They say the seventh wave is the largest.

The waves before it:

Gernsback invented the genre as a genre. He turned this special type of weird tale from a rare treat into a monthly staple, and so created a monthly market where authors wanting a sale would try to fit a template.

Campbell demanded better writing -- trying to rise from the "pulps" up to the level of the "slicks," and, beyond style, more thought into the ideas and inventions of the stories.

The '50s brought a revolution... I won't say against Campbell, because it wasn't a return to '30s sf, but to go beyond him: styles of writing he didn't appreciate, ideas or the implications of them which he didn't approve, basically, more than the one man's view of the field.

Then The New Wave, rioting in the streets, opera houses burned, cats and dogs living together, etc.

Then?

The late '70s through the '80s should have seen some type of movement according to the schedule. Each revolution before was associated with a magazine, which makes sense; you need a showcase to demonstrate the new style, a monthly workshop to develop what it is, and, with a touch of cynicism, to materially reward the members. The existing magazines had passed to new editors; any regression to the mean was not as severe as in sports, where the saying goes, "Don't be the one to follow a legendary coach. Aim to be the one that follows the one that follows a legendary coach." but they have not gone into history with their names written in fire. Of new magazines: Asimov's, Galileo, Omni, Interzone and Aboriginal, Omni seems best positioned to be an influence, but, editor Bova just seemed to carry over his writers from Analog onto the slicker paper. Maybe the movement of the '80s was synthesis of the New Wave into other influences, including the pop sf wave from the success of Star Wars.

There was cyberpunk. It even had a thesis statement anthology, _Mirrorshades_, but collecting previously published tales, it's not the leader of the revolution so much as a survey of it, maybe just one of many theme anthologies. Perhaps sf had gotten so large it doesn't have A movement, but smaller movements through the last forty years in various states of synthesis.

Then there's Damon Knight's _Orbit_. Not as frequent as a magazine -quantity does have a quality of its own- but its influence is supplemented by the writers workshops it reflects. Has anyone surveyed the writers in Damon Knight's orbit and the quiet movement they represent?

--
-Jack

In article <a099de85-ef48-4142-97f5-693182924000n@googlegroups.com>,
Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:
>They say the seventh wave is the largest.
>
>The waves before it:
>
>Gernsback invented the genre as a genre. He turned this special type of weird
>tale from a rare treat into a monthly staple, and so created a monthly market
>where authors wanting a sale would try to fit a template.
>
>Campbell demanded better writing -- trying to rise from the "pulps" up to the
>level of the "slicks," and, beyond style, more thought into the ideas and
>inventions of the stories.
>
>The '50s brought a revolution... I won't say against Campbell, because it
>wasn't a return to '30s sf, but to go beyond him: styles of writing he didn't
>appreciate, ideas or the implications of them which he didn't approve,
>basically, more than the one man's view of the field.
>
>Then The New Wave, rioting in the streets, opera houses burned, cats and dogs
>living together, etc.
>
>Then?
>
>The late '70s through the '80s should have seen some type of movement
>according to the schedule. Each revolution before was associated with a
>magazine, which makes sense; you need a showcase to demonstrate the new style,
>a monthly workshop to develop what it is, and, with a touch of cynicism, to
>materially reward the members. The existing magazines had passed to new
>editors; any regression to the mean was not as severe as in sports, where the
>saying goes, "Don't be the one to follow a legendary coach. Aim to be the one
>that follows the one that follows a legendary coach." but they have not gone
>into history with their names written in fire. Of new magazines: Asimov's,
>Galileo, Omni, Interzone and Aboriginal, Omni seems best positioned to be an
>influence, but, editor Bova just seemed to carry over his writers from Analog
>onto the slicker paper. Maybe the movement of the '80s was synthesis of the
>New Wave into other influences, including the pop sf wave from the success of
>Star Wars.
>
>There was cyberpunk. It even had a thesis statement anthology,
>_Mirrorshades_, but collecting previously published tales, it's not the leader
>of the revolution so much as a survey of it, maybe just one of many theme
>anthologies. Perhaps sf had gotten so large it doesn't have A movement, but
>smaller movements through the last forty years in various states of synthesis.
>
>Then there's Damon Knight's _Orbit_. Not as frequent as a magazine -quantity
>does have a quality of its own- but its influence is supplemented by the
>writers workshops it reflects. Has anyone surveyed the writers in Damon
>Knight's orbit and the quiet movement they represent?

