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Perhaps VD had a “double secret” approach to voting so the SJW Hugos would pale in comparison to the “populist” Dragon Awards. I think VD wants to split fandom in twain. How could we deal with this, if true? I don’t know.
rob_matic: ‘The Dragon Awards: the choice of the alt-right.’
I’m fond of quoting Mr. Lincoln in such matters: ‘It’s the kind of thing that will be enjoyed by those who enjoy that kind of thing.’
I’m gonna be super petty here, but the title Somewhither makes me want to punch someone or something really hard in the nuts. I wonder if there are any nekkid man statues in my area so the only damage will be to my hand. 😛
@Andrew M:
Since the statement isn’t “registered and voted”, I’m going to put a tentative upper bound on votes as under two thousand, and fewer for any category.
It’d be really interesting to know which categories got what number of votes.
@Dawn Incognito:
The “bland pedestrian and forgettable fanfic book” is actually Redshirts. Because the Phantom (for it is, indeed, he) is a very well-read Puppy and can compare books written years apart in his quest to demonstrate that SJWs are lying about their motivations in awarding Hugos. As he puts it:
(I think the “not trashing NKJ or Scalzi” bit needs qualifying along the lines of “not right now, anyway”, but that’s by the bye). Now, given that my own tastes are, at least, sufficiently varied to encompass both these titles (haven’t actually read Redshirts yet, but I’ve heard enough about it to think it’s worth a look), I don’t see any contradiction in a large, varied, and constantly changing electorate honouring both. As somebody once said (quoting from a rather more elevated source this time):
Could have been written about the Hugo electorate, that.
Politics do play a part in the awarding of the Hugos. SF is a literature of ideas. Some, though not all of them, are political ideas. Are we meant to ignore the political ideas contained in the books when we vote on them?
As for Redshirts: 2013 (or 2012, for which awards were voted in 2013) was a thin year. When I saw the Nebula nominations I said ‘this is a thin year’, and nothing that happened after that changed my mind. Only one of the Hugo nominees – 2312 – could really claim depth, and that was extremely polarising. The others were all a bit lightweight (though not as lightweight as many Puppy choices). And I don’t know of any really significant works that were kept off the ballot.
Among the works we had Redshirts was a perfectly fair winner. It would probably not have won if something like The Fifth Season or Ancillary Justice had been in play. As various people have commented, it’s distinctive of Hugo voters that they don’t just like one sort of thing.
@Oneiros,
It’s another option, the Chinese origin, as opposed to the Korean or English or American…
[Insert saying about judging a book by its Nutty Nuggets.]
That was one of the options I had in mind. I have wondered about my job prospects: would they have been better had I adopted an Anglicised first name? (New Zealand is a predominantly European-descent country after all).
Re: first earthquake. Probably in the 90s while working in a lab. Thought a big truck just rumbled past, but then noticed the liquids in the lab bottles were all swaying. While New Zealand is a seismically active country, I live a ways away from the major fault lines.
Re: Dragon Awards.
Congratulation to the winners. I wait to see how the results are received: Will there be celebrations? Will there be gloating?
I won’t go quite that far, but combining Somewhither with Withering sounds so twee it made me shed a magic crystallized tear that hardened on its way down to land in a mess of troll corpses.
@John A Arkansawyer: “While I admire your determination, is it possible that your ideological rigidity about the no-goodness of each and every Pup at all times keeps them in line as much as it does your own folks?”
How weird (in addition to the rest) that you’d propose JJ’s keeping his “own folks” in line. JJ, where’s my bribe to toe your line??? 😉 Paypal will do nicely, thanks.
@JJ: “An omnibus e-book of R.A. MacAvoy’s Damiano Trilogy. . .” – Beat me to it! 😉
ETA: I thought I had the first of the “Damiano” books, but apparently not; this is a steal (despite DRM).
@Joe Hill
Thx for the suggestions on sites that might be interested in the story. I’ll pass along any suggestions. It’s his business, literally :-] , which one’s he tries.
I’d call it more of an amble than a rush.
