The late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
So make no mistake, when Kellyanne Conway talks about “alternative facts,” what she means is lies.
Here’s another quote for you: ““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
That one is from Josef Goebbels. Keep him in mind when you hear the big lies repeated ad nauseum.
We’ve added a couple cool new things to the official Wild Cards website.
First off, a new blog post about Superworld, the role-playing game that inspired Wild Cards, from Steve Perrin, who created it.
Also, we’ve added a brand new art gallery at http://www.wildcardsworld.com/art-gallery/
Thing is, there’s no art in the art gallery… yet. That’s where we hope you will come in. We want Wild Cards art! Yes, we’ll be putting up some of the superb cover art and interior illustrations that the books have featured over the decades, but we also hope this page will be a place to showcase some fan art, and maybe discover some new talent.
So if you’ve got that restless urge to draw, and own a paintbrush or a box of colored pencils, we’d love to see what you can do. There’s a link right on the page where you can send your work. Everything that’s appropriate will be posted (please note, we want Wild Cards artwork ONLY, so don’t send us portraits of Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen, or Harry Potter, or Spider-Man, or ANYTHING that is not Wild Cards inspired).
Also, if you look through the author bios and character sketches elsewhere on the site, you’ll note that there are many Wild Cards characters who have NEVER been illustrated. We’ve love to have some thumbnails to add to those entries. We don’t promise to accept anything or everything… but for those who send us something cool enough to make the cut, we have free autographed hardcovers of INSIDE STRAIGHT.
Fly high, aces.
… back to the Jean Cocteau.
Colorado’s own Carrie Vaughn, one of our favorite people, will be returning to New Mexico on Sunday for an author event at the Jean Cocteau. We’ll do doing an interview and a Q&A, and Carrie will be signing copies of her new novel, MARTIANS ABROAD.
We’ll also have plenty of copies of Carrie’s Kitty Norville series on hand for autographing, as well as all the Wild Cards books that she has contributed to. (Her Wild Cards characters include Curveball, Earth Witch, Rikki, and Wild Fox).
The fun starts on Sunday at 1:00pm. Come join us, in you’re in the vicinity of Santa Fe. And if you’re not, you can still get a signed book by mailorder through the JCC website.
Another week, another round of NFL playoffs.
Last week in the divisional round, we got two great games and two blowouts. I was hoping that this week’s conference championships would give us more exciting contests, but no such luck. The Falcons ripped right through Green Bay and the Patriots obliterated the Steelers. Neither contest was even remotely competitive.
Not much to say about either game, really. Aaron Rodgers is amazing, yes, but he doesn’t play defense, and the Packer D could not even seem to slow down Matty Ice, let alone stop him. And the Patriots… yeah, yeah, Brady is good, especially when you give him weeks to sit in the pocket unmolested and don’t cover his receivers. I watched him complete pass after pass that seemed to be totally uncontested, with the receiver standing all alone and not a defender within yards.
Anyway, we have our SuperBowl: Patriots against Falcons.
Nothing much to say but GO FALCONS.
Meanwhile, I am thinking about next year’s draft…
Rock and roll will never die, boys and girls… but rockers do.
Time to head over to Tor.com for the last great set from Joker Plague.
That’s Stephen Leigh on story, and John Picacio on artwork. The title of the album is “The Atonement Tango.”
You can find it — for free — at http://www.tor.com/2017/01/18/the-atonement-tango/
Boogie on down and give a listen!
It’s that time again. Another year has ended, another worldcon is on the horizon (The Finnish Convention, this August, in Helsinki), and nominations are once again open for the Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2016.
To nominate, you need to be a member of at least one of these three worldcons:
— MidAmericon II, last year’s Kansas City worldcon,
— the current year’s worldcon, in Helsinki,
— the 2018 worldcon, ConJose II, in San Jose, California.