Orbit runs from the 1960s to the 1980s, and was considered by the Angry Old Dudes
of Skiffy to be New Wave or at least New Wave adjacent, thus the bitterness
over how many awards Orbit stories won and the orchestration of a no award
win over Orbit stories (Nebula, I think).

Although it began in the 1960s, there was a sharp rise in noteworthy SF by
women in the 1970s (which famously led a critic to comment all the interesting
new writers were women, save for James Tiptree, Jr.) I don't think this had
a name as such but again, it was enough for people to moan about it. Ben Bova
wrote a cane-wavy piece about how women were ruining SF around 1980.

(there was a big push to steer women into fantasy and not SF: I've seen
an essay written rather hilariously by a woman author outraged that her
"I'm not a feminist!" card didn't get her into the boy's club but that
was only about ten years ago)

1980s had cyberpunk but also the humanists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Terry
Carr included both in his third Ace Specials series. At some point, post-
cyberpunk came along.

Big deal in the 1980s: shared universes. Granted, comics had them for a long
time and there had been prose experiments like the Twayne Triplets and Cleopatra's
World but for a while in the 1980s, any half-baked setting could get its own
series and many did.

Late 1980s saw the rise of the New Space Opera by authors like Iain Banks,
where the idea was it would like the Old Space Opera but not, you know,
crap.

So that gets us to about 1990....
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

Forgot a big one: the formalization of the MilSF genre in the 1980s. Roots
go back before that but it didn't become a thing until the 1980s. Drop
"military SF" into ngram and it bumps a bit after 1985, then takes off
in the 1990s.
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> schrieb:

> There was cyberpunk.

Nothing aged as fast as cyberpunk.

Thinking back on "Neuromancer", you can clearly tell when it was
written. US/Soviet Union still an issue, Japanese domination of
industries, no mobile phones (phone booths instead, how quaint).

Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
and of course Gibson got holograms wrong, like everybody.

In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:

>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)

Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.

(More impressively: the HoneyBun once caught fire and kept on functioning)

On Monday, July 19, 2021 at 7:27:22 PM UTC+1, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Jack Bohn <jack....@gmail.com> schrieb:
>
> > There was cyberpunk.
>
> Nothing aged as fast as cyberpunk.
>
> Thinking back on "Neuromancer", you can clearly tell when it was
> written. US/Soviet Union still an issue, Japanese domination of
> industries, no mobile phones (phone booths instead, how quaint).
>
> Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
> for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
> an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
> and of course Gibson got holograms wrong, like everybody.

While I expect the lethal interfaces were entirely made up, there were two fabled incidents involving monkeys reported in the notes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey

jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>
>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.

Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
the room.

I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.

In article <_UjJI.9507$qL.3720@fx14.iad>,
Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
>jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>
>>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>>
>>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>
>Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
>the room.
>
>I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.
>

I got a hernia picking up an A/UX box as part of a scheme to filter
out the Morris Worm..
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

In article <_UjJI.9507$qL.3720@fx14.iad>,
Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
>jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>
>>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>>
>>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>
>Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
>the room.
>
>I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.

I never had physical contact with a disk drive at all. Hal,
however, had a tale to tell.

This was back when the computer rooms were chock-full of disk
drives the size of short refrigerators.

One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.

One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
switched it with the next drive over.

Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
packs and ....

You can see where this is going, can't you?

ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.

Hal himself was not working there then, but the horrific tale had
been handed down from generation to generation.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

In article <qwID2s.tB6@kithrup.com>,
Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <_UjJI.9507$qL.3720@fx14.iad>,
>Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
>>jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>>>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>>>
>>>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>>>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>>
>>Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
>>the room.
>>
>>I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.
>
>I never had physical contact with a disk drive at all. Hal,
>however, had a tale to tell.
>
>This was back when the computer rooms were chock-full of disk
>drives the size of short refrigerators.
>
>One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>
>One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>switched it with the next drive over.
>
>Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>packs and ....
>
>You can see where this is going, can't you?
>
>ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
>
>Hal himself was not working there then, but the horrific tale had
>been handed down from generation to generation.

I am reminded of the very firm directive I was given when being trained as a
guard many decades ago to resist the urge to provide unrequested assistance
to clients. The example used was the guard who noticed the chocolate factory
he was watching had inexplicably left machinery on at night, so he shut it
all down for them. This allowed the chocolate to solidify in place, ruining
the machinery....

