It's been a while but my reaction iirc was that Weir had one story in him, and it was The Martian, and that's pretty good for one life.

"is this essentially the same narrator voice? Does Andy Weir have one person whose brain he can convey?"

The narrative voice is the same, but Grace's personality, especially once he recovers his memory, is recognisably different from Mark Watney's, I would say.

Jammies and the kids had never read or seen The Martian, so Weir's whole shtick was new to them, which worked great. And I remember very little of The Martian, so having this be overly similar didn't bother me. But it certainly has the same vibe.

One underplayed good point of "The Legacy of Heorot" is this: it actually has a good in-story reason for the Idiot Ball. Too many stories, especially suspense films, depend on characters acting like idiots. If the audience are thinking "but at this point I would simply retreat back out of the basement of the lonely cabin, climb a hill, get a mobile phone signal, and call the police", or "personally I would not dismiss the panicky blood-covered woman's story out of hand, I would call this in and then cautiously investigate in case she's telling the truth", then it's a bad story.

But in "The Legacy of Heorot" a big plot element is that they are all suffering to some degree (mostly pretty mild) from brain damage and mental instability induced by cryogenic sleep, so not only is there a good reason for any character to do something stupid and plot-critical (which doesn't happen too often, to be fair), there is a good reason for any character not to trust any other character when he starts talking about frogocrocs or whatever, because the listener knows there's a good chance the speaker might have gone off his head.

But in "The Legacy of Heorot" a big plot element is that they are all suffering to some degree (mostly pretty mild) from brain damage and mental instability induced by cryogenic sleep, so not only is there a good reason for any character to do something stupid and plot-critical (which doesn't happen too often, to be fair), there is a good reason for any character not to trust any other character when he starts talking about frogocrocs or whatever, because the listener knows there's a good chance the speaker might have gone off his head.

Oh, right, I'd forgotten that, and it also becomes part of the generational divide, providing a reason for the people born on-planet to underestimate and/or dismiss any of the original colonists.

Was there some kerfuffle with the Worldcon self-censoring for Chengdu?

I have very similar thoughts about Scalzi. Most of his characters are indistinguishable Whedonesque quippy ciphers. It can be very enjoyable to read, but it's shallow and very same-y. He'll give the main character a friend group and you'll be like, what is the difference between these characters besides one has a sexual orientation that allows for hooking up?

I haven't read Weir's books, but I'm always tickled that I was a regular reader of his (mostly shitty) webcomic back in the oughts, and even extended to at some point downloading a free copy he made available of an early novel stab (an sf heist story).

I just let my Newsblur subscription lapse because I mostly only used it for webcomics which I follow few enough of now I can just type in the URLs from memory. Feels like end of an era.

Nerds, he typed, while adding to his iPad another novel about a former Navy SEAL with a super hot Russian assassin girlfriend fighting Venezuelan/Chinese/Californian bad guys and liberal politicians' red tape. Whaaaat? The villain was President Schmillary Gobama all along?!

It has now been 16 years since the blog post that birthed "Oh John Ringo No."

6: Yes, it was a right mess. But it seems each Worldcon is distinguishable from the one before it, all the way to the organizing committee (it's a weird structure), so the Glasgow one is considered unsullied by involveds.

Chengdu Gourmet is the name of the nicest Chinese restaurant near me. Is it compromised?

Do they make you unlock your phone when you go in?

I just get take out.

Probably ok then.

6: A right mess is an understatement. At one point, a credible case could be made that Worldcon had abandoned its trademarks and more or less anyone could call their thing the Hugo Awards. (As a sideline, Worldcon's tradition of passing surplus on to the next year's convention may violate any number of regulations.) It's possible that someone with a grudge and deep pockets could still make that case that the trademarks have been abandoned, and any number of organizational attacks remain possible given enough cash plus a certain number of willing helpers.

The Hugos as they are now are remarkably resistant to change, and even after a scandal that may yet permanently damage the award, the earliest that an outside auditor could be mandated is 2026. There is of course no guarantee that this year's Worldcon will pass a mandate for auditors.

As if to remind everyone about these vulnerabilities, this week saw news that fully 10% of this year's votes were fraudulent, and had been discounted by the administrators. According to the committee (which is well regarded in fandom, but of course last year's administrator had previously been well regarded until the fuckery came to light), the fraudsters did things like use the same last name for fake voters but with one letter changed each time. Anyway, I'm inclined to trust the committee, but there are no external auditors.

I have my doubts that this year's Hugo personnel will do anything to make good the people screwed over last year. They will argue that there's nothing they can do because separate Worldcons and bla bla, but to an outsider that's not much different from just pretending it didn't happen.

Would be happy to be proven wrong, and we'll know soon enough.

Since there's an entire post about this, I might as well follow up on one line from Doug's review I disagreed with. Or rather, something he didn't like about the book, I did.

The political aspects of things on earth -- willingness of all of humanity to work together, the amount of resources committed, the authority given to one person to make things happen -- struck me as highly improbable, not to say daft.

Granted that it would be unlikely, but I viewed it as forced by the structure of the book. As for the amount of resources committed, if it doesn't happen, there's no book. Just like the unlikelihood of humans and Eridians both being able to send a ship to the astrophage's star, discussed in the book. I guess he could have written about humanity being challenged and failing but I don't blame him for not wanting to.

