What are you reading in 2024?

[overgeeked]

I'm sure you could find more palatable writers making the same points, but I didn't feel like spending another ten minutes googling around looking for a post excoriating the state of the industry. It was getting near bedtime for me.

No need. Go to the same source that guy did. Dean Wesley Smith. He writes about it regularly. He posts a blog almost every day. One of his main topics is indie publishing vs traditional publishing. Dean’s been around a minute, so has some great insights.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

No need. Go to the same source that guy did. Dean Wesley Smith. He writes about it regularly. He posts a blog almost every day. One of his main topics is indie publishing vs traditional publishing. Dean’s been around a minute, so has some great insights.

I've read a few of posts in the past as well but for some reason he never got of my blog rotation list. Should probably fix that, even if it is getting a bit out of hand. Time to go through my bookmarks again, methinks.

 

[overgeeked]

I finished The Shadow #5 last night. Gangland’s Doom. Published December 1931. In this yarn one of The Shadow’s agents is gunned down in Chicago, so The Shadow seeks revenge.

I was warming up to the killed-off character in the previous stories. Not sure why Walter Gibson killed him off. Maybe that’s why. He was destined to die.

This one is a bit convoluted with a large cast of characters. Rival gangs at war, trying to make peace, power shifts, etc. It’s the two factions fighting it out when a stranger comes to town and throws off the balance of power trope.

One character was named “Anelmo” and my brain would not stop replacing it with “an Elmo.”

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Was going through my deceased father's storage and stumbled across an unexpected prize, a book of cartoons originally published in Pacific Stars & Stripes during the US Occupation of Japan and collected under the title of "Tokyo Joe" in late 1946. Created by Sgt. Ed Doughty, the one-panel gag comics feature the exploits of three GI characters - JOE, Joe, and joe - during the Occupation and revolve around "serviceman jokes" around the difficulties GIs had interacting with unfamiliar Japanese culture. Surprisingly less horribly racist than you might expect from pre-surrender propaganda, although still far from good. The other theme is the perennial complaint about the MPs keeping the Joes from having "fun" while off duty, for which you can read "finding booze, sex and war souvenirs" despite the military censors keeping it from being too explicitly stated.

The cartoons are nowhere near on par with the far superior work of better-known creators like Bill Mauldin or Theodor Seuss Geisel, but I'm not the target audience for them and actual GIs stuck in Japan would probably have appreciated them more - even if some of it is pretty dark humor about war-weary soldiers who just want to get home and go back to their civilian lives. One interesting feature is that each of the ~62 cartoons has a brief explanation of conditions (including some rather misguided etiquette advice) during the Occupation on the facing page, essentially explaining the joke for anyone who didn't get it. Normally that's death to humor, but in this case it does make the whole thing more easily accessible to someone reading from a very alien future.

Interesting bit of history, although I suspect it was my maternal grandfather's book originally rather than my father's, since gramps served in the Occupation forces while dad did his Air Force time working on the Atlas silos outside of Plattsburgh NY just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. AFAIK my paternal grandfather didn't serve at all for health reasons. The box I found it in also had some wartime newspaper clippings, seemingly at random - one was a clothing ad - the prize of which was a copy of this famously grim 1943 editorial cartoon by the vastly underappreciated Anne Mergen (image taken from online - mine is rather faded and yellowed, although I'm still donating it to the local historical society along with the book and some other mementos):

 

[Autumnal]

@Wofano Wotanto Wow! What a great find! Thank you for the writeup.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I have a whole bunch of fiction novels I have picked up over time from used bookstores and other sources. About 2/3 of them are Hugo/Nebula/World Fantasy Award nominees (and some times winners) that are not carried in my library.

I decided starting June 1, I’m going to start to read those award nominee books that I own - in publishing date order. I have set a life goal to have read all of the H/N/WFA nominees published after 1980 before I die. 450 or so books to go, with roughly 10-12 new ones every year (there are always overlaps).

However, in some cases, there are prequel titles. I’m reading the prequels in the order that the nominee was published. For example, going to re-read the Earthsea original trilogy around other books published late 80's/early 90s, since that’s when Tehanu, the Nebula nominated book came out. Some books come very late in their respective series, such as Quantum Rose, volume 6 in Catherine Asaro’s Skolian Empire space opera series. Which means a bunch of previous volume reading to get to the actual nominee. Oh, and I’m only re-reading earlier books if I want to. I’m probably not going to re-read all the Asimov Robot books leading up to his 1984 Hugo nominated Robots of Dawn

Spent last night until 2am organizing and creating spreadsheets figuring out what I need to read some of these series.Three rules