Wasn't there a story on comp risks about a manager noticing the a/c was
on in the computer rooms even on weekends when nobody was around, so he
shut it off to save power. Result: dead mainframes as they overheated.

ObSF: QRM, by George O. Smith.

--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

On Mon, 19 Jul 2021 20:04:04 GMT, djheydt@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>In article <_UjJI.9507$qL.3720@fx14.iad>,
>Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
>>jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>>>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>>>
>>>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>>>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>>
>>Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
>>the room.
>>
>>I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.
>
>I never had physical contact with a disk drive at all. Hal,
>however, had a tale to tell.
>
>This was back when the computer rooms were chock-full of disk
>drives the size of short refrigerators.
>
>One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>
>One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>switched it with the next drive over.
>
>Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>packs and ....
>
>You can see where this is going, can't you?
>
>ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
>
>Hal himself was not working there then, but the horrific tale had
>been handed down from generation to generation.

That's worse than the VAX at UCONN. They only got up to three dead
drives there. But then they only had 3 drives.

On 19 Jul 2021 18:31:06 -0000, jdnicoll@panix.com wrote:

>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>
>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>
>(More impressively: the HoneyBun once caught fire and kept on functioning)

One time I took it into my head to show my students the innards of a
disk drive, so I opened up a dead one and passed it around. After the
students had all handled it one asked what it looked like running. So
I fired it up, something went "WHACK", and there was a little hole in
the drywall and no head on the topmost platter.

On 7/19/2021 11:31 AM, jdnicoll@panix.com wrote:
> In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>
>> Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>> for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>> an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>
> Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
> a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>
> (More impressively: the HoneyBun once caught fire and kept on functioning)
>
"Dave, I seem to be having a temperature malfunction."

--
Troll, troll, troll your post gently down the thread
Angrily, angrily, angrily, the net's a nut's scream.

On 2021-07-19 12:27 p.m., Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> schrieb:
>
>> There was cyberpunk.
>
> Nothing aged as fast as cyberpunk.
>
> Thinking back on "Neuromancer", you can clearly tell when it was
> written. US/Soviet Union still an issue, Japanese domination of
> industries, no mobile phones (phone booths instead, how quaint).
>
> Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
> for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
> an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
> and of course Gibson got holograms wrong, like everybody.
>

It was the gamers who saved cyberpunk from complete annihilation.

On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:

> One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
> up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>
> One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
> switched it with the next drive over.
>
> Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
> packs and ....
>
> You can see where this is going, can't you?
>
> ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
> stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.

Must have been an implausibly dim guy.

I remember when I put a new disk drive into a system, powered it
on, and there was a bzzzt and a whisp of smoke coming from the disk.
Well, that was a dud. So I put in another drive and... bzzzt, smoke.
At that point I decided that the blame most probably did not lie
with the drives. Close inspection eventually revealed that the
Y-cable for the power, fresh from the bag, had been miswired at the
manufacturer, flipping 5V and 12V at one end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molex_connector#Disk_drive

So that's how a $1 cable killed two $500 disk drives.
(Symbolic numbers, I don't recall the actual figures.)

I cut that cable into parts before throwing it into the trash to
make sure that nobody else would try to use it.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On Monday, July 19, 2021 at 10:35:32 AM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:
> In article <a099de85-ef48-4142...@googlegroups.com>,
> Jack Bohn <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
> >They say the seventh wave is the largest.
> >
> >Then?
> >
> >There was cyberpunk. It even had a thesis statement anthology,
> >_Mirrorshades_, but collecting previously published tales, it's not the leader
> >of the revolution so much as a survey of it, maybe just one of many theme
> >anthologies. Perhaps sf had gotten so large it doesn't have A movement, but
> >smaller movements through the last forty years in various states of synthesis.
> >
> 1980s had cyberpunk but also the humanists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Terry
> Carr included both in his third Ace Specials series. At some point, post-
> cyberpunk came along.

Steampunk? Heh, I'd thought it was named for _The Stirling Engine_ by Bruce D... I mean _The Difference Engine_ by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Looking it up, I see the term was suggested by K.W. Jeter a few years before the book, more on the fringes of trademark infringement than as a suggestion for a new direction.
> Big deal in the 1980s: shared universes. Granted, comics had them for a long
> time and there had been prose experiments like the Twayne Triplets and Cleopatra's
> World but for a while in the 1980s, any half-baked setting could get its own
> series and many did.
>
> Late 1980s saw the rise of the New Space Opera by authors like Iain Banks,
> where the idea was it would like the Old Space Opera but not, you know,
> crap.

