Werthead

Discworld #9: Eric by Terry Pratchett

Four episodes in. Some iffy pacing, the effects are a bit too pristine and digital to be really convincing (man, doing in-universe CGI that looks naturalistic is hard) and there is a bit of a tonal problem: the show in almost every respect is YA but then has swearing and people being gorily sliced in half by magic and other people shot and left bleeding out on the ground, which feels a bit of a mixed message. That actors are all pretty good though and the Grisha trilogy side of things is far superior to the novel. There's also a "typical Netflix house style" feeling to events which is annoying but it feels like this show is kind of fighting against that (as The Witcher did) rather than leaning into it. The Crows storyline is making me think that a more adult and focused Lies of Locke Lamora adaptation could do gangbusters.

Discworld #8: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Correction from the other thread: apparently the Stormlight Archive was eligible after all. Some people felt it should have gotten a nomination from the number of people who said they were nominating it, but it just didn't get enough votes to get on there (which, given how quickly it dropped out of the conversation, is perhaps not as surprising as it would have been a while back). Having gone round the houses on the GRRM thing, I can't see how they can disallow it. As a few commentators have pointed out, a WorldCon's code of conduct (which isn't even a required thing) cannot override the rules for the Hugo Awards, so it appears that the nomination can stand. There also seems to have been a call to precedent: when faced with a large number of people trying to fuck over the Hugo Awards during puppygate, the response wasn't to disallow their nominations or use executive powers to boot them out, but to use the existing mechanisms to stop them (i.e. No Award and then mild reform of the voting process). The argument would seem to be the same here, except the fault line isn't between the normal Hugo fandom and outsiders but within the normal Hugo fandom, which will probably result in a strong number of votes for it to win and for No Award to triumph over it. There is a marginal difference in that the GRRM blog entry mentions GRRM by name in the title, but some of the puppy entries (particularly the VD entries) were quite a lot more vicious and unpleasant in specifics and generalities and they were allowed to stand. I can't see them making a different call here.

Some Americans knew the term from 1970s PBS broadcasts of Doctor Who, since Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor had an insane predilection for them.

Discworld #7: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

I think this might be just another demonstration of how marginal the BRW category is. A couple dozen or so people were MLP fans, saw this, though it was cool and nominated it. I don't think it's much more than that. Hell, the MLP fanbase is nuts. If you don't want the GRRM article to win, go on a few MLP fansites and publicise the fact this thing has been nominated, it'll win by a thousand votes.

The general audience is unaware of that. I think for the people who do pay attention to that, Lynch has gone into the "amber alert" category where future rumours/behaviour will be watched but he's not got everyone calling for his head (Bear is in that category as well after the whole racefail thing, and that was a decade ago, and she's published plenty of books since then). Hell, Cole and Sykes were given extra rope and second and third chances before they got to the point of having their contracts pulled.

Best Series I believe was introduced to stop people nominating series in the Best Novel category (like Wheel of Time in 2014), which they felt was not in the spirit of the award. I think that's a reasonable precedent for splitting out Best Related Work from these kind of fandom essays/analyses.

Yeah, it was weird trying to adapt two books (even short-ish ones) into the same timeframe as the other adaptations managed for one.

For Book of Words, Warner Books in the USA and Orbit in the UK. Warners published all three books as trade and then mass-market paperbacks. Orbit published Books 1 and 2 as mass-market paperback originals and then switched to hardcover for Book 3. For Sword of Shadows, Warner Books published Book 1 in hardcover in the USA, then Tor bought the paperback rights for Book 1, then published Books 2-4 in hardcover. Orbit published all four books in hardcover (with a change in cover design between Books 1 and 2). Warners had the first edition for Book 1 and Tor for Books 3-4, but Orbit had the first edition of Book 2 (Warner Books shut down around the time Book 2 was supposed to come out and there were problems in transferring the deal to Tor, during which time Orbit just pressed on and got the book out). Jones's ISFDB page may be helpful.

Yeah, I'd stand by that. Book of Words was solid and got better as it went along, but Sword of Shadows is probably on a par with ASoIaF. There was a huge step-up between the two series.

Well, Rothfuss already has (The Wise Man's Fear came out five months before A Dance with Dragons). Lynch, whose most recent book came out two-and-a-half years after theirs, obviously can't overtake them until one of them publishes.

Cosgrove Hall adapted Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music; Sky One adapted Hogfather, The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Going Postal. Going Postal I think was generally regarded as the best.

Best Related Work has been the lowest or one of the lowest-nominated and voted categories for donkey's years. Blog entries and essays have perked it up because they can be read in half an hour or less, whilst a 300-page biography of a major SFF figure or a book-long analysis of fandom might be too much to read (especially if the voter is also reading a dozen novels between Best Novel and Lodestar, plus novellas and short stories, maybe more if they want to vote on Best Series etc). There's been a lot of complaints about that, such as the thrust of Jeanette Ng's speech being similar to the book Astounding that came out a couple of years earlier which went into a lot more detail exactly why Campbell was a racist arsehole. But you could read that speech in five minutes or watch it on YouTube in a lot less, rather than reading a pretty big book on the same issue. That said, you could also argue this is a good thing: Jeanette Ng's speech was a short and accessible encapsulation of things people had already said in greater detail elsewhere, and it led to a change in SFF fandom, so why not give it an award? Kameron Hurley's "We Have Always Fought" also summarised an argument that could have been made at much greater length into a shorter and more accessible format.

