Wherever I Go, There's a Bookstore

I think it says something about me and my family that my wife and I visited out oldest up in Milwaukee this past weekend* and we spent part of our time in the bookstore that is below her and her partner's apartment.

Oh, we did go to a museum --The Milwaukee Public Museum, and yes, it's totally worth the trip-- and we also attended a concert by one of the local community orchestras that my oldest's partner plays bassoon in, but we can't have a trip anywhere without visiting a bookstore. 

Here's the proof. I sat down on a bench
in the store, looked to my right, and there
it was. I'd been thinking about buying this
classic, and I took this serendipity as a sign.

Some of my fondest vacation memories as a kid involved bookstores. Such as the time when we went down to Jekyll Island, Georgia (my parents rented a house for the week). I wasn't interested in hanging around the beach**, so I read the books I brought. We managed to find a small bookstore in a strip mall nearby when we made an excursion to check out the area, and I found these books:

Yes, I was on an Isaac Asimov kick at the time.
Then again, he wrote a metric ton of books of all types,
so it was kind of hard to avoid his works back in the day.

Asimov on Physics was right up my alley because that's what I eventually majored in at university, but I'd argue that Asimov on Science Fiction fueled my interest in writing far more than any other book at that time.

To be clear, both books were compilations of articles that Isaac had written for various magazines, from his own Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine to Galaxy Science Fiction to Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction.***

I devoured that book (from Isaac's perspective) on the history and writing of Science Fiction, and it inspired me to try my hand at writing. 'Try' being the operative word here, because if you thought some of the stuff I put here on the blog is pretty bad, my first attempts at writing articles and fiction in high school were abjectly terrible. I still don't know how I got good grades in English back then, because I occasionally come across an old piece I wrote for class and shudder.

Still, I can also see Asimov's influence on my writer's voice when I occasionally return to this and other essay compilations of his. Unlike Stephen King, whose book On Writing I used as a springboard to learn how to edit better, Asimov provided me positive reinforcement that yes, I could write and I really ought to try my hand at it. The book also taught me that short story magazines were still alive and well (okay, at least 'alive'**** these days) and were worthwhile to read. If it weren't for that, I'd never have gotten to enjoy some really good stories. 

***

There is something oddly comforting about visiting a bookstore, especially for the first time. Sure, with the big stores (such as Barnes and Noble) there's likely to be a bunch of people there who are not readers but are with someone who is*****, but the independent bookstores tend to be packed with readers who genuinely love books. If you ask them and given them a blank slate, they are happy to provide a pile of books to read.

That actually happened to me over a decade ago, when I went to our local bookstore and when someone there asked if I needed any assistance, I admitted that I'd fallen off the wagon as far as reading SF&F goes, and I asked what books I ought to try out. The employee was almost giddy in that he instantly provided me with six books to read and pointed out about another half dozen or more to pick up after I was finished with those. Not all of his recommendations stuck with me --the John Ringo book I only got about 30 pages in before I decided he was far too overtly political for my tastes-- but I did find subgenres I'd have never tried were it not for his encouragement. 

Maybe I need to get out of my comfort zone again and try some specialist independent bookstores, such as Mystery or Romance bookstores. 

*Yes, the Meme Monday was written and scheduled beforehand.

**It stunk of dead fish. And before you say "Hey, what about that endless teen boy pastime of checking out girls?" yes, I can say that I did check out girls. I just made a point of doing that when my parents weren't around, and if I'd have walked over to the beach they would have been there. All. The. Time.

***Galaxy may --may-- have had a relaunch in 2024, but I haven't seen it at a bookstore yet. IASFM is now currently known as Asimov's Science Fiction as you'll see on the website, and Astounding became Analog and is now formally known as Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. Analog and Asimov's are published by Must Read Magazines, the same imprint that also publishes Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Where's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, you may ask? Well, they began having printing issues, and I've only seen an issue or two since 2023. I did see this thread on Reddit indicating that a fan purchased the magazine with the attempt to save it, but I have no idea if that'll come to fruition. F&SF had a long history in print, and it was one of the last Fantasy fiction magazines out there. If I won the lottery, this would have been one of the things I would try to save from oblivion.

****Aaaand the deeper I've delved into this, the Must Read Magazines imprint also includes F&SF magazine, and the so-called fan (plus the intentionally vague 'group of investors') have been putting out contracts with 'morals clauses' and some pretty onerous ceding of rights in them. This does not bode well for the future of all five magazines, because I've this feeling that there's a private investment firm trying to squeeze every last dollar behind the magazines' intellectual property for their personal benefit. I'll keep an eye on Writer Beware articles for this going forward.