I think these would qualify more as trends than as Movements. (I remember typing the phrase "The Way It Ought To Be" in my previous post, it must have been part of a branching thought that got pruned. If I had to stir up a metaphor, I'd say a movement is like a direct effort to change the course of a stream, while a trend is a bunch of rolling stones surprised to be told they are an avalanche.) Was there debate over New Space Opera, pro or con? I do remember some Angry Old Dude waving his cane against shared universes, deploring them as "sharecropped universes," but I didn't see any impassioned responses. There was one controversy back then in The Magazine of F&SF... OK, James Gunn had written an article "The Labor Day Group" stating that there was a group of authors focused on writing award-winning fiction, which was bad, because... well, ISFDB says it appeared in 1982-11, so probably a few months later one of the writers named borrowed the Books column to reply, and maybe there were some letters later, and how did they get a controversy really going before they had the internet? But I guess there wasn't really a drive to convert the field to all award-winning stories, or, at least, it didn't gain much traction.

MilSF, how much of that was Baen's doing? Or am I mixing the "There Will Be War" anthology series with "Far Frontiers" anthology/magazine? Branching thought, how much was Baen's "Destinies" just Baen's "Galaxy" in paperback form, and how did it change when reincarnated as "Far Frontiers" and "New Destinies"?

--
-Jack

On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:53:45 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber
<naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

>On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>> up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>>
>> One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>> switched it with the next drive over.
>>
>> Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>> packs and ....
>>
>> You can see where this is going, can't you?
>>
>> ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>> stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
>
>Must have been an implausibly dim guy.

I dunno--our guy was a PhD computer science professor. There might be
some Pauli Effect going on
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect>.

>I remember when I put a new disk drive into a system, powered it
>on, and there was a bzzzt and a whisp of smoke coming from the disk.
>Well, that was a dud. So I put in another drive and... bzzzt, smoke.
>At that point I decided that the blame most probably did not lie
>with the drives. Close inspection eventually revealed that the
>Y-cable for the power, fresh from the bag, had been miswired at the
>manufacturer, flipping 5V and 12V at one end.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molex_connector#Disk_drive
>
>So that's how a $1 cable killed two $500 disk drives.
>(Symbolic numbers, I don't recall the actual figures.)
>
>I cut that cable into parts before throwing it into the trash to
>make sure that nobody else would try to use it.

On Mon, 19 Jul 2021 20:04:04 GMT, djheydt@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>In article <_UjJI.9507$qL.3720@fx14.iad>,
>Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:
>>jdnicoll@panix.com writes:
>>>In article <sd4g66$1b3$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>>Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Plus, there are a few lesser sins such as interface equipment
>>>>for computers which can kill you (I don't think that was ever
>>>>an issue, except when somebody dropped a card punch on someone)
>>>
>>>Storage media could be more dangerous: UWaterloo had an incident where
>>>a platter dismounted and buried itself in the wall near the operator.
>>
>>Burroughs had a tape drive that could toss a 9track tape reel across
>>the room.
>>
>>I've also seen capacitors blow up in tape drives back in the early 80s'.
>
>I never had physical contact with a disk drive at all. Hal,
>however, had a tale to tell.
>
>This was back when the computer rooms were chock-full of disk
>drives the size of short refrigerators.
>
>One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>
>One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>switched it with the next drive over.
>
>Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>packs and ....
>
>You can see where this is going, can't you?
>
>ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
>
>Hal himself was not working there then, but the horrific tale had
>been handed down from generation to generation.

Sounds like the "click of death" that took out my Jazz drive and
disks.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

In article <77972822-76d3-41bd-8b4a-6e2839a9e4d5n@googlegroups.com>,
Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Monday, July 19, 2021 at 10:35:32 AM UTC-4, James Nicoll wrote:
>> In article <a099de85-ef48-4142...@googlegroups.com>,
>> Jack Bohn <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >They say the seventh wave is the largest.
>> >
>> >Then?
>> >
>> >There was cyberpunk. It even had a thesis statement anthology,
>> >_Mirrorshades_, but collecting previously published tales, it's not the leader
>> >of the revolution so much as a survey of it, maybe just one of many theme
>> >anthologies. Perhaps sf had gotten so large it doesn't have A movement, but
>> >smaller movements through the last forty years in various states of synthesis.
>> >
>> 1980s had cyberpunk but also the humanists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Terry
>> Carr included both in his third Ace Specials series. At some point, post-
>> cyberpunk came along.
>
>Steampunk? Heh, I'd thought it was named for _The Stirling Engine_ by Bruce
>D... I mean _The Difference Engine_ by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
>Looking it up, I see the term was suggested by K.W. Jeter a few years before
>the book, more on the fringes of trademark infringement than as a suggestion
>for a new direction.

