12 Lousy Predictions for 2019

Anyone familiar with the record of my ouija board will be interested in my predictions for 2019 so they can bet against them. Here are a dozen:

1. The Academy Awards will be held without a host this year. But the bigger surprise will come the next morning, when the ratings reveal they were also without an audience.
2. A genetically-modified horse will be foaled with the scientists involved promising that such horses will soon dominate all races that allow them. Several races will hurriedly enact rules barring them.
3. Vladimir Putin will make a surprising offer of land grants in Russia to white South Africans willing to relocate there, with their families.
4. Congress will not allocate funding for a border wall. Nevertheless, construction will begin, through some dubious workaround.
5. Britain will leave the EU in the spring without a deal for an orderly separation, and by the end of the year the effect of the divorce on its economy will be ... notably better than the effect on the rest of the EU. Before 2020, another nation will also elect to exit.
6. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Dark Phoenix, and Star Wars: Episode WHOCARESANYMORE will all disappoint fans. On the other hand, the Memorial Day weekend Brad Pitt science fiction movie Ad Astra will pleasantly surprise.
7. A third Trump appointment, female, will be confirmed to the Supreme Court after a circus of protests. Her opponents in Congress will undertake to tie some explosive misogynistic scandal to her.
8. Chicago will elect its second female mayor. Soon after she will declare a state of financial crisis, appeal to the federal government for a bailout, and upon being rebuffed, claim that President Trump's hardheartedness is the real problem.
9. The House will impeach the president two or three times, and the Senate will dismiss each case more rapidly than the one before. Finally an issue will arise concerning the manner of conducting the 2020 US Census, which will provide the pretext for yet another impeachment vote; it will fail in the House and will be the last such attempt. President Trump's approval rating will rise slightly after each attempt, topping 55% by the year's end. 
10. There will be regime change in one of the nations on this list: China; Cuba; France; Iran; Venezuela.
11. My writing activity will increase significantly in 2019 with the completion of several stories and beginning a novel. Two as-yet unwritten stories of mine will see publication. The total number of posts on this blog will triple.
12. Finally, something from this list of totally-surprising events will happen:
     -- The Chinese lander on the far side of the Moon will pick up signals that some will say originated with an extraterrestrial civilization.
     -- President Trump will receive astonishment, consternation, and approval, each of them crossing party lines, by proposing to forgive an enormous amount of student debt held by the US Treasury.
     -- Pope Francis will abdicate, and an African bishop will be chosen as the new Pope.
     -- Congressman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will appear in a Super Bowl ad endorsing a popular brand of toothpaste. She will mention her liking for its color (blue),
     -- The Chicago Bears will win the Super Bowl.
     -- The Hugo Award for Best Novel will go to a straight white male.

Happy Ramanujan's Birthday

By the way, as I write this it is Srinivasa Ramanujan's birthday (December 22).

Ramanujan, as not-nearly-enough people know, was an amazingly intuitive, brilliant mathematician, whose tragically short life makes a remarkable story. One anecdote that illustrates the kind of observation he would just casually throw off now and then concerns the number 1729, now known as Ramanujan's number, which happened to be the number of a taxicab his friend and fellow mathematician G. H. Hardy took to visit him in the hospital one day. Apparently the pair were fond of working out "interesting" facts about numbers they randomly encountered, because Hardy mentioned 1729 to Ramanujan and added that he hadn't been able to think of anything particularly interesting about it.

Ramanujan at once countered that it was, in fact, a very interesting number, being the smallest number that is the sum of two squares in two different ways.

His insight was correct, as it often was (though not always): 1729 is 10 cubed plus 9 cubed (1000 + 729), and also 12 cubed plus 1 cubed (1728 + 1).

I actually make very brief passing reference to this anecdote in a story of mine that has been accepted into one of the upcoming Superversive Planetary anthologies, which I'll be writing more about later.

Meanwhile, here is a slightly curious fact relating Ramanujan's number to the coming new year, 2019, that AFAIK no one in the world is aware of, except me, and now you (if you're the first one to read this post, and to get this far... which is pretty likely). If you take the 14th root of 1729, and add 5, and raise the result to the 4th power, you get VERY close to 2019. Within about one-one hundredth, as I recall from when I worked it out. Plugging 1729 into this works better than either 1728 or 1730, too.