Unless you’ve got a time machine, it’s too late to join MidAmericon II, but signing up for Helsinki and San Jose is easy enough… and the sooner you do it, the less you’ll be spending, since the cost of membership rises as we get nearer to the con. You do NOT have to attend to be able to nominate. Supporting Memberships are also available, at a much lower rate.
To join the Helsinki con, go to:
http://www.worldcon.fi/
To join for San Jose, the address is:
http://www.worldcon76.org/
Join one, join the other, join both. Come if you can, but nominate even if you can’t.
Once you’ve signed up, you will be sent your own personalized link to the nominations page, which will allow you to nominate the books, stories, movies, television shows, artists, fans, and editors whose work most wowed you this past year.
The Hugo Awards were first given in 1953, and remain our field’s most prestigious, important, and meaningful awards. The list of Hugo winners is a Who’s Who in science fiction and fantasy, and you can have a voice in determining which names are added to that distinguished roster besides those of Alfred Bester, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Connie Willis, Samuel R. Delany, N.K. Jemisin, James Tiptree Jr, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Gardner Dozois, Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Anne Leckie, Anne McCaffery, and so many many more.
And yes, come to worldcon if you can. The best place to meet and hang with your favorite writers. Including me…
So this past weekend was the divisional round of the NFL playoffs.
And, yes, being a football fan I watched them all, even though my Giants were eliminated last week (and the Jets never got within shouting distance).
There was good news and bad news for the people of Houston. The bad news was, Evil Little Bill and his Patriots dismissed the Texans rather soundly. (Not unexpected, sad to say. Not when you have Osweiler going up against Brady). The good news was, the Cowboys lost, thereby eliminating any chance of a Cowboys/ Patriots Superbowl, so right-minded fans no longer need to root for a giant asteroid to strike Houston. Now we can simply root for whoever is playing New England.
With neither of my teams involved, I had a lot less invested in this weekend’s contests. The Saturday games were both pretty one-sided, so much so that I found myself multi-tasking and doing other stuff while watching. The Sunday games were better… especially the epic struggle between the Packers and the Cowboys. That one looked like a blowout too when the Pack went up 21-3, but somehow Dallas fought back, and tied the game at 28 and then again at 31. Looked like overtime, but they made the mistake of leaving thirty seconds for Aaron Rodgers. His sideline pass to set up the winning field goal was the thing of beauty, a throw and catch to rival Eli’s superbowl tosses to Tyree and Manningham. And afterwards, in the wake of the Cowboy defeat, America got to see Jerry Jones making his I-am-sucking-on-sour-lemons face, last seen in 2007 when it was the Giants who sent the Boys home.
The Kansas City/ Pittsburgh game also came down to the last second, yet somehow was not nearly as exciting. The Steelers won without scoring a touchdown. That’s not going to cut it next week against the Patriots and Evil Little Bill.
So… Pittsburgh at New England, Green Bay at Atlanta.
Should be fun.
Just signed contracts with TEAS Press for Azerbaijani editions of A Song of Ice and Fire. A first for me.
This marks the forty-seventh different language that Ice & Fire has been translated into. Not half bad. And moving in on the half-century mark.
Makes me wonder how many living languages we have on the planet at the moment. Not counting Klingon and Dothraki and other fictional tongues.
Curious about where the Wild Cards series came from, lo these thirty years ago?
All your question… well, okay, some of your questions… are answered in the latest video from Tor Books, cut together from the hours of interviews they taped at last summer’s Kansas City worldcon, during the launch party for HIGH STAKES.
<lj-embed id=”870″/>
This is the third in the series. You can find the first two on the new Wild Cards website.
There will be more.
(Please restrict your questions and comments to Wild Cards).
((Signed copies of HIGH STAKES and many other Wild Cards books are available from the Jean Cocteau Cinema bookshop)).
The news just broke that the San Diego Chargers will be relocating to Los Angeles next season.
San Diego has loyally supported the team since the old AFL days in the early 60s. Win or lose, the fans loved their Bolts.