1. Books can only come from a library, used bookstore (or other used source like a garage sale), or gift. No new books, no online shopping.
2. I can bail out of any book after 100 pps if I want to.
3. I can choose to skip a book if I want to. For example, I’m not reading Dan Simmons any more - so I’m going to skip Song of Kali. Same with Larry Correia and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

tbh, sometimes the organizing and acquiring of the books is as fun as the actual reading of the books

Also, while people poo-pooh awards, I have found that at least for the Hugos and Nebluas, and a little less so the World Fantasy Awards, they are generally pretty good guideposts to quality, new, “good” SF/F

Here’s a screen shot of part of the spreadsheet

 

[Autumnal]

That’s a cool challenge. Looking forward to hearing how it goes.

 

[Autumnal]

Reading a lot of older scifi can also be a good vocabulary booster in general, since so much of it uses (often dated) technical terms to describe how various wonder-gadgets work. I've been working my way through Astounding this year and the 30s and 40s alone introduced me over a dozen words I'd never run into before.

It’s time for a story about by my father. For those who haven’t run into these before, Dad would have been Caltech class of 1944 except for World War II. He flew photo-reconnaissance P-38 over Eastern Europe, and came home to be part of the class of ‘46. (“I once got within 5 miles of Berlin on a day of exceptionally heavy cloud cover. 5 miles straight up, that is.”) he went on to work at JPL, designing ranging systems for the Deep Space Network.

Which is to say that Oboy are my brothers and I second-generation nerds.

One time Dad and I were talking about jargon that made its way into regular speech. This was before Neuromancer, and I don’t remember what example I had in mind, but it sent Dad off on a tangent about authors with too-favorite words. In particular, he remembered from his reading as a boy E.E. Smith’s fascination with making everything mechanical be an “integrating” version of itself.

He told me that in flight school, he and the other sf readers started referring to integrating goniometers. And he wouldn’t tell me what a goniometer is - I had to go look it up. You know those mechanical-compass-like calipers that craftspeople use? To help them draw angles precisely? Those are goniometers. Goodness only knows what an integrating one would do.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

In particular, he remembered from his reading as a boy E.E. Smith’s fascination with making everything mechanical be an “integrating” version of itself.

True, although I remember him more for overusing "slipstick" in place of slide rule - which wasn't really all that unusual for a time period where every engineer and mathematician knew how to use one. Heck, I don't think you could get out of the higher levels of high school math without knowing your way around a slide rule back in those days. Given that at its most basic "integrating" pretty much just means "capable of solving for a function" it's easy to apply it to a lot of tools if you want to sound more technical, even if it's kind of meaningless. Maybe Smith was just enraptured by early integrating calculators or something?

The fact that it adds to one's word count (and income as a pulp writer) might be a factor here as well...

Those are goniometers. Goodness only knows what an integrating one would do.

"Goniometer" is an extremely broad term, and they don't have to be some kind of exotic specialized tool (although many are). Anything that can be used to precisely determine an angle is a goniometer, and everyone who's ever used a protractor in an art or geometry class has used a goniometer whether they knew it or not. They're used today in many fields, although I'm not sure how common it is to actually apply the term to the devices in question even when using specialized technical language.

I'm not sure exactly what an "integrating goniometer" for aviation applications would be, but at a guess it'd have something to do with radio direction finding or more general course plotting.

 

[Ryujin]

True, although I remember him more for overusing "slipstick" in place of slide rule - which wasn't really all that unusual for a time period where every engineer and mathematician knew how to use one. Heck, I don't think you could get out of the higher levels of high school math without knowing your way around a slide rule back in those days. Given that at its most basic "integrating" pretty much just means "capable of solving for a function" it's easy to apply it to a lot of tools if you want to sound more technical, even if it's kind of meaningless. Maybe Smith was just enraptured by early integrating calculators or something?

The fact that it adds to one's word count (and income as a pulp writer) might be a factor here as well...

"Goniometer" is an extremely broad term, and they don't have to be some kind of exotic specialized tool (although many are). Anything that can be used to precisely determine an angle is a goniometer, and everyone who's ever used a protractor in an art or geometry class has used a goniometer whether they knew it or not. They're used today in many fields, although I'm not sure how common it is to actually apply the term to the devices in question even when using specialized technical language.

I'm not sure exactly what an "integrating goniometer" for aviation applications would be, but at a guess it'd have something to do with radio direction finding or more general course plotting.

Calculators were banned from schools in the school board in which I attended high school. They were new tech and board members wanted to make sure that students were actually able to do the work, themselves. As a result I taught myself how to use a slide-rule, aka "guessing stick." This was in the '70s.