It also happens that 1729 to the power 6/7 (that is, raised to the sixth power and then extracting the seventh root) is quite close to the whole number 596.

Another original-with-me curiosity of modest interest: If you raise 12 to the 3rd power and add one, then of course you get 1729. But if you add one to 12 and then raise to the 3rd power (that is, take the cube of 13), you get 2197, which is a palindrome of 1729. There's another number smaller than 12 that has this property, that if you cube-and-add-one or add-one-and-cube you get two numbers that are palindromes: can you find it? As I recall there are several more such numbers, at least one of them below 100, and a few more below 2000.

Ah, well. Enjoy Ramanujan's Birthday!

What's new in our corner of SFF

I want to start doing more blogging going forward, and less wasting time on media like Twitter (where I've recently joined the growing throng who have deleted their accounts). So after a long hiatus from Tarquin the Humble, it seems good to return with a quick roundup of some of what's new in "our" corner of the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genre, whatever we're calling ourselves these days--the readers and writers who hope to enjoy speculative fiction as it used to be, focused on fun, inspiration, imagination, and the celebration of humanity, human achievement, human potential, and all that. You know, like the Sad Puppies, or PulpRev, or NobleBright. The Inklings, Chesterton, Dunsany, Merritt, John C. Wright, etc.

John C Wright has had a successful funder for a new series, STARQUEST, to be published by Superversive Press, and aimed at being a space opera of the sort that would not have disappointed Star Wars fans. AFAIK there's no projected publication date yet; if you know better, there's a comment section.

Out already are the first two books of Declan Finn's new Saint Tommy, NYPD series. Declan, of course, is the author of the Honor at Stake series, the Pius Man series, and wrote a terrific story in the underappreciated Tales of the Once and Future King , the anthology where (ahem) you can find one of my stories. Declan is also an editor in an upcoming Superversive Press anthology where another of my stories is slated to appear, which I'll be blogging more about later. So far I've only read the first Saint Tommy book, and I would recommend it heartily, as I did in my Amazon review.

If we really want to influence the course of SFF, how would we go about it? I recall reading in Frederick Pohl's autobiography that someone asked him a question around 1950 about how to get more or better writers for one of the pulp magazines, or something like that--sorry, my copy is in a box someplace--but what struck me was less the question than his answer, which for a leftist like Pohl was quite astute. He said simply, "Pay more." If I had a fortune at my fingers, that would be my strategy: I'd start about 20 monthly fiction magazines, priced low, that would each publish about 70,000 words each issue of fun, uplifting, religion-positive (or at least religion-neutral) SFF, mysteries, westerns, romances ... and I would pay the authors 15 cents a word.

That would do it, I think. Authors would look at that market, and instead of trying to get into Asimov's or Analog or F&SF would aim first at this market. The whole writing market would change as a result. Granted, I'd have to be ready to lose millions while the reading public shifts; but for those millions I'd get a wholesome change in the whole culture.

Could a market support fiction magazines paying that much? Actually, as a fascinating post at Emperor's Notepad reveals, the market once did. If you think the pulps underpaid the authors, go read that post. Actually go read it if you're interested in the history of SFF at all.

Misha Burnett, author of the Book of Lost Doors series, has been turning his attention to shorter fiction this year, and has a good blog post on his experiences also. I'm personally interested in short fiction markets because I have several ideas for short stories I want to get written in the near future; a few more short stories and then start adding some work on novels to the mix. Burnett also has a good story in the just-released (good bargain!) Utopia Pending anthology.

I'm going to have to do another roundup soon because there's so much going on in "our corner of SFF" (we really need to come up with a name).

Spelling mnemonic

I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded as A
As in “neighbor” and “weigh”;
Or in “counterfeit”, or in
A word such as “foreign”;
Or when rhyming with “iced tea”
In words such as “feisty”;
Or things found in a bean
Like “protein” and “caffeine”;
Or in names from Westmeath
Such as “Deirdre” and “Keith”;
Or in “leisure”, to keep us from taking a breather,
And lest we forget about “either” and “neither”;
Or in words that describe something that might be feared,
Such as “kaleidoscopic”, “heinous” and “weird”;
Or borrowings got from the land of the Rhine,
Like “gesundheit” and “leitmotif”, “zeitgeist” and “stein”;
Or in “sheik”, “vein”, “reveille”, “heifer”, or “seize”;
But, apart from these few, put your I’s before E’s.