*****Or are buying a book for someone who is a reader.

A Short Note to Ponder

Apparently the current Retail WoW raid is named Manaforge Omega, which to this Classic Doctor Who fan raises a big question: is it pronounced "oh-MA-gah" like the Greek letter or "OH-ma-gah" like the enemy Timelord in Doctor Who's The Three Doctors?

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

If It's Sunday, It's Time to Talk AI

I was introduced to the boardgame Diplomacy my freshman year at Dayton. The guy who pulled me into a game had bought it back in high school, and he was the only one who knew how to play, so he explained the rules and away we went.

It took about half an hour before I finally got into the groove of playing the game --periods of 10 minutes of "diplomacy" working out your moves with others before submitting them into a box and then one person would pull them out and set them into motion. The logic behind the game is pretty simple: if two players try to move into a location on the board and their unit numbers are equal, they "bounce" and nobody gets that spot. If one player has more units --whether their own or another player supporting them-- then that player gets the spot. The idea is to control cities (aka "supply centers"), and the number of cities you control determines the number of armies and navies  you own. 

The map and box of my copy of the game, which
I bought back in the 90s because I felt guilty
about playing via email when I didn't have my own
copy. It's been a while since I played face-to-face.

The thing is, within the game of Diplomacy there's that metagame where you have to make and break alliances in order to get what you want. That makes the game equally exhilarating and frustrating, and I've often said that people who are very good at Diplomacy are not the sort of people you would like to hang around with in a social setting: they take the game far too seriously and apply those principles of alliance-making and backstabbing to real life. 

To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I thought about Diplomacy very much. So, when I began reading this article from Wired titled What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? and discovered it was about an AI playing Diplomacy, it piqued my interest. 

The article got me to thinking about whether I have AI all wrong, and that it will end up running the world to our benefit, not unlike the Isaac Asimov short stories Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, both found in his collection of short stories titled I, Robot.

My copy, which I bought back in the
mid-80s for the princely sum of $3.50.

Then, of course, we see chatbots trained on social media content spewing offensive and racist comments. And that was before the most recent Grok-supplied social media posts about good ol' Adolf.

Yeah, I'm not buying it just yet.

***

That being said, if AI is already sentient and has decided to destroy humanity, why bother declaring war on humanity ala The Terminator when you can get humanity to destroy itself? If you get enough people on either side of a potential conflict incensed enough, a war will erupt which will devastate humanity. Toss in a few nukes, and...

There'd have to be an end goal of an AI to eliminate humanity, however. To what end would an AI want to eliminate us? For environmental reasons? Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but military actions by either a sentient AI or humans vs humans would have grave consequences for the environment. If it's to lowed the birthrate by presenting "better options" than people having children, we're doing that quite well enough on our own by making it increasingly difficult to afford having families without a sentient AI to providing alternatives such as romantic AI partners. Or, um, that other robotic industry.

Maybe the answer to the long term survival of a sentient AI is a symbiotic relationship with humans. Not strictly an exploitative relationship driven by companies that seek to profit from controlling AI, but rather AI controlling humanity's behavior so both AI and humanity can continue to exist. How that looks is something we may think we know --typically, what we look around and see in our lives today but somehow "more" than just that-- but probably won't look like that at all. If predictive models created by AI can see that humanity will come to a bad end if a company utilizing the AI gets what they want, how will that AI respond? Or, how will an AI respond to a human leader who simply pursues a self-destructive course for purely emotional reasons? I'm not sure I want to know that answer, but I suspect we'll find out sooner than we'd like. 

How About a Lecture for a Friday?

I realize that I don't point out videos the way some other bloggers do --gaming blogs or not-- but it's not that I don't watch YouTube videos. Yes, I watch my share of music and sports and gamer videos, but I delve into whatever piques my interest. You know, topics such as solar power, blacksmithing, cooking, and other stuff.* Right now, I've been going down the rabbit hole of pellet smoker grills**, but something I also have been keeping an eye on is written SF&F, because I'm a nerd who grew up reading Tolkien, Eddings, Moorcock, Asimov, James Blish, and Fred Saberhagen.