LA has never supported any football team unless it was winning, and preferably winning big. Once LA had two teams, and that was great when they won; when they hit down years, as all teams do, the Raiders and Rams were both abandoned. That’s why they left town twenty years ago, both in the same year. Last year the Rams came back… but they lost, and before season’s end, they were playing before tens of thousands of empty seats.
I’d say the same fate awaits the Chargers, except I read that they will be playing in a small 30,000 seat venue for a couple years until the new Rams stadium (where they will be a tenant, like the Jets in old Giants Stadium) is complete. That’s smart, I suppose. Nothing else about the move is.
It’s all about greed. And despite what you may have heard Gordon Gekko say, greed is NOT good. (Too many people seem to lose sight of the fact that he was the VILLAIN of that film).
I am a fan of the Giants and Jets, both of whom have great loyal fan bases and seem likely to remain where they are for decades to come… but I know what it is to have your heart torn out when a greedy owner moves your team away. When I was a child, I was a Dodgers fan… the Brooklyn Dodgers, thank you very much, the Boys of Summer, one of baseball’s great iconic franchises, playing in one of baseball’s great iconic ballparks, Ebbets Field. The Dodgers were the heart and soul of Brooklyn; never has a city loved a team so much, or had so much of its identity bound up with them. The city that was Brooklyn died when the Dodgers departed; the gentrified borough that remains is just a bedroom community for Manhattan. (Okay, they still have fantastic pizza, gotta give ’em that).
The Dodger fans (and the fans of the baseball Giants, similarly bereft) eventually got the Mets, which helped some… especially in ’69 and ’86… but the pain is still there, down deep, when we think back on it. Ebbets Field was old and run-down and small, yeah, but it was wonderful in the same way that Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are wonderful. Those ballparks have become legendary and historic, cherished by the people of Boston and Chicago respectively, and I don’t think anyone would dare to tear them down now. The same thing would have happened to Ebbets Field if only it had lasted a few more years and managed to survive the fad for building hideous concrete multi-purpose stadiums that dominated the 60s. (And indeed that is exactly what has happened in the Wild Cards universe, an alternate world where Walter O’Malley contracted the wild card virus before he could move the team. He turned into a pile of slime, but it was days before anyone noticed the difference).
Maybe because of my early childhood trauma at losing the Dodgers, I have never liked the various relocations that have plagued both football and baseball over the decades. The ONLY cases where I think it is warranted are those where a city stops supporting its team or teams… as happened in LA with the Raiders and the Rams. But the rest? Bob Irsay slinking out of Baltimore in the dead of night with the Colts? Despicable. Al Davis abandoning Oakland, spending a decade in LA, then moving back? Offensive. Art Modell moving the Browns from Cleveland? Shame, shame.
Cleveland did get a new Browns team, so at least they got to keep the name and tradition (though the original Browns, now the Ravens, are a perennial contender who won a SuperBowl after the move, while the expansion Browns have pretty much sucked since they were reborn, so it was hardly a fair swap). The good fans of Baltimore did not even get that. The ‘Colts’ name and colors should have stayed when Irsay left. Let the Indianapolis team start fresh with a new name and uni, as the Ravens did. It would be splendid if the NFL would rule that Spanos can move his team, but the name ‘Chargers’ and the lightning bolt and the powder blues should all remain with San Diego, for however long it takes for them to get an expansion team. The relocated team can be the LA Earthquakes, since I think their tenure in Lalaland is going to be pretty shaky. If what I read is true, neither the city nor the Rams want them there.
Green Bay has the right idea. The Packers are owned by the people of Green Bay. Would that were true in more cities. If I were only a billionaire (not even close, sorry), I’d buy an NFL franchise and leave it to the city upon my death… except, alas, I am told that NFL rules no longer allow that. So there will never be another Green Bay, and the billionaire owners will continue to move their teams around the country in search of ever newer, bigger, glitzier stadiums paid for by the fans and taxpayers, stadiums that can generate hundreds of millions in profits instead of merely tens of millions.
Charger fans, I feel for you.
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