{"id":9892,"date":"2021-04-14T17:38:21","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T01:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9892"},"modified":"2021-04-15T05:25:40","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T13:25:40","slug":"russian-liaisons-polish-hellicorns-alien-kickstarters-and-contraband-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=9892","title":{"rendered":"Russian Liaisons, Polish Hellicorns, Alien Kickstarters, and Contraband Readings."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

But before we get to any of that: The Revenge of the Attack Helicopters<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2020 Hugo finalists<\/a> have been announced. If you scroll down the to the “Best Novelette” category, you’ll see an entry that you may find both familiar and not: \u201cHelicopter Story\u201d, by Isabel Fall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Familiar because Fall and her story were the target of a virtue-signaling shitstorm upon first publication. Fall was harassed and bullied, called a transphobic troll and a TERF and a Neonazi (she is in fact trans herself), to the point the story was ultimately taken down at her own request. Unfamiliar because the story’s title has been changed from the intentionally-provocative (and spot-on) “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” to the mealier, self-consciously generic “Helicopter Story”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a story you can barely even find any more. It’s still not on Clarkesworld; The Wayback Machine lists the page it once inhabited as “excluded”. Wyrm Publishing apparently sold out a “limited-edition” ebook version back in December but it’s not anywhere in their catalog as of this morning. You can<\/em> find it archived at Archive.today<\/a>. It has been purged from the usual outlets, erased if not forgotten. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it’s up for a fucking Hugo<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I may have more to say on this subject (and the bandwagon groupthink issues that gave rise to it) in the future, if I can find the time and the stomach for it. In the meantime: find this story and read it, if you haven’t already. Buy it, if it ever becomes available again. Consider voting for it, if you’ve got a Worldcon membership. Show the bastards that they may win the battle now and then, but the war is still up for grabs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n *\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have<\/em> been doing stuff, you know. I haven’t been slacking off, even if it might look that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s just that my life lately has been in bits and pieces; an interview, a short story, tentative collaborations still too embryonic for me to know if they’ll soar into the stratosphere or flame out before they even get off the ground. They range from the trivial\u2014 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(a video montage of me serially harassing all the tetrapod vertebrates in the Magic Bungalow\u2014along with one ill-fated mealworm\u2014 to help French publishers Belial celebrate their 25th anniversary)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014to Way-Out-Of-My-League\u2014 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(an interview with the European Open Science Cloud as one of their “creative voices, visionaries and bold pioneers with scientific backgrounds” to “elaborate on visions of how research will and should be conducted in the future”. It wasn’t a total<\/em> mess, but they should have listened to me when I told them I was unqualified. Cory Doctorow was far more insightful) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014to the Don’t-Look-Or-You-Might-Jinx-It\u2014 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(down in New York City, there exists an officially optioned Blindsight <\/em>screenplay). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe a dozen things crowd my plate at the moment: all have potential, none are huge, some I don’t feel comfortable talking about yet. But a few have already been announced, or even released into the wild; a couple are upcoming and could do with a bit of PR. None of them, in isolation, really warrant a standalone blog post\u2014but bundle them all together and you’ve got a respectable word count. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are their stories (dun dun<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n *\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Russia interviewed me a couple of weeks back, in service of a video they were assembling to commemorate Cosmonautics Day and Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering spaceflight. They’ve just posted the final product<\/a>, at a very glossy two minutes eleven seconds: footage of space missions past and present, color-saturated nebula porn, real cosmonauts calling in from LEO. Triumphal music and inspirational sentiments delivered from labs and launch pads and living rooms. Then, just when you think the cheerleading can’t get any more brazen, they cut to a cascade of catastrophe: launch-pad explosions, falling spaceships, burning debris.[1]<\/a><\/sup>1<\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
This was my intro.<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That’s where they stuck me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have to admit: there’s a certain grim joy in being so appropriately typecast. I only got a single line (I think that’s pretty much all anyone got), so the hour-plus interview that produced it seems a bit excessive in hindsight. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. The conversation was a blast just on its own terms. I even talked them into having it on Jitsi instead of their own Google Meet platform, based on Jitsi’s superior privacy policies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A teensy victory, and ultimately meaningless. But these days I’ll take what I can get. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

