2012 – Page 58 – Wis[s]e Words

Sadie Hawkins Day lives

Published on February 29, 2012Leave a comment

the first appearance of Sadie Hawkins Day

L’il Abner, All Capp’s hillbilly humour/adventure comic strip was of course hugely popular for decades and hugely influencial on American popular culture. One of the things it popularised was Sadiw Hawkins Day, an annual day on which women of l’il Abner’s hillbilly town of Dogpatch got to propose to their men; the rest of the year they had to sit around and wait for their lazy and marriage afearing beaus to propose to them. Even on Sadie Hawkins day they still had to ketch them to actually be able to propose and All Capp managed to milk the pursuit of L’il Abner by his girlfriend Daisy Mae for decades before he eventually married them off.

Sadie Hawkins Day meanwhile had become popular outside the L’il Abner strip as well, merging with an older tradition of February 29th being the only day in the year that women could ask men out to dance, or marriage. That sort of topsy turvy craziness was hilarious back when gender roles were somewhat more strict than in modern times, but Sadie Hawkins day still is celebrated.

As my foster brother found out this morning. He has been living together with his partner for years now, they have two children together and while she would like to get married, he was in no hurry to do so. Which is why a few weeks back she took the matters into her own hands and asked my father for his hand, then surprised him this morning with a true old fashioned marriage proposal, having first collected several witnesses including his daughters and my mother, going down on one knee and popping the big question. He said yes of course; he’d better if he knew what was good for him.

So congratulations to the happy couple and I hope to get the wedding invitation soon.

Whither back issues?

Published on February 29, 2012Leave a comment

Tom Spurgeon asks what we think will happen with the comics back issues market in the next few years or decades:

So what do you think? Is this even a market 10, 15, 25 years from now? Is it all digital? Does it shift to newer comics as more of those children try to recapture their past? Will people buy from the original run of DC New 52 comics in 2028? Will Jack Kirby comic books still appeal? What happens?

I think a lot of it will depend on what happens to the comic book format in general. To say it’s not in the best of health is an understatement and I can see it dying quickly once digital comics become fully accepted and every important publishers offers them. If that tie between the weekly batch of new comics and the necessary trip to the comics store is broken, that will inevitably mean fewer opportunities for the stores to sell back issues too. Especially once there’s a generation of comic book readers who’ve never known anything but cheap and easy availability of digital comics and who are happy to buy their back issues that way too.

Which would mean that most back issues will only be bought by a slowly shrinking base of aging consumers who have grown up with that way of buying comics, as arguable is already the case for new comics anyway. Which in turn means fewer comics stores, with those that survive having to specialise in something that makes them desirable for consumers who can get their normal comics fix through the internet. This is not a new development of course; just ask your local independent bookseller.

The upper segment of back issue sales, selling Golden Age, Silver Age and key Bronze Age and more modern comics can go two ways. It may develop further into a sort of pseudo arts market, with speculators and collectors both wanting to get the rarer, more exclusive comics, driving up prices on the usual suspects, with perhaps a lowering of prices for your run of the mill Golden or Silver age comic. But it may also go the way of the “normal” back issue market, as newer and younger collectors no longer see the point and value in getting them when they can get the stories either digital or in nice, luxurious hardcover collections.

In either case, there will also be a new market for these sort of back issue: the institutional collector, working for e.g. a dedicated comics museum, an university with a comics and sequential art department or even more general musea and universities wanting comics not so much for their intrisic value but for what they can say about a given period’s zeitgeist. For all these parties having the original comic can be as important if not more so than having the stories they contained; rule of thumb in any sort of academic research is always to go to the sources after all.

This is something that has happened to other once popular mass media. Way back in 1992 or so a columnist in the Comics Buyers Guide of all place dropped the example of the dime novel, hugely popular in the early twentieth century, having a resurge in the twenties and thirties as people started buying back issues for nostalgic reasons and once that audience died off, largely only of interest to the type of institutional collector I described above.