But however quick it was, I’m exactly that quick. By definition!
Given how poorly DragonCon promoted the DAs, that may have been the intent.
@JJ and Kurt: I followed JJ’s good advice and slogged through all 17 1/2 minutes of SciFi4Me’s interview with Paulk, and transcribed all significant bits just in case useful later. (Send me mail at [email protected] if you want it, from a throwaway account if not wanting to dox thine self. Seems more than excessive to post it here.)
Am genuinely curious what bit/bits is/are deemed deemed to show hypocrisy and/or dishonesty, either alone or in conjunction with Paulk’s very odd brief ‘speech against’ delivered at the Business Meeting mic. Not trying to argue; I’m just not sure what the logic is, here.
The passage most obviously relevant to the Business Meeting proposals is at the 12:56 mark. Paraphrasing: If the anti-slate measures pass, beaucoup folks will take their awards ball and play elsewhere.
So far, predictably I find her understanding of peripatetic fannish conventions exceedingly weak (a sadly common comprehension problem), her premises incorrect, and her conclusions correspondingly quite wrong, but am not spotting what has been asserted in this space.
From the Cora Buhlert article:
Another really common argument … that always comes up whenever anybody dares to point out that women and writers of colour are underrepresented in magazines, publisher’s catalogues and tables of content, that they are less promoted and less reviewed is “Well, women and people of colour just aren’t into SFF. They don’t write it, they don’t submit it, they don’t care about SFF. Publishers can’t publish what isn’t being submitted.”
This comes up in virtually every discussion of sexism, racism, and other forms of exclusionary patterns. I’m sure I’m not the only one who notices that it is an absolutely canonical circular argument.
@ Kevin: Yep. For a good (if now outdated) look at what that area might be like after New Madrid lets go, see The Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele, which is also a rip-roaring good “emergent AI” story. (Or at least it was when I read it last — I haven’t been back to see if the Suck Fairy has gotten into it, but I do recall several prominent and non-stereotypical female characters.)
@ Spacefaringkitten: If Ctrl!Alt!Revolt! beats out The Desert and the Blade, it will be a clear miscarriage of justice. (And Prince of Outcasts had BETTER be available in time for me to pick up a copy at FenCon!)
@ Charon: Yes, media-cons skew both younger and more diverse. I see more fans of color at one media-con than I do in a year’s worth of traditional fan-run lit-cons. And as a dealer, I attend a fair number of both types of con.
@ Bonnie: You would not be wrong. And I would bet you real money that his bookshelves are very monotonous, since the idea that the same person can like more than one kind of fiction is apparently foreign to him.
@ Dawn: The “bland and forgettable fanfic book” was Redshirts; he was arguing that since two such dissimilar things had both won the Best Novel Hugo, there were obviously Political Shenanigans going on.
Yes, really.
JJ:
At that, it’s a more prepossessing title than the Eros Comix series TIME WANKERS, which had a somewhat similar premise.
@ Andrew: Are we meant to ignore the political ideas contained in the books when we vote on them?
The answer to that question will fall in different places for different people. And sometimes for the same person as well; I know that there are some political ideas I can ignore (even though I disagree with them) and others that will immediately put a book into downcheck. In general, the better the writing the easier it is for me to set aside the politics (which is why JCW fails), but there is also a point at which the politics simply overwhelms the story no matter how well-written it might be.
@ Soon Lee: There’s a body of evidence suggesting that you’d have gotten more callbacks / interviews with an Anglicized first name. Whether or not that would have translated into better job prospects once you reached the interview stage is less clear. (Heh. The spellchecker here is clearly set to prioritize American spellings.)
@Lee,
Yeah, I was aware of this early on and have developed tactics to ameliorate that tendency (not sure how successful these have been, but most places where I apply for jobs will already have someone who knows me: New Zealand is small enough that the six degrees of separation collapses into two degrees, if that). In general, I do well if I can get to the interview stage, so there’s that.
Thanks for the corrections on the bland and forgettable fanfic book. I thought Redshirts was quite entertaining and was somewhat impressed at how meta it got.