* <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
This fierce dark hellicorn was Konline’s official mascot.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’ve had more lines elsewhere, albeit never in a venue with such high production values. During the time I was going back and forth with Google Russia I was also doing an extended three-part interview with a group of other Russians who, I have just discovered, go by the moniker “GrimDarkManClub”. (An English-only version has just gone up<\/a>, and has already been described by one viewer as “sad and offensive”.) Back in March I attended Konline 2021<\/a>, my first virtual con (based in Poland, naturally). I participated in a panel on the feedback loops connecting Science and SF, and gave a talk which was hopefully (if they used the thumbnail I provided) described as <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The tees they sent us were somewhat less intimidating.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 a welcome departure from his usual doom-and-gloom lectures about how fucked we are as a species, Peter Watts virtually returns to Poland to talk about how interstellar travel holds the secret to redeeming Humanity by rendering it Inhuman. He then argues that the same principles should apply to any species with starflight capabilities. It’s probably bullshit, but when you’re predicting trends for a whole galaxy, how can it not be? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It went over pretty well, as far as I could tell from the Chat window (although you never know; no stream of emojis, no matter how long, will ever replace the feel of a live audience). It’s kind of a drag that this new neuro book<\/a> I’m reading throws the whole premise of that talk into question, though. On the upside, the same book is taking Omniscience<\/em> in new and unexpected directions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n *\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Julie Novakova<\/a> and The European Astrobiology Institute<\/a> (the team behind last year’s Strangest of All<\/a> anthology) have joined forces with Canada’s own Laksa Media<\/a> to kickstart Life Beyond Us<\/em><\/a>. It’s an anthology of exobiology-themed stories, with a twist: each story will be paired to a nonfiction essay written by a bona-fide expert in whatever field the SF author has chosen to brutalize. They’ve got twenty-two of us lined up, from current superstars like Mary Robinette Kowal to senior grandmasters like Gregory Benford. I’m in there too; I haven’t quite settled on what to write, or even the general arena my aliens might inhabit. I just hope Julie can dig up an expert on the biology of life-forms that live in the chromospheres of suns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a Kickstarter project<\/a>\u2014the first Kickstarter I’ve ever been involved with, actually\u2014so I’ll take it very personally if we don’t at least reach a stretch goal or two. (Of course, they’re offering a variety of awards and perks to minimize the chances of that happening.) They’re currently at 15%. You know what to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n *\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And finally, something in the more immediate future: this very weekend, in fact. I’m participating in Flights of Foundry<\/a>: another virtual con, whose designers\u2014 judging by the variety of bird-cat hybrids adorning their splash page\u2014 seem to have a thing for interspecies sex. You gotta register in advance, but it’s free, and it slants towards presentations that are useful<\/em>: less Star Trek vs Star Wars<\/em>, more How to make a Webcomic<\/em> and Geographic Worldbuilding<\/em>. I’m only up front in three events myself, but there’s a number of others I plan to attend out of pure personal interest (which believe me, doesn’t happen often when you’ve seen as many cons as I have). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only real fly in the ointment is actually as much feature as bug: in keeping with their stated virtual location of “Anywhere On Earth!”, they’ve adopted UTC as their operational time zone and they’re running around the clock. Which means that depending on where you live, you might have to get up at 3am to catch that panel on Neurodiversity in SF. (On the plus side, two days of around-the-clock programming\u2014in multiple streams, no less\u2014 means you get a lot<\/em> of material to choose from). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own schedule is pretty light: a panel on “Tackling Environmental Issues in Video Games” (April 17, 1400-1450 UTC, or 10am Toronto time), one on “Speculative Biology” (April 18th, 1900-1950 UTC, 1500 Toronto), and a reading (April 18, 2130-2200 UTC, 1730 Toronto). The titles tell you all you really need to know about the panels; the reading, though, is a bit unusual. I’ll be presenting a story that has never been published and probably never will be; it was commissioned as a tie-in for a limited TV series which, as far as I know, never made it to air. The rights remain with the production company, so I can’t publish the damn thing; but I’m willing to sneak it out in a live reading, if you all promise not to tell. Which is to say: I can’t vouch for the quality, but it’s very <\/em>exclusive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hope you can make it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n

    1<\/sup> I almost expected to hear the lyrics my elder brother once taught a bunch of preschoolers to help them “deal with their grief” over the Challenger explosion: bodies flying through the air\/All the horror everywhere\u2026<\/em> \u2191<\/a>\n <\/p>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    But before we get to any of that: The Revenge of the Attack Helicopters. The 2020 Hugo finalists have been announced. If you scroll down the to the “Best Novelette” category, you’ll see an entry that you may find both familiar and not: \u201cHelicopter Story\u201d, by Isabel Fall. Familiar because Fall and her story were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,43,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-interviews","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9892"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9931,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892\/revisions\/9931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}