HEROES FALL by Morgon Newquist

Silver Empire, the rising small publisher of some fine SFF titles (see my mini-reviews here and here), is embarking on an exciting new project in the superhero fiction arena: Heroes Unleashed, a series of superhero novels by various authors all set in a common universe. (The link goes to a Kickstarter campaign that runs to Tuesday, so you can still get in on the ground floor.) So far there are five authors with novels in the pipeline, nearly ready for press, and I had the privilege of seeing a draft of the first of them—SERENITY CITY: HEROES FALL, by Morgon Newquist, a fast-paced, enthralling novel that fills in the reader on some of the tantalizing hints from her previous Serenity City stories (“Blackout”, which you can read in PARAGONS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SUPERHEROES, and “The Gala”, which appears in HA! HA! HA: A SUPERVILLAIN ANTHOLOGY), while leaving plenty to look forward to in future installments.

Amatopia has an excellent review of HEROES FALL here, on which my meager reviewing powers cannot improve. I’ll just add a couple points of appreciation for this book: I loved how Serenity City itself gets more and more fleshed out as a backdrop for the action. The run-down Greycoast where amateur superheroine Victoria Westerdale (no supername for this unpretentious young lady) defends the underdogs with whom she sympathizes and identifies, and also the location of the abandoned Silver Coast Laboratories, where the mysterious Event that turned so many ordinary people into Primes with superpowers took place decades ago. Rhiannon Park, with its 20-foot-tall statues of two of the city’s great superheroes, dedicated by the still rather mysterious Riley Hirsch: who had erected no statue to her own father, the third superhero of the legendary Triumvirate. Northmill Heights Penitentiary, where Achilles, that third, is now incarcerated, following his Rampage of twenty years ago. The Argall Manor house where Riley, heiress to Rhiannon Argall’s fortune, began her life. The Fina Hill Cemetery, which—like so much in this book—turns out to have rather more in it than appears at first glance. As I got to know Serenity City I found myself wanting to see more of it, and more of the spots I know and like already. Seems like this bodes well for the series.

One of the circumstances that make Serenity City seem more real, and more intriguing, is there’s a lot about the superheroes that is not public knowledge: and not only points connected with their secret identities. Twenty years after Achilles’s Rampage, no one knows what really happened to trigger it. No one really understands what Pendragon’s superpower is, or how the supervillain Blackout was killed, or whence came Thanatos (his successor in supervillainy, who seems to have appeared about the time Blackout exited… hmmm, I wonder…), or what really motivates him to induce superheroes to their own destruction. Some of these things we find out in the course of the book, some may remain forever unclear; in a way it’s like real life, where we never get the answers to questions like what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times this past week, or how Harry Reid got so rich as a U.S. Senator. Why would we expect superheroes to make detailed information about their own challenges or limitation common knowledge?

Victoria Westerdale herself is an awesome character. She’s superstrong but not supertough, so superheroics carry serious risk for her. But she carries on in the most thankless job that Serenity City offers for a superhero, protecting the people least able to repay her, sacrificing the rewards of a normal life merely from her own sense of personal responsibility as the steward of her powers. The choice she makes at the climax of the book is both surprising and natural for her, and marks her transition to a new life as a mature superheroine. I’m eager to read more of her adventures.

Did I mention that this series has a Kickstarter campaign going? It still has a couple days left as I write this. It's fully funded (since about 11 hours into the campaign!), and as you can guess, I think it's highly worthwhile.

I’ve heard talk that someone may be working with Silver Empire on some kind of comic book version of these novels: I’m mainly a novel reader, but I’d be interested in those.

Who owns a grassroots movement?

This is one of those questions that answers itself: nobody, obviously. The whole point of a "grassroots" movement is that it grows up from millions of separate roots, like grass, when there's a feeling throughout a wide section of a population that they need some new direction. It may have figureheads to rally behind, but they aren't the driving force of the movement, and they don't have any kind of authority over it. If they try to lead it in a direction apart from the general consensus, they'll fail.