There's a tor piece: five authors whose work would have been counted as part
of a popular genre except for being too early: Blaylock for Steam Punk, Ford for
Cyberpunk, and Huff for Urban Fantasy.

snip
>I think these would qualify more as trends than as Movements. (I remember
>typing the phrase "The Way It Ought To Be" in my previous post, it must have
>been part of a branching thought that got pruned. If I had to stir up a
>metaphor, I'd say a movement is like a direct effort to change the course of a
>stream, while a trend is a bunch of rolling stones surprised to be told they
>are an avalanche.) Was there debate over New Space Opera, pro or con? I do
>remember some Angry Old Dude waving his cane against shared universes,
>deploring them as "sharecropped universes," but I didn't see any impassioned
>responses.

I don't know of anyone denouncing Banks. The early issue with him was
that he sold very well in the UK but was a solid midlister in the US.

The old dude denouncing shared universes would have been Gardner Dozois,
I think, or at least I know that he did. He would not have been so old
at the time, having started off young and become older with time as so
many people do.

>There was one controversy back then in The Magazine of F&SF... OK,
>James Gunn had written an article "The Labor Day Group" stating that there was
>a group of authors focused on writing award-winning fiction, which was bad,
>because... well, ISFDB says it appeared in 1982-11, so probably a few months
>later one of the writers named borrowed the Books column to reply, and maybe
>there were some letters later, and how did they get a controversy really going
>before they had the internet? But I guess there wasn't really a drive to
>convert the field to all award-winning stories, or, at least, it didn't gain
>much traction.

Not Gunn. Thomas M. Disch, whose evidence of schenanigans seemed to consist of
the fact people who were not Disch were somehow winning awards.

>MilSF, how much of that was Baen's doing? Or am I mixing the "There Will Be
>War" anthology series with "Far Frontiers" anthology/magazine? Branching
>thought, how much was Baen's "Destinies" just Baen's "Galaxy" in paperback
>form, and how did it change when reincarnated as "Far Frontiers" and "New
>Destinies"?

I'd say it's one part Pournelle to one part Jim Baen at his various editorial
positions, but it really got traction under Baen Books.

I loved Baen's Galaxy and Destinies but Far Frontiers and New Destinies just
left me cold for some reason.
--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> writes:
>On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>> up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>>
>> One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>> switched it with the next drive over.
>>
>> Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>> packs and ....
>>
>> You can see where this is going, can't you?
>>
>> ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>> stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
>
>Must have been an implausibly dim guy.

I saw an operator try that in 1981, but when the second drive also
failed, he was wise enough to call the DEC FE.

On Tuesday, July 20, 2021 at 11:43:41 AM UTC-4, jack....@gmail.com wrote:
[snip-snip]
> ...how did they get a controversy really going before they had the internet?
[snip]

1. Local clubs
2. Letters published in prozines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterhack)
3. Fanzines and APAs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_press_association)
4. Conventions
5. Private meetings, letters, phone calls, etc.

In article <slrnsfdorp.13ed.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
>On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
>> up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
>>
>> One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
>> switched it with the next drive over.
>>
>> Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
>> packs and ....
>>
>> You can see where this is going, can't you?
>>
>> ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
>> stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.

Addendum: I just said to Hal, "So I told about the guy who ruined
16 disk drives..."

and he said, "Thirty-two, actually."
>
>Must have been an implausibly dim guy.

Hal: "Yup."
>
>I remember when I put a new disk drive into a system, powered it
>on, and there was a bzzzt and a whisp of smoke coming from the disk.
>Well, that was a dud. So I put in another drive and... bzzzt, smoke.
>At that point I decided that the blame most probably did not lie
>with the drives. Close inspection eventually revealed that the
>Y-cable for the power, fresh from the bag, had been miswired at the
>manufacturer, flipping 5V and 12V at one end.

Hal: "That would do it."

