Sidetracks - September 6, 2018

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. For more links and commentary you can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr. You can also support us on Patreon.

Jodie

1. Riz Ahmed is going to play Hamlet in a new adaptation coming to Netflix!!!

2. Ira is developing a reading tracker app called Liberry & the team need you to fill out a survey to help make this the best app it can be.

3. Nicole Kornher Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, has a really interesting post about Alternatives to Romance over at The Book Smugglers.

4. Tor's article Casting Idris Elba as James Bond Would Change the Character in the Best Way is, of course, of interest to me. I do, however, take issue with the final paragraph, as does the very first person to comment on the article (yay). The article wonders whether casting Idris Elba would be radical enough now, and then asks 'Why not a woman?' I'd love to see Bond played by a woman. However, at this point in the conversation, with Elba's history of campaigning for the role and the discourse firmly centred on why a black man should play Bond, any suggestion that the next Bond should be a woman needs to call for a chromatic female actress to take up the role. Gillian Anderson would make a great Bond, but if Gillian Anderson is the next Bond I'll be sorely disappointed because she'll stand as a symbol of the franchise rejecting black people.

5. F. C. Yee is writing an Avatar book based around Avatar Kyoshi.

6. Ana Grilo shares 10 Fall Books to Look For over at Kirkus. Lots of great stuff on here, and I'm really sad I didn't have time to request Rosewater but look forward to picking it up when it comes out.

KJ

7. Still in the glow of Worldcon, I enjoyed these con reports from Foz Meadows and John Picacio.

8. Relatedly, Ann Leckie writes about some of the backlash to N.K. Jemisin's win for Best Novel. She got some similar guff back when Ancillary Justice swept all the major SFF awards, and I found her thoughts insightful and inspiring.

9. Over on SyFy, the "Fangirls" column talks about media breakups, including some thoughts from our own Clare on quitting Heroes. I also had to end things with Heroes (in my case midway through the third season), so I can sympathize, but what particularly resonated were Carly Lane's thoughts on taking a break from Game of Thrones.

10. Hispanic Heritage Month starts on September 15, and what better way to celebrate by reading some books? SofiainBookland is co-hosting a Latinx Book Bingo challenge and provides some recommended titles for each square. I've already done some book shopping and look forward to jumping in.

11. From Bustle: "A Breakdown of "By The Book" Columns Shows That Male Authors Are Four Times More Likely to Recommend Books by Men Than by Women". Who is surprised? No one is surprised. Still depressing though.

12. I was pretty fascinated by this article that traces the history of Alison Moyet's laugh from the Yazoo (known in the US as Yaz) song "Situation", which has become one of the most sampled sounds in music history.

Susan

13. I am fascinated by this article about art heists involving looted Chinese artwork. Heists! Discussion of the repercussions of colonialism on museum collections and the countries that items were taken from! Political ramifications! Sometimes real life does actually bring you all the things you love in fiction.

14. I only follow the Magic: The Gathering fiction a little (Chandra is my bisexual flame-throwing patronus), but Cassandra Khaw is writing the latest Magic story arc! From the character's fluff text, she's basically magical Steve Irwin, so I'm very excited about this combination!

15. Little Foolery have a new story out!

Comments

[stardreamer]

Jodie: The Alternatives to Romance article speaks strongly to me -- not because I'm ace or aro, but because I've always had platonic male friends as well as guys I dated, and I've always had to fight that same goddamned set of assumptions. It's not just the kids who need to see cross-gender friendships modeled, it's their fucking PARENTS and TEACHERS and RANDOM JERKS WHO JUST WON'T GET A CLUE.

KJ: The last major media breakup I had was Bones at the end of season 3 -- where they wrote out my favorite character in a way that was absolutely, completely OUT of character and made no sense at all. I did check out the first few episodes of season 4 (off the torrents, TYVM), and they were terrible; it was painfully obvious that the producers had decided to retcon the whole show from "ensemble drama with lots of snarky, geeky humor" into "wacky romantic comedy set in a forensics lab", and I never went back. And yes, I'm still bitter and still mourning the show it was for the first two and a half seasons, and could have continued to be.

[owlmoose]

I never watched Bones, but that sounds supremely frustrating. Tone shifts in shows are definitely tough to stick with, especially when you can see shades of the show that it used to be, and wish it still was.

[stardreamer]

I can still wholeheartedly recommend the first two seasons and most of the third -- but for the love of ghod, STOP at the end of the third-to-last episode.

I loved the show because it was about people like me and my friends, and unlike most shows that focus on geeky types (including Big Bang Theory), it did NOT set them up as freaks to be laughed at. The humor was very Whedonesque, and the overall tone of the show was positive even though not all the endings were happy.