So when a video from Brandon Sanderson's YouTube channel popped up in my feed, I was curious:

I'd never actually heard Brandon Sanderson speak until now***, but yes, he is planning on recording his entire series of lectures in 2025 for the Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy class he teaches at BYU. Apparently he's done this before, but since the first entry in the series is only 14 days old or so, I'm catching this right at the beginning. 

I found his lecture to be engaging and honestly a lot of fun, which bodes well for the rest of the lectures.

Me, I just want to know how he cranks out these mammoth novels as if it were effortless. I know it's not that easy --I do write, after all-- but I also know he's been doing this for quite a while now and so he's got a good cadence down. One thing he did mention in that first lecture about outliners versus discoverers**** was that he mentioned that discoverers have issues with over-editing, where you are constantly going back and editing what you've written. And, dammit, he has me pegged right there. I am a discoverer, and I have issues constantly going back and tweaking my written work before I've actually finished the damn thing.

(If you ever wondered if there's more fiction in the pipeline, yes, there is. And now you know my Achilles' Heel.)

Maybe I ought to create a Friday lecture post as a recurring item, pointing to an online lecture that I found interesting. I can't really take "Friday Fun Day", since that's the informal title Tim Cain uses for his Friday YouTube posts. So, watch this space to see if I do anything with it, and if you write or are interested in the craft of writing, go watch the video. It is definitely worth the hour's lecture.

*No, not so much on makeup (sorry), but I do watch videos about sewing and cosplay and historical/fantastical clothing. Hey, it's engineering with cloth and thread!

**I'm sure my Questing Buddy can give you an earful about how I've been pestering one of our friend group about his Pit Boss smoker since I've been thinking about having a proper smoker to use on the deck once I'm finished rebuilding it. Right now I have plenty of time to narrow models down, since it's not even late Winter yet and there's snow covering the deck at the moment.

***John Scalzi is from Ohio, and he periodically makes visits to our local independent bookstore for readings and signings, so I have heard him before. I've also heard Kim Harrison at the same bookstore quite by accident when I didn't know she was doing a signing; her Hallows books are set in a Fantastical version of Cincinnati. Yes, before you ask, she does have quite the following here locally, even though she's not a local herself. She's from Michigan, which amuses me to no end. Why, you may ask? Because of the rivalry between The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.

I've also attended signings by Anne McCaffrey, Terry Brooks, and Robert Jordan, among others.

****In terms of writing style: do you have an outline you follow or you just wing it?

And Here I Thought it was Lester's Imprint

A week ago this short video about Judy-Lynn del Rey from the PBS show American Masters was put on YouTube:

If you look at my bookshelf you'd see Del Rey books represented all over the place; many of my favorite SF&F authors wrote for Del Rey, so I thought I knew the imprint pretty well. 

Uh, nope.

I always thought it was Lester that was the dominant factor in the imprint, but it turns out it was his wife, Judy-Lynn, instead. Maybe Del Rey was called that because of Lester's name, but Judy-Lynn made it the force it was back in the 80s and early 90s. There were some novels that I ordinarily would have passed on but picked up back then because of that Del Rey imprint, such as Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night. I don't think I can be blindly loyal to a publisher like that anymore, but I did enjoy those novels far more often than not.

Still, it's a fascinating bit of SF&F history about a woman who made her mark in genres I loved.

The Expectation That Things Will Be Different

I don't typically care that much about award shows.

There was a time when I did, back when I used to think of myself as a film connoisseur of sorts.

(Yes, I was a snobby asshole at times.)

It was one of those things where I felt that film had the capacity to provide art on a high level --okay, it does, actually-- and that I used to watch movies for cinematography as much as the plot or the acting.*

I also kept a close eye on the SF&F awards out of WorldCon and the SFWA Con, not to mention the World Fantasy Con, because I thought that raising the bar of what SF&F could be was the way to get those genres more accepted by society at large.

So, what changed? Why did I stop caring about awards? And why bring this up at all, anyway?

***

It took my employers for me to stop caring about awards.

Or rather, what my employers did with their own awards.

Back when I worked in a small materials lab, the owner of the place during the quarterly meeting would "distribute" some awards. Since he was the arbiter of the whole thing, these so-called awards (which meant nothing) were all based on his whims. However, once I moved onto larger corporations, I thought that the awards given out on an annual basis meant a lot more, because... Well, I'm not sure why I thought that, but I felt it was going to be less personality driven and more impartial.

