Hi there. My name is Hiu, and I have a keyboard and internet connection. For those of you unfamiliar with the internet, this means that I am qualified to report the News (as regards the Fantasy and Science-Fiction landscape), and tell you how you should be thinking about certain topics.
This is a totally serious, and not at all satirical affair. Not at all. Not even a wee bit. I am definitely a real journalism.
So with that out of the way, let’s move on to today’s News!
WorldCon 76 – California, ‘Murica.
There has been a fair bit of drama surrounding WorldCon in the past few days. WorldCon claims to be an inclusive conference, where anyone is welcome regardless of nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, or sexuality.
And they’re absolutely correct about that.
Despite the horrendous misnomer (how can a conference that’s only held in one city at a time really call itself WORLDcon?), WorldCon is a bastion of acceptance in an otherwise intolerant world. What’s more… the city they’ve chosen this year is in America, the most progressive country in the world. Anyone in the world is welcome to visit ‘Murica (provided that they are of an acceptable race, religion, and nationality).
How anyone can criticise WorldCon from a diversity standpoint is beyond me. WorldCon is the host of the Hugo Awards after all, and there has never been any such drama associated with the Hugos.
So don’t listen to the lies and slander that are currently circulating Twitter and the rest of the SFF interwebs. WorldCon is for everyone! Except for those who aren’t allowed in the country, those who can’t afford fancy clothes, those who aren’t of a binary gender, and those who just aren’t famous enough.
In fact, if you don’t have a six-figure advance or a movie deal in the works, then it might be best for everyone if you bugger off.
July Releases
There has been a bunch of exciting new releases in the SFF world this month, and luckily for you I’ve been able to read a few of those in order to give you some totally accurate summaries that absolutely aren’t ridiculous extrapolations based solely on the titles.
Kill The Farm Boy, by Delilah S. Dawson
Kill The Farmboy is one grimdark book too far for this journalist. In fact, I’d go as far to say that this is everything that is wrong with grimdark. The “fantasy farmboy” is a well established symbol of hope, and the symbolic death of that trope sets the tone for the rest of this haunting novel. The wanton murder of farmhands as condoned by this “book” is nothing short of disgusting. It’s murder for murder’s sake. There’s no tension. No story. No meaning. It’ll set Grimdark back decades.
Ravencry, by Ed McDonald
A touching coming-of-age tale of a small bird that has lost its mother. After falling from its nest, the eponymous raven must hide from the predators that would devour it. Terrified, the raven sobs for the majority of the novel, lending an emotional rawness to the tale that would melt the heart of even the most stoic reader.
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Hands-down, the best Beyblade book you’ll ever read.
The Subgenre Wars
It has been 15 long years since the subgenre wars began, and this journalist is weary. This month, the casualties reached an all-time high.
A Space Opera fan, unconscious of the fact that their own subgenre title is historically a pejorative, decried the paranormal romance subgenre as “trash” on a romance-heavy message board. Following the barrage of abuse that resulted from this lapse in judgement—including 14 comments that were deleted by moderators, and at least one instance of verbal murder—the victim is now AFK. Rumours suggest that they might even have to go so far as a 2-week social media cleanse.
There appears to be no end to the conflict in sight, although you can count on this journalist to keep you up-to-date on the latest News.
For those who haven’t quite realized it by now, this is OBVIOUSLY satire.
Ok, do these posts get posted under specific parts of your website? Because I’m subscribed through the wordpress feed and the book reviews show up just fine, but all of these non-book reviews have never shown up. Just wondering what I need to do to see everything in my feed.
And I spoke too soon. This post DID show up in my feed, but it didn’t show up when you posted it.
Do you pre\post date/time the posts? Just trying to figure out why this didn’t show up in my feed in a timely manner.
Hmm. Thats odd. What we usually do is write the content, have it sitting on private for a while, and then just set it to public with the “current” timestamp when we want to post. Content will fall under either the “Reviews” or “Musings” categories.
We do the same for all of our content, so I don’t see why the WordPress feed is acting up. Maybe it expects the content to be scheduled for some point in the future? I really have no idea.
Ahhh, ok, that’s what it is then. I’ve found when updating the time stamp that it doesn’t carry over into the feed. It shows up in the feed under the time you posted it originally.
Mystery solved, I think. I just wanted to make sure I knew what was going on and now I think I do.
Thanks for taking the time to go over this. I guess I’l just have to visit outside of the feed or something.