet Kristine and John at Worldcon, and they are fully as amazing people as this act of generosity would suggest.  Let’s help them make the most of this awesome gesture.  Donate to Strange Horizons today.

Recent Reading (May 5, 2009)

My friend Megan does capsule reviews of the books she reads every month, and whenever she does I think to myself, “Oh!  That’s clever!  I should do that.”  And then I fail to keep track of all the books I read, and by the time Megan puts up her next set of reviews, I can’t remember what I read when.  So I am going to go a less regimented route, and just start doing reviews of my recent reading whenever the mood strikes me, and not worry about some books slipping through the cracks.

We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ — While I was at Clarion, Geoff Ryman told me that one of my stories needed to be a tale of grand adventure and escape, because he didn’t think I had the temperament to write an elegiac rumination on the inevitability of death, which was the only other way the story could work.  My response was approximately, “Pshh! Don’t label me, author man!  I’m confident I can write anything!” because I’m mature like that.  Geoff recommended We Who Are About To… as a novel to look at for how to do that well.  I’d heard of Russ as the author of The Female Man, often given as an example of early feminist SF, but I had never read any of her work.  I found this book interesting, but not really enjoyable.  The first 100 pages or so are a story of the survivors of a spaceship crash wrangling with gender roles and the tyranny of the majority, written in the tersest prose style I have ever encountered.  After only one of the initial survivors is left alive (not really a spoiler, it is made clear from the very start that none of them are surviving to the end of the book), the writing becomes more discursive and far less interesting for the last 70 pages.  It is certainly a rumination on the inevitability of death, but to this reader it failed to be an engaging one.  I found the book disjointed, and had to force myself to finish it.  I will still probably read The Female Man at some point.

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi — Scalzi’s writing is smooth and entertaining; I’ve never read a book of his that I haven’t enjoyed.  That said, I found this to be the weakest of the Old Man’s War novels, largely because it focused so heavily on a bit of future tech that didn’t work for me in the previous book.  The part of Old Man’s War detailing the transfer of consciousness from the soldiers’ original bodies to their fighting bodies felt fairly hand-wavey to me, treating cognition and identity as something akin to a videogame cartridge that gets removed from one brain and slammed into another.  Thus the uncomfortable “Think Like A Dinosaur” identity duplication problem is avoided, but not in a very convincing fashion.  It didn’t work for me in Old Man’s War, where it just showed up once, and continued to not work for me throughout all of The Ghost Brigades.  Also, the plot felt a little bit formulaic, in that it twice employed the “character has a minorly clever insight early in the story that turns out to be (surprise!) applicable under the much more dire circumstances of the climax” summer movie callback structure.  It was done well, but my reaction to it was that I was reading a very accomplished demonstration of something I had seen before, rather than being surprised by something new.

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi — The third book in the series I enjoyed more, especially because it fixed another problem I had with the previous book.  Somewhere in The Ghost Brigades it is mentioned that our part of the galaxy has over 700 spacefaring races, and when I read that line my immediate thought was that I hadn’t been made to feel that the galaxy really was that heavily populated.  I didn’t buy that there were other aliens outside the edges of the page, and that the ones in the story were merely those most relevant to the characters at the moment.  But Scalzi does a much better job making the galaxy feel like a fully populated place in The Last Colony, which I appreciated.  Precisely what it means for the Obin to have intelligence without consciousness, and how their consciousness prostheses effect them is not really well explained, but that ended up bothering me much less than the similar level of handwaviness about consciousness transfer in the previous two books–probably because there was no issue of the potential for duplicated identity to be addressed.  I more or less just decided that they were all Data turning his emotion chip on and off and didn’t worry about it.  John, Jane, Zoë, Hickory, and Dickory are a delightful family to spend a novel reading about, and I didn’t even mind Zoë showing up with a deus ex machina toward the end because I knew I would get another whole novel worth of time to spend to them.

Zoe’s Tale, by John Scalzi — I think that my friend Kat is correct when she opines in this comment thread that Zoe’s Tale is the strongest novel in the series.  Zoë’s voice is a real departure from the beats and cadences of the previous books, and is very convincingly realized.  I think Scalzi is justifiably proud of her.  While it still comes fifth in my ranking of this year’s best novel Hugo shortlist, it isn’t by as much as I thought it would be based on having only read Old Man’s War.  John Perry learns a lot, but doesn’t really change much as a person from the first moment we meet him.  Jane Sagan changes from a no-identity weapon into a person, which is an interesting character arc, but not one that is very universal or easy to relate to.  Jared Dirac’s path of personal development is even more divorced from standard human experience.  But Zoë is different.  Zoë Boutin-Perry is the first main character we really get to see grow as a person in a recognizable way, and that is what makes Zoe’s Tale the best of these books.  My only real complaint about it is that I think my enjoyment was much enhanced by knowing things about the story from the last book–such as the full details of the redacted Conclave video–that couldn’t be included in this book because Zoë never learned them.  I’m glad I read the series in order, and I do wonder whether the book wouldn’t seem significantly less nuanced if read on its own.  But I believe that the best moments in the book, such as Zoë’s thoughts about Enzo or her address to the assembled Obin on the space station, will be affecting for any reader.  Zoë is Scalzi’s strongest character, and that makes her moments of triumph more powerful than any that came before.

I Guess We Could Call This BlurbFail…

The cover of the mass market paperback of The Last Colony, the third novel in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series:

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The cover of the just-released mass market paperback of Zoe’s Tale, the fourth novel in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, with an unfortunate detail highlighted:

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It seems that I am the first person to notice this.  I suppose that if you are going to have your novel retitled through typographical caprice, it’s nice to get a new title that does at least make sense with the story.  Still, poor John Scalzi.  This seems like the sort of thing it was probably someone’s job to make sure didn’t happen.

Next Book Results

The winner of my poll on what book I already own I should read next was A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge.  I will read this book soon, but it isn’t going to be the next book off the stack.  The real winner is: none of the above.  Kat has convinced me, in the comments on my last post, that Zoe’s Tale, by John Scalzi, needs to be bumped up in priority.  But I want to be able to appreciate it both in terms of its place in the larger OMW universe narrative, and its place in Scalzi’s body of work.  So I am going to do a marathon burn through the series, like I did last month with Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.  Hence, the next novels I read will be The Ghost Brigades, then The Last Colony, then Zoe’s Tale.

And then, if I’m not feeling burned out on fiction again, A Fire Upon The Deep.  Unless I get seduced by Martin Millar’s Lux The Poet, which I saw while I was getting my copy of The Ghost Brigades, and had to buy because, come on, I’m only human.  (I’m never going to get my unread books list under 40.  This is why I refuse to let myself buy books online.)