JV Jones has released the cover art and a sample chapter for Sorry Jones, a stand-alone novel she's self-publishing. She wrote this book to get back in the zone after a long period spent out of the writing game, before getting into Endlords.

Yes. Books 1-3 are effectively prequels he wrote because he realised he needed the reader to have much more empathy for and knowledge of Locke, Sabetha and Jean as characters. Lynch completed a first draft about two years ago. Rewrites and edits had not been begun at that stage. Two years for rewrites and edits is an incredibly long time (given that a lot of people write a book from scratch, rewrite, edit and publish in a 12 to 24-month period in total).

Yup. Apparently it would have been done at the end of last year or the start of this without the pandemic and attendant problems, but it got pushed back a bit. I think she was sitting around the two-thirds-done point late last year. I know JV has also recovered the rights to the Book of Words trilogy - which leads into Sword of Shadows but is not strictly necessary to enjoy it - and wants to re-release them as ebooks and audiobooks. If Tor picked them up, that could take the sting out of waiting eleven years for Endlords (though I suspect they'll also want to see the progress on the final book as well, which JV is planning to roll straight into) and allow for a unified marketing and cover design strategy.

It's not from Lynch or Gollancz, so I'd immediately say disregard it. (worth reiterating again that although Lynch is American, Gollancz is his primary publisher so the US publishers can't get a date until the UK publishers provide a date, and that's not been done so far)

Nobody apart from the original complainant identified themselves, unlike the original complaint which identified times, places and what was going on (and also stating they fully consented to everything that happened) and then both Lynch and Bear gave their version of events confirming what happened. Everything was pretty conflated, it was only the emphasis on intent that differed. I'm not saying everyone involved was as pure as the driven snow and that other complaints were not valid, but given that both authors have picked up "hate" groups over the years who've harassed and attacked them at almost every opportunity, it is very hard to distinguish between genuine complaints, bandwagon-jumping by trolls and the Internet amplifying rumours. IIRC someone did a blog post saying they'd received "major evidence" against a dozen or so other authors and would be making a big announcement and then never did. The whole situation was pretty sleazy and bizarre, and the unverified rumour and insinuation did little to help the situation. If more people come forward and corroborate claims and a pattern of behaviour emerges, as it did with Sykes and Cole and Anvar and Whedon, then I have no doubt that would be come clear very quickly. It's not been swept under the carpet, and it's put people on notice that something unfortunate happened, if the details of whom was the victim and whom was the transgressor are in dispute. If more stuff comes out, this will be remembered.

It was all between consenting adults and there was no suggestion that there was anything untoward or non-consensual going on beyond that (despite some claims that a 25-year-old is not a responsible adult). There was some additional unsubstantiated gossip attached to that which was best ignored as it was not supported (there was some anonymous claims that more people would come forward with claims, which they never did). It was not in the same league as the other things going on at the same time with Cas Anvar, Sam Sykes and Myke Cole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGKP2vVwcDg The full-length 1997 Cosgrove Hall animated TV film of Wyrd Sisters is freely available on YouTube. I think Soul Music is on there as well, but split up into its constituent parts.

Despite the immense gaps between publications, the three extant books still sell tens to hundreds of thousands of copies a year, and The Lies of Locke Lamora by itself has sold over a million copies. Lynch sells more for Gollancz even without having released a book for eight years than probably the bottom 50-70% of their entire list manages (people angrily asking why GRRM's publishers don't drop him don't realise that GRRM sells more than the bottom 98% of their respective lists). The book is constantly recommended on Goodreads and Reddit (helped by being a total stand-alone, of course). Lynch's well-known health issues I think make him also pretty un-droppable without sparking a massive backlash. Tor seem to be still fine with publishing JV Jones's next book when she's been been even longer between books (almost eleven years, probably more than twelve by the time it comes out), and she's not in GRRM's sales category and I doubt is in Lynch's.

Discworld #6: Wyrd Sisters

I'd say that Eric and Sourcery have strong claims to being the weakest Discworld novel. I think that Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent are also reasonable contenders because they are redundant: Carpe Jugulum is just Lords and Ladies with vampires replacing elves and The Last Continent is Interesting Times with China swapped out for Australia. Interesting Times isn't great either, as it opens very heavily on the "dry frog pill" Bursar, which was a great one-book joke dragged out over far too many books. Unseen Academicals is definitely a bit too one-note in its gags and it's also far too long. Any time a Pratchett book goes over 400 pages there's a risk of him becoming too self-indulgent and at almost 600 (!), UA is both the longest Discworld book and one with one of the least compelling plots. But it is hard to criticise the later books, obviously, because of the external factor of the Embuggerance. I believe most of Rincewind's crazy adventures happened off-screen in the six months he spent travelling with Twoflower over the course of The Colour of Magic. He may have also counted his trip to Al-Khali in Sourcery as going to Klatch.