I was also amused that I could only remember four of the novel finalists from this year. Though when I look back at the other finalists from 2013, I find I can’t recall anything about Throne of the Crescent Moon.
Personal news section:
My dad is in the hospital again with heart failure. He’s doing much better now but this is a helluva setback. Fuck today; tomorrow, you’re on notice.
I have taken some painkillers for my usual headache and a sedative (after making phone calls and running mandatory errands), am curled up in bed with Obelisk Gate and an SJW credential beside my pillow and am having an extended read/sleep.
(Thanks/sorry for my indulgence.)
@Dawn
Sorry to hear about your father. Please keep us posted.
Also…as much as I loved The Obelisk Gate, perhaps it isn’t the best book to be reading at a time like this.
@Lee, @Soon Lee: I wonder if that research is relevant to New Zealand in the way it is relevant to the US. The research I’m aware of studied distinctively black names versus names not distinctively black. That’s a very American question. But there may be relevant research I’m not aware of.
@Jim Henley: My fears were unfounded. We got a great lay sermon which had a title that might have indicated a different experience, had it been topical to Labor Day. As it was, it had nothing to do with Labor Day, and it was one of the better lay sermons we’ve had. Good stuff.
As is often the caee, I’m glad to have been wrong.
Now that it’s an award winner, I’m hard at work on ANYWHENCE: THE SAGA OF THE SPHERE UNWUTHERING.
@Dawn Incognito: I am so sorry to hear about your father’s setback. I’m hoping for the best for both of you. As Bonnie says, please keep us posted to the extent you’re inclined.
@John A. Arkansawyer: Great! Do you have a lot of lay sermons at your church?
@Kurt Busiek
Don’t you mean The Saga of the Sphere Unwankering? 😉
@Jim Henley: Typically we have one guest sermon a month, except in summer, when there is usually a two-month stretch of them. Mine in June was okay, but not nearly so good as I’d hoped. I should transcribe it–I work from an outline–but if you’re curious, here it is.
@Dawn, I’m so sorry about your dad. I hope your self care is everything you need it to be and that he recovers quickly and completely.
@Lee – The “bland and forgettable fanfic book” was Redshirts; he was arguing that since two such dissimilar things had both won the Best Novel Hugo, there were obviously Political Shenanigans going on.
I thought Redshirts was merely an entertaining way to spend an afternoon until I read the codas. They were something else again and retroactively changed the way I saw the book. Whatever (oh, heh). Anyway, as to the second part of that sentence, whaaaa? That doesn’t make any sort of sense at all, not even historic sense, because uniformity is not something that has ever been baked into that award.
I guess I’m going to have to listen to the Paulk interview myself, because even the best transcription won’t convey body language and tone of voice. I’m starting with the bias that she’s speaking the truth as she sees it, because most of us do.
@John A Arkansawyer,
Oh yes (pdf link). If you’re European Pakeha (non-Maori) by ethnicity (namewise), you are statistically more likely to get to next stage of the job application.
@Dawn Incognito,
Best wishes to you & your father.
That may explain that sphere’s problems.
But no, this one just doesn’t get much above a breeze.
@Soon Lee: Thank you! That study made for fascinating reading.
One thing I wondered about after reading it was the effect specific to Maori applicants. I did not see anything on that, though I did see a note about Maori raters. The abstract specifically named Chinese and Indian applicants, and the studies quoted don’t seem to look at Maori applicants.
Given what little I know, or think I know, about New Zealand, I would expect bias against Maori applicants by Anglo-Saxon raters. Do you know if that has been studied? Or is my ignorance showing? And of course immigration plays into it all. So complex. So fascinating. So distressing.
@Hampus: I’d forgotten about 3.
