S&L Podcast - #493 - Bunny Lamps and Bad Decisions
/Oh, Hugos. Also, the best Sci-Fi books of all time, and will AI kill the planet? We kick off our August book The Spear that Cuts Through Water, and wrap up our last thoughts on Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung.
WHAT ARE WE NOMMING?
Tom: Shrimp Burrito
Veronica: Mac and Cheese bites
QUICK BURNS
John: The Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards subcommittee has identified that someone has been trying to unfairly influence the vote and has issued a statement about the matter.
Jan: 377 votes have been disqualified for this year's Hugo Awards by the Glasgow WorldCon team. It seems there have been attempts to push for one specific finalist through memberships that were canceled and refunded after votes had been cast. The Glasgow team will not identify who this finalist is as there is no evidence they were involved in the scheme.
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terpkristin: In other Hugos news, Glasgow 2024 has told Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow and Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty they will not be allowed to attend the convention. McCarty says he did not receive an explanation why; Yalow says he did not request one.
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Colin: Just in case anyone is using Goodreads on a Fire Tablet, Amazon has removed the Goodreads app from the Kindle Fire. That may make things like keeping up with the reading challenges a little more challenging.
Mark and Seth: Here's the shortlist for the LeGuin Prize for Fiction:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom Publishing)
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher (Ballantine Books)
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (New Directions)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press)
Sift by Alissa Hattman (The 3rd Thing)
The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Scholastic Press)
Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey)
The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed (Solaris)
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom Publishing)
Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom Publishing)
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Pilchie and Seth: The 100 greatest books of the century (so far, according to the NYTimes), and not much in the way of sci-fi or fantasy. I do like that they offer read-alikes for their picks, and I like that they used pictures of well-loved copies of the books. I noticed Station Eleven, Exit West, and The Fifth Season.
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Mark: Esquire has selected quite a few Sword & Laser picks for their 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time.
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Spriggana: A graphic adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea is coming on March 11, 2025. No examples of internal art are shown, but Fred Fordham already adapted three other novels: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and Brave New World. And while reading about this, I had a thought that if someone would adapt The Left Hand of Darkness, the snow scenes drawn by the right person could be stunning.
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Mark: Malka Older announced that Mossa and Pleiti (the main characters of S&L pick The Mimicking of Known Successes) will return for three more books! Follow-up: Malka Older's next Mossa and Pleiti novel is titled The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses.
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Tamahøme: The first two chapters from Peter F. Hamilton's game-related next space opera novel (~45 pages): Lots of tech and royalty politics.
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BARE YOUR SWORD
Sean Lookielook: Veronica Belbot will read all the books and mispronounce all the names. Seriously though, it seems like everyone's first reaction to anything AI these days is abject horror. I remember when the Star Trek TNG holodeck recreated famous people and we all thought it was amazing. Well, now we're one step closer and suddenly it's creepy? It'll be fine. Culture tends to preserve value. We still have TV despite the Internet, we still have radio despite TV, we still have live plays despite radio. The forms and uses change over time, but it can be argued that they would have changed anyway. That's just the nature of human beings to reinvent old ideas to fit changing circumstances. AI will find its place in the scheme of things, although there may be growing pains along the way. Granted, profiting off someone without their or their estate's permission is a heinous act of piracy. Still, it raises the question—when does a person become public domain?
Iain Bertram (iain_bertram): Like all of these large-scale AI projects, it is based on theft. The estates of the famous dead actors are paid while the audiobook narrators that have their work stolen to train the AI on how to read the books get nothing. The idea that it will be fine in the future ignores the quite real effects of the implementation of new technologies that can disadvantage large swathes of society for the benefit of the very few. It can take decades for these changes to start to benefit the masses. ALSO some people are worried about the environmental effects of datacenter usage.
AI seems destined to play a dual role. On the one hand, it can help reduce the effects of the climate crisis, such as in smart grid design, developing low-emission infrastructure, and modeling climate change predictions. On the other hand, AI is itself a significant emitter of carbon. This message reached the attention of a general audience in the latter half of 2019 when researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst analyzed various natural language processing (NLP) training models available online to estimate the energy cost in kilowatts required to train them. Converting this energy consumption in approximate carbon emissions and electricity costs, the authors estimated that the carbon footprint of training a single big language model is equal to around 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide emissions. This is of the order of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing, a quantification that laypersons can visualize.
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Peter: Regarding reading Seanan McGuire or Mira Grant. I found Feed on the books almost chosen page on the wiki as it was in the 2017 March Madness tournament. She was also interviewed way back on episode 103.
Sean Lookielook: I don't mind series. What I don't like are books that claim to be part of a series, but have at best a passing relationship to the others—be that the story of a very minor character from another book or just being set in the same universe, for example. Sometimes, you want to see the perspective of a supporting character and read their story, but all too often this winds up being two entirely different books crammed together for marketing purposes. (Romantasy is the worst offender.) Similarly, I actively hate books that don't end properly because the story continues in the next book. That's not a cliffhanger; it's a cop-out. And it always feels like a cash grab. Make your damn book 800 pages if it needs to be 800 pages. If you don't think you can sell a book that long, you haven't met GRRM or Sarah Maas.
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
KICK OFF
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Bookshop
Amazon
WRAP UP