The biggest worry in all this, if we ignore the economic turmoil these developments will wreak on the already fragile comics industry is one that Tom touched upon as well, that certain comics will become genuinely rare once the market collapses, that there won’t be anybody who saves them and hence that we’ll be in danger of losing parts of our history. This is an even greater worry with digital formats. Paper is much more durable than silicon: even if the hardware remains usable, the software might not be, while data formats in particular are incredibly vulnerable to bitrot. Paper comics also don’t have any nasty digital rights management build in that prevents you from reselling them. Worse with some formats, your comic exists as long as their publisher keeps them alive in “the cloud”. Ironically, it might be the comics pirates who are our best bests in keeping these comics available after their publisher has given the ghost…

This year’s Clarke Award

Published on February 28, 20121 Comment

The Clarke Award (founded by Arthur C. hisself) is given each year to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK the previous year. It’s a juried award, unlike both the Hugo and Nebula, for which any publisher can submit novels it thinks eligible. This year’s submissions longlist has just been made public at Torque Control; so farof the sixty entries, I’ve read exactly one of them, Charlie Stross’ Rule 34. Which I think is also the only sf or fantasy novel published in 2011 that I’ve actually read.

Which won’t stop me from entering Torque Control‘s guess the shortlist game however. Below are the six entries I think will be on it and why:

Embassytown, China Miéville. China is a multiple Clarke Award winner and this novel created quite a lot of buzz early last year, so I think this is a shoe-in.

The Islanders, Christopher Priest. Another easy guess, as Priest has also won the Award previously, while this novel is a return to his old Dream Archipelago series of stories.

Reamde, Neal Stephenson. The Clarke Awards in the past few years have had at least one American nominee in the shortlist and this is the obvious candidate; if we’re unlucky it will be one of the two Connie Willis novels instead.

Osama Lavie Tidhar, which I’m currently reading. This is the one I’m the least sure about, but it seems to have had a fairly large p.r. push (helped by Tidhar making the e-book edition free a while back, which is when I got it), it tackles a big, important theme and it’s somewhat on the literary side of the science fiction genre, which ticks all Clarke boxes for me.

Rule 34, Charles Stross. A good book, an important British sf writer, who has been nominated before.

The Fallen Blade Jon Courtenay Grimwood. He has been shortlisted a few times before, so is a likely candidate for this year as well.

An all male lineup, which would not be my preference so much as me looking at the list of nominees with no other information than what I already knew about the writers and books listed. We’ll see at the end of March how right I was.

The Cold Equations

Published on February 27, 2012Leave a comment

Existence required order, and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them, but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter, and no science of man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation, and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature, and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth.

That’s the message that “The Cold Equations“, Tom Godwin’s best known story (to be honest, the only story he really is known for) wants you to take away from it. It’s the melodramatic story of an emergency dispatch ship (EDS) pilot who discovers a stowaway on board and knows he has to immediately shove him out of the airlock, or otherwise he won’t have enough fuel to reach the colony he’s on his way to, his ship having just enough fuel to reach that. But then it turns out the stowaway is not some swarthy space bandit but *gasp* a young, innocent girl wanting to visit her brother in the colony. Our hero now has a moral dilemma, but the cold equations of space leave no other room than for the girl to sacrifice herself to save the ship.

For all its melodrama it’s an incredible effective story, if you don’t think too much about it, pitting a certain science fiction reader’s desire to be the kind of hard man who knows some sacrifices are unavoidable against the very same fan’s belief that there always is a solution. Even now, almost sixty years after its first publication it’s still a subject for debate as so many people want to deny its central message, that the laws of nature have no place for human values, that some deaths are unavoidable.

I’m one of them. Because the situation that “The Cold Equations” sketches is avoidable and as a result the story ends up not to be so much a parable for the cold, uncaring cruel laws of space as it is a demonstration of the necessity of good health and safety laws.

Lets start with basics: you have these huge space cruisers that fly between colonies which have a couple of EDS ships on board in case a colony not on the itenary needs urgent help. These EDS shuttles are sent out with the bare minimum of fuel needed to reach the colony. Even without the problem of stowaways, there are other situations in which a ship might need more fuel than the bare minimum to reach its goal; why skimp on this safety margin? But worse is that the story makes clear that there are no real safety measures to keep passengers on the cruiser to reach an EDS, or any real attempt to discover stowaways before the EDS leaves the cruiser. Sure, there’s a sign saying that the EDS is off limits to unauthorised personnel, but that’s hardly a real safety measure…

And this is not because the (fictional) company running these spaceships is sloppy and negligent, but because Tom Godwin, the author, needs this to setup the situation he wants of the innocent girl stowaway doomed to die because at that point the harsh laws of space permit no other outcome. But before this situation can be set up he therefore has to omit a lot of common sense safety measures that would’ve prevented it from arising in the first place.