@Andrew M. V whfg pbhyqa’g ohl vg. Gung na napvrag, vareg negvsnpg gung Ovagv sbhaq va gur qrfreg ba Rnegu, qrfcvgr gur phygheny naq culfvpny vfbyngvba bs gur Uvzon, gheaf bhg gb or obgu n jrncba gung gur Zrqhfr pnaabg birepbzr naq n pbzzhavpngvba qrivpr, naq juvpu zntvpnyyl pbzrf gb yvsr sbe gur svefg gvzr gb fnir ure jura gur Zrqhfr nggnpx, jnf frireny oevqtrf gbb sne sbe zr.
@John A. Arkansawyer: Cool! Thanks for sharing.
@John A Arkansawyer,
Maori names weren’t included in that study, but given there are other studies that show bias against Maori in other areas (just one recent example), it would not surprise me if some recruiters have a bias (conscious or sub-conscious) against applications with Maori names attached.
@ Dawn: That sucks. Take care of yourself.
@ John A: There are multiple studies, many of which included both male and female names as well as those sounding typically black, Latin@, and various types of Asian. The one thing that doesn’t change is the outcome: names that sound “white male” get a statistically-significant higher percentage of responses than any other types, when attached to otherwise-identical applications. OTOH, I’m not sure I’ve seen any that were done in other English-speaking countries, so that may make a difference.
@ Cheryl: Yes, exactly. it’s the “therefore” which turns his argument from silly into WTF; the underlying assumption is (1) that everyone who disagrees with him must have exactly the same taste in books, and (2) that said taste is relatively narrow. As I said upthread, a very 7th-grade way of looking at things.
Oops. Posted to the wrong thread. Re-posting in the Dragon Awards thread.
@Dawn Icognito
Crap, bad news on your dad. Hope both he and Mike are out of the hospital soon.
@Lee:
Yeah. One distressing item in the first paper Soon Lee posted was that Maori raters and Anglo-Saxon raters alike discriminated against Asians. It didn’t explicitly say “in favor of Anglo-Saxons”, but I think that’s a reasonable inference from the study design.
Funny story: We gave the kid a non-gender specific name so no one would throw the resume in the wrong pile on first reading. When the kid was about a year old, we were checking out at the grocery store by a guy with the same first and last name as the kid.
A black man.
Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that we’d given the kid a first name most commonly given to black males. So the resume will get thrown in the wrong pile for the wrong reason. (Not that there’s a right reason.)
So the kid will get to compare two different sorts of bias. Great.
The moral of the story? Individual solutions to societal problems are insufficient at best.
@Dawn Incognito
Sorry to hear about your dad. How scary. May things be better from here forwards. May Jemisin’s writing distract you.
Earthquakes. Only tremor I remember feeling was here in western New York. I’m told I experienced one in Colorado in the 60s, but while I remember talking about earthquakes then, I don’t remember experiencing any.
Names. In Virginia, one of my theater friends was Kim Lee, who said she has probably benefitted from affirmative action, because her name sounds Korean to a lot of folks, and if they’re surprised when they find out, they don’t show it.
Dawn, best wishes for your dad, and for his loved ones as well. Best possible outcome.
Kurt Busiek:
Thank you for helping me with that title, I was going crazy trying to remember it.
Dawn Incognito, nothing helpful to say, but <hugs> offered if welcome.
Rick Moen: I merely said I wouldn’t be so quick as Kurt was to rush to judgement on her passing rhetoric at the Business Meeting — that he reached a conclusion of ‘hypocrisy’ only by attributing the noisiest of the Puppy crowd’s WSFS nihilism to her personally, along with making an uncharitable interpretation of her Business Meeting remark.
Actually, no, Kurt probably reached that judgment the same way I did — by having read enough of her words over at MGC. One need not attribute anything to her personally other than her own past words about the Hugo Awards to come up with a judgment of hypocrisy.
And it’s not “an uncharitable interpretation”. It’s what she said — that passing EPH and 3SV and EPH+ was likely to “damage the Hugo brand”, as she reiterated later on MGC:
I’ll be helping [with SP5] behind the scenes, and working with the WSFS committee behind the scenes [*snort*] to help mitigate the damage the motions passed at the business meeting are likely to do to the Hugo brand.
