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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) sfwa
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sfwa_admin | |
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 Dear SFWA members,
Today, SFWA President Russell Davis has posted the most recent iteration of the new draft bylaws for SFWA, the review of the membership. Please log in to to the Discussion Forums to download a copy of the draft and give us your feedback.
At the same time the membership is reviewing this, we will be asking our legal counsel in both Colorado and an associated office in California, to review the document as well.
Members have until February 1, 2010, to review these bylaws, ask questions, make comments, bring up concerns, etc. On that date, the Board will resume discussions based on the feedback from members and counsel, and will move to draft a final set of bylaws which is the one that the members will be asked to vote on.
Please give us your comments at the Discussion Forums
Mirrored from SFWA | Comment at SFWA Tags: news, sfwa blog, sfwa business
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xthread | |
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The US Treasury would dearly love to get out of the business of printing one dollar bills. Paper bills don't last very long in circulation, and are relatively expensive to produce. By contrast, coins last about thirty years in circulation, longer out. No other first world industrialized economy still has a paper bill at the one dollar purchasing point. But getting a practical one dollar coin into circulation has been a real challenge in the US, largely because of the efforts of the american coin operated machine owner's lobby (machine makers would be delighted to sell revamped machines, but machine buyers have been largely unthrilled by the prospect of replacing their existing coin-op machines with new machines that could handle dollar coins). However, that knot was finally cut, by and large, a few years back when the USPS and major US city transit systems started deploying machines that had dollar coin accepters, and the Mint is now in the third year of a ten year program to release four new dollar coins each year with a different US president on the coin. I buy a couple of rolls a month, and mostly use them for tips on small purchases and the like. But it's been kind of a hassle - my neighborhood banks pretty reliably don't order as many dollar coins as I'd like to buy from them, and I have to go through every so often and figure out which presidential coins I haven't seen that are in circulation. But now the Mint has come to my rescue! They have a program to ship you boxes of coins, at face value, with free shipping, in quantities of $250, $500, and $1,000 boxes. This has led to frequent-flyer mile-collectors to come up with a lovely hack: Buy large numbers of coins from the Mint, charge them to credit cards that have frequent-flyer mile rewards, then pay the credit card bill immediately... with the coins that the Mint has just mailed them. This is not precisely what the Mint had in mind. However, I'll bet that it does actually get more of the coins into circulation, between the fact that I'm sure a fair number of people hold onto a few coins from the shipment and actually use them, and it means that more banks have the coins on hand to give out. But it is a lovely hack.
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taff2009
frankwu | |
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And so our thoughts turn again to the UK. Naturally, I've been thinking a lot about the UK lately, and today I wanted to share some more thoughts about the British invasion. Some years ago, I was writing a series of stories, which I called, "The Encyclopedia Capricciosa," a sort of science fiction history of music, with stories spaced every 5 years. I'd written stories for 1915 (about the Italian Futurists making music with very weird instruments), 1965 (about surface guitar), 1975 (about glam rock), and 1990 (about an effort to sequence Michael Jackson's genome). You can read them here: http://www.frankwu.com/storieshome.htmlOne story I always wanted to write and never got around to was about how the UK saved rock and roll. Rock and roll! The joyful noise without which I can't do art! The songs that mark the milestones of my time on this planet! The soundtrack of my life! My story was intended for 1960, and it detailed how the UK saved rock and roll from disappearing off the face of the planet. In 1960, rock was in bad shape. Elvis was in the army (and soon to return with non-rock pablum like "It's Now or Never"). Buddy "Peggy Sue" Holly, Ritchie "La Bamba" Valens and Big "Chantilly Lace" Bopper had all perished in a plane crash. Eddie "Summertime Blues" Cochran had died in a taxi. Jerry Lee "Great Balls of Fire" Lewis was blacklisted for marrying his 13-year-old cousin (!). Those who said that rock was just a passing phase seemed right. But it wasn't dead, it was like a great empire of glorious dissonance, slowly falling, slowly dying. But it would rise again. And here we see the parallel between this period of music and Asimov's Foundation books. Rock would rise again, eventually, but we needed to shorten the period from maybe decades to... perhaps five years. Why five years? Because rock and roll seems to complete destroy and remake itself every five years - five years being the school/prison term of an American high school student held back a year for bad behavior. And a new sub-genre of music seems to crop up every five years (surf guitar, psychedelia, glam rock, heavy metal, disco, rap, technorave, dance, hiphop, mashups, in succession). But just as the Foundation stories required a Terminus - a depository of all knowledge, the seed from which to grow a new civilization - so rock and roll needed a foundation in 1960. And that foundation was Liverpool, more specifically the docks of Liverpool. 45s from the dead Buddy Holly and the blacklisted Jerry Lee Lewis had found their way onto freighters from America that crossed the ocean, to be unloaded in Liverpool. There they found their ways into the hands of a Liverpool College of Art student who was remaking his old skiffle band into a rock and roll band. A band that would name itself as a pun on Buddy Holly's band "the Crickets" (and later record three of Holly's songs). They were British lads with Liverpudlian accents, but they sang like Americans, because they listened to American rock and roll. And their band that would spearhead the British invasion and signal the rebirth of rock and roll with a triumphant journey to America in February 1964. It was their first journey to America, but it was a return trip of the music that the ships had carried across the ocean, a journey culminating in hysteria at an airport and a triumphant appearance on Ed Sullivan - a journey almost exactly five years after the Day the Music Died. Rock and Roll was reborn, and Liverpool was the Terminus, the Foundation, that had restored the music of our lives. (More random thoughts about the UK on their way.)
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sfwa
sfwa_admin | |
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I’ve talked about sociolinguistics here before, in the context of accents. It’s essentially about how language differs across social boundaries, and how it is used to indicate membership in various kinds of social groups. These can be class groups, interest-related groups, regional groups, etc.
This is extremely useful for writing about science fiction and fantasy worlds.
As you put your world together, ask yourself how your people divide themselves up. Is it by town? By side of town (other side of the tracks, etc.)? Is it by larger geographical region? Is it by profession? By upper and lower class?
Once you’ve decided on the divisions, think through how these divisions might be linguistically indicated. Is there a pattern of speech that is considered particularly sophisticated? One that is very lowbrow? Is there a group, such as traders or port workers, whose language mixes with other languages from the nearby regions? How would that influence their speech, and how would such speech be regarded by those around them?
I’m not talking about slang, necessarily, though slang can be one of your tools. Pidgin/creole languages can also help you. You can also choose phonological differences, like the dropping of a final consonant on some kinds of words, to indicate the speech of a social group. Keep in mind that the social divisions you create can be distinguished by virtually any of the various measures I’ve been discussing: phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary use, pragmatics (!) etc.
Drawing linguistic distinctions between social groups is one of the best ways to help a created society take on extra dimension. So do give this some thought as you go forward.
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How sociolinguistics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.
 Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.
Mirrored from SFWA | Comment at SFWA Tags: juliette wade, linguistics, sfwa blog
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