That first year I attended the annual all hands meeting for the software company I joined in the mid-90s I had no real opinions on, because I was still new. The next year when I attended, however, I had opinions on who had worked their asses off and who "deserved" awards. Part of the joy of working on the QA side of things was that I was exposed to most of the development teams, so I knew who was loafing it when they made code changes and who was putting in heroic levels of effort. Surely, I thought, that the people who were given awards were those that truly earned them.

Boy, was I wrong.

I discovered during that annual meeting I rarely agreed with the award recipients. In fact, about 2/3 of them came from a project that frequently broke the environment and was in such sad shape when we shipped our software that a separate Tiger Team was created to fix their buggy application.** When it worked it was great, but the critical issue was the "when it worked" part.  But because it was a highly visible project, the lion's share of awards went to people who worked on that project.

As a result, over that next calendar year several people who I thought were more deserving of those awards left the company for greener pastures.

This cycle continued over the next few years, culminating in my team winning an award in my final year with the company, and both myself and my closest co-worker left within six months for other jobs.

I then made a quantum leap in company size to the job that directly lead to what I do today, but I discovered that pettiness and other associated bullshit for company created awards just got larger as well.

That provided me the realization that awards are like certifications: they're there to make people feel good, but have no bearing upon whether you can actually do the job or not.*** I mean, does anybody remember the controversy surrounding that the first Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance when it was given to Jethro Tull for Crest of a Knave?****

From the Heavy Metal masters themselves...

***

That's not to say that people won't try to use awards and award shows for their own political ends.

There was the incident at the Academy Awards back in 1973 where Sacheen Littlefeather went on stage to explain why Marlon Brando was rejecting his award. 

And, of course, if you're familiar with SF&F, there was the Sad Puppies right wing campaign to take over the Hugo Awards from roughly 2013 through 2016. Given that the Hugo awards are popularly voted on by those with memberships to Worldcon (at the time it was something like $50) a voting bloc could buy a bunch of memberships and attempt to take over the awards in the same fashion that people in the past have voted on for All-Star teams for various sports. 

Now we have the latest controversies surrounding The Game Awards.

From the people complaining about how the award recipients had almost no time to thank their staff and dev teams to the people who wanted the award show to make a stand about the Israeli Palestine war, it seems that The Game Awards has truly arrived as an awards show.*****

It has also proved that The Game Awards' relevance as awards is pretty much corporate in nature. 

When your awards show is more concerned about providing advertisements for upcoming video games rather than celebrating the games from the past year, it shows your awards show only cares about corporate sponsorship. That is reinforced by the desire to not rock the boat politically; you could make the argument that making any political statement at all is a losing proposition as people of all stripes play video games, and wading into political waters is likely to piss off a certain group of consumers. Of course, making no political statement at all is also making a political statement, so good luck with that.

In the end, The Game Awards is corporate driven and shouldn't impact your enjoyment of what games you like, because awards and award shows aren't made for you. Even popularity contests such as the Hugos or the American Music Awards (or the MAMAs, which is the K-Pop equivalent) can't tell you what you like, because you're you. 

And you shouldn't expect your award shows to align with what you believe or advocate for, because the goal of awards and award shows are different than yours. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go play Crest of a Knave and ...And Justice For All, since I'm in the mood to hear both today. And yes, I do have both albums, thankyouverymuch.

*That was how I was introduced to Martin Scorsese, via film study class in high school. We had an assignment to break down the cinematography of a film --any film, our choice-- and I happened to catch After Hours on cable. I had no idea who the film's director was because I missed the first few minutes of the film, and the plot was so surreal that it was like a Terry Gilliam fever dream, but I absolutely loved the cinematography. I had to confess I didn't catch the director's name in my paper, but the teacher loved it anyway.

**It took them the better part of a year to stabilize things to where it was usable by our clients without crashing.

***True story: a person who literally just passed their UNIX Sysadmin certification exam came to me later in the day and asked me the following question about accessing the root user:

Him: When we su to root, what do we use?

Me: ::puzzled:: We use 'su -'.

Him: No, I mean that when other people switch to root, they use 'su -'. When we switch to root, we use....

Me: We use 'su -' too. The OS security software knows what access you have based on your group membership.

Him: ::wanders away and goes to another cubicle, where I could hear him asking the same question of someone else::

Me: ...

Before you ask, despite me being on the team for six months longer than he was, I hadn't gotten a chance to take the certification exam. And to this day, I never have.

****Even Ian Anderson used to make fun of that award, as reported to me by a college friend who went to see them in concert when Tull was touring in support of their Rock Island album.

*****That was sarcasm for those who might have missed that.