And if you’re trying to prove a political point by arguing that the laws of physics make certain measures necessary, that killing some people is sadly necessary for the greater good, it behooves you to make sure that the situation you’ve chosen to illustrate this harsh fact is in fact not completely avoidable with some common sense precautions.

What she said

Published on February 26, 2012Leave a comment

He died around midnight, just a couple days after his 33rd birthday and three years, almost to the day, after his diagnosis. In all, we were together 15 years. I have very few regrets about the time I spent with Scott.

That was the point when I lost it for a while. Until then I could read Betsy Megan’s incredible article on what it feels like losing your spouse (found via Metafilter) dispassionately, but that little paragraph, the matter of fact way in which she writes about his death and the conclusion just hit home. That was exactly what it feels like. All else being equal, I’d rather would’ve liked to be able to spent more time with Sandra, but the time we did have together was worth it. Just because we’ve reached terminus doesn’t make the journey worthless.

Hector and Sophie asleep on the sofa

I’d been thinking a lot about Sandra this week anyway, having been home sick from Wednesday, bringing thrown back inside my own head, sleeping a lot, not being able to concentrate much when awake, thinking about Sandra. Work and the distractions of various entertainments normally keep too much hurt at bay, but without them I had nowhere to hide. The cats weren’t much of a help either, as you can see, though it has been nice sleeping in a bed with them at night.

We decided to get married. Initially we had intended to wait until after we both finished engineering school, but I have never been too fond of weddings and it seemed to suit him well enough not to bother for the first 12 years we were together. It was no lack of commitment; we bought a house together and loved each other very much. Marrying him was part a practical decision—so that I could speak for him if he couldn’t, and so that inheritance sorts of things would be easier to sort out. But at this point, it was also to have some good news to tell people, to offset the bad news, as it were.

Sandra being congratulated by the wedding registrar

Again, this was more or less why we gotten married as well, two years ago when Sandra was scheduled for yet another very intense operation, to make sure that all the legal niceties were tied off just in case and as a sign of our love for each other. (Big thumbs up for the Amsterdam civil service btw for making that possible so quickly btw.) I still wear my wedding ring daily, as a reminder and symbol of our love. In my head I’m still married.

Beyond that, it is hard not to feel perhaps even selfish. Of course I miss him for himself, his sense of humor, and all the things I fell in love with him for. But I seem somehow to feel his loss most keenly for all the things he did for me that I can’t or don’t like doing: creating and maintaining an amazing home network that’s now gradually deteriorating in ways I don’t understand; cooking every other time we ran out of leftovers; doing nearly all the shopping (I dislike shopping); tackling the monthly bills; snuggling when I was feeling down; pushing me to keep trying; and even just telling me, gently, when I was being foolish. (It’s an ongoing quandary for me in social settings, too: explain to someone I just met that I’m a widow, which alarms and flusters people and is not a good introduction to the funny story I intend to tell, or go on referring to “my husband” in the past tense and just don’t mention why?)

This, so very much. I miss Sandra for her cooking and gardening, her erudition, for being able to talk with her about politics or books in ways I could do with nobody else, almost as much as for herself. But then those sort of things are also what makes somebody your partner, aren’t they?

And that dillemma of how to refer to Sandra, boy do I recognise it. Refering to her as my wife gives the wrong expectation and you don’t want to cause other people potential for embarassement, but to call her my late wife, or deceased wife, or to myself as a widower seems both a bit dramatic/attention seeking and often irrelevant in the context. Not to mention a bit heavy to lay on people.

I had originally planned to talk about this article about most common cooking/baking mistakes and what Sandra had taught me about cooking (first rule: clean as you go), but that’ll have to wait until another Sunday…