Literary movements, like the Sad Puppies movement or the more recent ComicsGate movement, have this character as well. If they're destined to amount to anything, it's because there is a broad market being unserved by the established purveyors of their respective forms of literature: science fiction and fantasy, in the case of the Sad Puppies, or comics for ComicsGate. The existence of unserved markets is beyond dispute. Their size and interest is being tested by the creators aiming (like me, as an old Sad Puppy) to produce work we think will prosper. If the enemies of these movements are right, we who try to produce for this market will have little success. If we don't do a good enough job at producing or marketing we may have little success anyway, but the vehement and active opposition to both Sad Puppies and ComicsGate suggest that their opponents suspect the markets for such work are indeed out there, and success is possible.

Another way a grassroots movement, or at least its brand, can fail, is for some of its figureheads to get too puffed-up about their own importance. At the time a couple years ago when Sarah Hoyt tried to leverage her own role in starting out the Sad Puppies movement into ownership of the (untrademarked) name, there were a great many fans who called themselves Sad Puppies based on general sympathy with the ideas it represented. It was a grassroots movement; it meant different things to different people, but all of them had a general dissatisfaction with a direction SFF publishing had taken and wanted something new.

But then Hoyt wrote her blog post, sternly dissing a younger author of growing prominence to Sad Puppy fans, who had dared to publish his own set of recommendations for Hugo nominations using Sad Puppies in the title (you know, so people looking for Sad Puppy information could find it).

And she killed the movement. Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore. Suddenly everyone realized that calling yourself a Sad Puppy wasn't just something you could do casually, and define it yourself, and no one would care much: now it implied taking sides in a dispute--and against someone people liked.

Now ComicsGate looks like it's about to swirl down the same toilet. Vox Day has started a comic book imprint called ComicsGate: I presume he took the trouble of trademarking it before making the announcement. Ethan Van Sciver strongly objects to "his" hashtag being used by a figure he (and many others) strongly dislikes.

Now, I'm not a comics fan of long standing, but am growing more interested in the new voices in the medium; I supported the Alt-Hero comics, and some others, and rather look forward to seeing what they come up with. I see this as part of the movement to reclaim fantastic literature from the bleak, antihuman, antireligious nihilism into which it fell toward the end of the 20th century. But I read with sadness the same recriminations tearing ComicsGate today that sundered Sad Puppies a few years ago: the bitter invective thrown between the anti-Vox Day side and the pro-Vox Day side.

And I suppose the result will be that in their desire to claim the name of ComicsGate for their own, the two factions will turn it into something neither side will have any use for. There are pro-Vox parties "disavowing" ComicsGate, because they're upset with Mr. Van Sciver; which will make Vox's ComicsGate imprint worthless. Swell.

The consolation is that, with or without a name, the movement continues: the unserved markets are still there, and creators will continue their efforts to serve them. The grass continues to grow from its roots, perennially.

My own first effort was the story, "The Kings of the Corona", now close to its publication anniversary in TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. It got some good reviews on Amazon!

Schadenfreude!

Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
Gatekeeping
Is what WorldCon employed!
Larry saw
The Hugos were all devoid
   Of any but
      Token picks.
      And it sticks
      Politics
      In the mix.

Schadenfreude!
So much Schadenfreude!
Puppies picked
Good books that we
All enjoyed...
But No-Award
Was given, just to avoid
   Our nasty con-
      Tagion!
      So we moved on.
      We’ve all gone
      To DragonCon.

Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!
That WorldCon is
So damn paranoid!
Del Arroz
Considered a Polaroid...
   But they were too
      Scared if Jon
      Put camera on
      Goings-on
      At their con...

Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
All the times
WorldCon has annoyed!
Signaling
Their virtue was unalloyed!
   But anyway,
      Here’s the twist:
      A panelist
      That they missed
      “E” feels dissed!

Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!
Hugo nom’s
They’re admitting no one enjoyed!
Now the swarm
Has their own con destroyed!
   Watch them as they
      All drop out!
      And scream and shout!
      No more clout!
      What a rout!

(Fade out)
Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!