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molex_connector#Disk_drive
>
>So that's how a $1 cable killed two $500 disk drives.
>(Symbolic numbers, I don't recall the actual figures.)
>
>I cut that cable into parts before throwing it into the trash to
>make sure that nobody else would try to use it.
>
And you were right to do so.

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

On Tuesday, 20 July 2021 at 16:30:09 UTC+1, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
> > One morning the operator came into the room and started booting
> > up the various gadgets, including the disk drives.
> >
> > One of them didn't come up. So he took out the disk pack and
> > switched it with the next drive over.
> >
> > Now neither of them would come up. So he took out both disk
> > packs and ....
> >
> > You can see where this is going, can't you?
> >
> > ISTR he got up to 16 ruined packs and drives before somebody
> > stopped him. The first one had had a head crash.
> Must have been an implausibly dim guy.
>
> I remember when I put a new disk drive into a system, powered it
> on, and there was a bzzzt and a whisp of smoke coming from the disk.
> Well, that was a dud. So I put in another drive and... bzzzt, smoke.
> At that point I decided that the blame most probably did not lie
> with the drives. Close inspection eventually revealed that the
> Y-cable for the power, fresh from the bag, had been miswired at the
> manufacturer, flipping 5V and 12V at one end.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molex_connector#Disk_drive
>
> So that's how a $1 cable killed two $500 disk drives.
> (Symbolic numbers, I don't recall the actual figures.)
>
> I cut that cable into parts before throwing it into the trash to
> make sure that nobody else would try to use it.

In some workplaces you would need to show it
as evidence of why an expensive event happened.
Let your boss try it on their own, maybe.

Also, getting a refund would be interesting.
But probably hopeless.

In article <0qrdfgdciig2lsgom1knds95j03g7ms94i@4ax.com>,
J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:53:45 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber
><naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
>
>>On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>
[concerning the guy who kept switching disks and disk drives till
he had ruined 32 of them]

>>
>>Must have been an implausibly dim guy.
>
>I dunno--our guy was a PhD computer science professor. There might be
>some Pauli Effect going on
><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect>.

Ooooooh, *another* one. I think this group mentions the
Heisenberg effect, which holds that a sufficiently crucial
experiment will fail if there is a distinguished theoretical
physicist within a given distance. Named for Werner Heisenberg,
of course, of whom it was said that any experiment would fail if
he were in the same *city*.

Sort of the reverse of the CE effect, whereby any nonfunctioning
piece of hardware will begin to function perfectly as soon as the
CE takes a look at it.

Hal was never a professional CE, but I have observed the CE
effect countless times, wherein my computer won't do [$ANYTHING]
until Hal gets up and comes to look at it, whereupon it works
again.

Possibly he fixes it with a stern glance?

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 20:40:02 GMT, djheydt@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

>In article <0qrdfgdciig2lsgom1knds95j03g7ms94i@4ax.com>,
>J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> wrote:
>>On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:53:45 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber
>><naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
>>
>>>On 2021-07-19, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>>
>[concerning the guy who kept switching disks and disk drives till
>he had ruined 32 of them]
>
>>>
>>>Must have been an implausibly dim guy.
>>
>>I dunno--our guy was a PhD computer science professor. There might be
>>some Pauli Effect going on
>><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect>.
>
>Ooooooh, *another* one. I think this group mentions the
>Heisenberg effect, which holds that a sufficiently crucial
>experiment will fail if there is a distinguished theoretical
>physicist within a given distance. Named for Werner Heisenberg,
>of course, of whom it was said that any experiment would fail if
>he were in the same *city*.
>
>Sort of the reverse of the CE effect, whereby any nonfunctioning
>piece of hardware will begin to function perfectly as soon as the
>CE takes a look at it.
>
>Hal was never a professional CE, but I have observed the CE
>effect countless times, wherein my computer won't do [$ANYTHING]
>until Hal gets up and comes to look at it, whereupon it works
>again.
>
>Possibly he fixes it with a stern glance?

I find that effect very frustrating because I can't fix the damned
thing if it won't stay broke.

A variant on that is the hammer effect. Friend of mine when his
computer was being particularly recalcitrant would lean an 18-pound
hammer on the table supporting it. This was remarkably efficacious.

Friend of mine, service tech for Burroughs, said once that one of the
salient benefits of computers is that "they give you an appreciation
for the perversity of inanimate objects".