Now, if you haven’t been reading anything over at MGC, I can understand why you might think that Kurt and I have made erroneous judgments. But I am not going to encourage you to go down that rabbit hole just to convince you otherwise.
John A Arkansawyer: One of the principles taught us that I wholeheartedly approve of is that you start work with the healthiest member of an unhealthy system.
I agree with that.
The difference between you and me is that you think there might be something to be accomplished by engaging with the “healthiest member” of the unhealthy Puppy system. I’ve become convinced that attempting to do so is an exercise in futility.
I don’t think rational engagement from non-Puppies is going to have the slightest effect on the worldview of any of the Puppies, including Paulk — I’ve seen Camestros, and snowcrash, and Mark-kitteh attempt this numerous times over at MGC — and all of the Pups, including Paulk, are so far down the rabbit hole that it does no good. Their only responses are to counter with repetitions of their old, tired vitriol and lies, to mock, and to block.
I give you full marks for being charitable enough to consider Paulk possible of changing direction. I don’t think she is capable of that, and I have absolutely no interest in attempting to engage with her.
John A Arkansawyer:
Such as the one saying this about last years Hugo voters?
The healthiest member? Maybe. Healthy? Not really.
@Dawn Incognito, so sorry your Dad is ill. I hope he’ll recover soon.
@All, speaking of Obelisk Gate, can someone remind me of the trigger warnings for The Fifth Season? I didn’t read it because it sounded too dark for me, but all of y’all’s plaudits for the two books are making me want to reconsider.
On last year’s fiction, I liked Binti, but I liked Penric’s Demon better. It actually induced me to go back and read all of Bujold’s Chalion/Five Gods series. (I’ve been a Bujold holdout because the list of books is intimidatingly long.) I did nominate both of them. I enjoyed Cat Pictures Please and voted for it, but it wasn’t on my nomination ballot. There was a lot of competition in short story. I liked Kritzer’s So Much Cooking better, and was disappointed it didn’t make the novelette ballot. Folding Beijing was good, too, but not my favorite overall, although it was my favorite of what made the ballot.
@jonesnori. off the top of my head, there is child murder (very early on), and slavery, and some really dark things involved with both of those. Oh, and an apocalypse and the problems with people acting badly during the same.
@JJ: You are, in my opinion, more likely than I am to be right. But I live in hope. After all, John Ringo didn’t block me the other day. We’ll see.
@jonesnori: Child murder, violence against children, rape. slavery, and nonconsensual sex that isn’t quite rape (I’m not sure how to describe this – it isn’t rape, but neither party really wants to participate).
Just because some people consider these things triggering: Pregnancy and homosexual sex.
@Hampus Eckerman: Back in 2003, when some of us were depressed by the low quality of the anti-war leadership, I decided to take the Darth Cheney point of view of, “You fight a war with the opposition you have.” So while I can’t disagree with you, I think it’s the best of a set of slim chances. I’ve said some intemperate things over the years myself, especially when in the grip of ideology, and wished I’d had a chance to take them back or make amends. More than any of the other Pups I’ve read, Kate Paulk has moments of what looks like humane sentiment, and if I get a chance, I’ll encourage it.
I’m thinking of what a character in John Barnes’ most beautiful and tragic novel said, which I’ll leave unspecific to avoid spoilerage: “Act on your best impulses. Shore up whatever poor, weak forces of tolerance and peace you can find, do what harm you can to bigots and murderers, bind any wound that falls in your reach, keep articulating reason to them.”
Good, hopeful words to live by in hard times. I’m tempted not to add the next sentence, but that wouldn’t be honest: “And don’t expect it to work.” Which I don’t. But as I say, I live in hope. Not Hope. That’s down the road. All it offers me is watermelons. And I hate watermelons.
@Dawn Incognito
So sorry to hear about your dad. You’re doing the right thing, imo, to rest and take care of yourself as much as possible. Best wishes and best of luck. If you want or need to share details here, I, for one, have no objection.
I just had a fit of the giggles over the idea that someone could be confused about how librarians without access to Locus could still know the Hugo winners.