As for giving all the authority to Stratt, and Watney tagging along on all the meetings, The Martian was mostly first person in the form of Mark's journal entries but had interludes on Earth and with the other astronauts. Project Hail Mary, on the other hand, is 100 percent first person, no conceit of an in-universe document, just what Ryland is seeing, doing, and thinking. Given that Weir felt like the political scenes were important and he wanted to keep the narrator totally limited to Ryland, putting him in those scenes is the simplest way.

I kind of think of it like a one-act play trying to cover things that logically couldn't/didn't happen in the same place but nonetheless are important. I'd agree that a good editor might have cut the courtroom scene, but I think it's interesting how firmly Weir stuck to that structure.

Anyway, I've been bingeing 40k fic, Horus Heresy. The quality is very uneven, and most of the fight scenes are skimmable, but overall it's interesting. Various takes on organizational culture, ideology and reality, the role of religion when gods and magic turn out to be real. Also just authors having fun mixing in different genres.

19: some of it is really not bad, though I agree that the fight scenes are the least interesting.
Little bits like the mantra of "I recognise my failure and will be sure to correct it".
The whole inevitable tragedy aspect of Guilliman thinking to himself "we won't be fighting forever, which is good! There's more to life than fighting! My sons will make great administrators and mid-level government officials, just like I always dreamed they would be!" because of course we know this is not going to happen and everything is going to fall apart into endless war.
And the very nice central theme of sin/corruption being just excess of good, that's reflected in which characters are corrupted and which ones aren't; so you have Perdurabo going "everyone ignores me, no one's interested in me, I am embittered and will rebel" and the Khan going "everyone ignores me, no one's interested in me, that's cool, that allows me to do my own thing way out here in the borders, and won't they be surprised when they see what I've done!" It's quite a mediaeval or at least pre-modern story in that respect; lots of characters who aren't so much well-rounded normal humans as Embodiments of Things. Achilles isn't a recognisable normal human (he isn't a normal human at all, any more than a primarch is) he's an Embodiment of Rage and Pride.

SPOILER WARNINGS PLEASE!
I'm [checks] less than halfway through.

Ah, sorry! I came to the books from years of immersion in the tabletop games, so I knew the basics of what happens already, because it's part of the lore. Didn't think that you might be approaching it differently. Apologies.

But HH is the origin story of how we ended up with "IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR", so, yeah, not going to go happily.

And as if by serendipity I have just glanced at GK Chesterton "In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" which seems relevant:
www.online-literature.com/chesterton/the-defendant/1/

GKC on science fiction:

Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star.

In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space, clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man's fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers!

22.1: No worries, I just haven't quite reached the Khan.
22.2: One thing the books do well is clearly showing the empire is already an omnicidal totalitarian nightmare before the rebellion. (But obviously things can always get worse.) Even without Chaos, you have essentially a system based on Führerprinzip (bad enough) which has multiple führer (worse). It would have gone to shit anyway.
Another thing it does moderately well is early-modern like oceanic warfare -- FTL exists but takes significant time, is unpredictable, entails substantial losses, etc.

One thing the books do well is clearly showing the empire is already an omnicidal totalitarian nightmare before the rebellion. (But obviously things can always get worse.)

Yes definitely. Would have been very easy to depict it as this lost rational utopia, but I'm glad they went the other way - all the main characters, all the ones who we get so fond of because they're honest and noble and brave and so on, will also cheerfully wipe out entire alien races and devastate cities full of civilians for looking a bit rebellious. If Arthur Harris was a HH character he would be universally known as "Soft Lad".

I haven't read it but there is apparently a 40k novel set on a backwater world that has been entirely peaceful for the last several millennia, to the point where most sensible adults think the Astartes are just a silly myth and the Imperial Cult has moderated to the point where it is basically the Church of England. Hopefully this is played entirely for laughs.

"Soft Lad" is what they call Vance at the furniture store.

10: And there was another problem this year, with a bunch of fraudulent votes! (That is, they were tied to paid memberships, but with transparently false names attached, and the Hugo bylaws require votes be cast by actual people.) It's a mess, because there's strong ideological commitment that a fan from, e.g., rural China can sign up and vote just like a fan from New York or London, but that makes some possibilities for proof of identity very hard to manage. I distantly know someone who has been working on the vote-counting software, and it's a very hard nut to crack.

I've read all but one novel on the shortlist (the Martha Wells fantasy novel), and think The Saint of Bright Doors is pretty strongly ahead of the others--a fantasy novel with crowdfunding and cell phones and support groups for failed prophetic figures, with a very strong and to-me-unusual Buddhist vibe. (I would put the Tesh and Chakraborty books into the 2nd tier; I didn't think the Scalzi or Leckie books were great, despite liking other books by them. Tesh's book is thematically fantastic as a response to Ender's Game, but the writing was imo workmanlike and I had some issues with the plot--I do appreciate her getting the story done in one count it one book; Chakraborty's is a romp and a delightful read but not particularly thought provoking.)

This is why I only read nonfiction, hiking guides, and British authors who died last century or before.

Settling down with old friend G.K. Chesterton, whose work could never be deemed problematic?

I never was able to finish one of his.

I was actually just reading The Secret of Father Brown Tuesday night in bed. Haven't hit any Jew-baiting yet, but I'm sure it's coming.

I kept hearing Tom Bosley's voice and had to stop.