Canterbury Tails 5/27

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Aka Mansfield Puppy Park

The wisdom of crowds is supplied by Ruth Davies, Adam-Troy Castro, Nancy Lebovitz, Gabriel McKee, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Lyda Morehouse, L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright, Alexandra Erin, Vox Day, JDZ, Lis Carey, Joe Sherry, Lisa J. Goldstein, Rebekah Golden, Joseph Brassey, John Scalzi, Katya Czaja, plus less identifiable others. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day rcade and Kary English.)

Ruth Davies on The Hippo Collective

“Taking a Literary Step Backwards: the Hugo Awards 2015” – May 24

This scandal is clearly worrying; such regressive views placed upon particular literary genres, such as science fiction and fantasy, must have implications for other genres, and the larger literary field. Literature is key in its power to evolve and combat the oppression of minority groups, by allowing a voice and platform (although being well heard often unfortunately relies on getting ‘discovered’ and subsequently published). Right-wing action is also more concerning when involved with such canonising activity as literary awards. Awards often help shape the (Western) literary canon, which contains a lot of the West’s most famous and widely read literature. Therefore right-wing attitudes, such as those of the ‘Sad Puppies’ and ‘Rabid Puppies’, merely blocks diversification of the canon – discouraging the cultural change that the West still desperately needs.

However, the question still remains: how do we overcome such regressive strategies in literature? The democratic fan vote should appear the fairest and least problematic strategy, yet as seen, it has its fundamental drawbacks.

 

Font Folly

“Tom Puppy and the Visitor from Planet Clueless” – May 27

A Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy supporter posted an op-ed on the men’s rights site Return of the Kings (he links to and heavily paraphrases one of the Sad Puppy podcasts), “How Female-Dominated Publishing Houses Are Censoring Male Authors” that is a great example of several of the issues that I believe underpin the Sad Puppy position. Never mind that the statistics show that men make up more than 65% of the annual publishing lists of most of the publishing houses, and male-authored books comprise more the 80% of books reviewed in the major publications, this guy is here to tell us that men are being censored!

 

Adam Troy-Castro on Facebook – May 27

(Sigh) No, I am not saying, nor am I ever going to say, that the organizers of the Sad Puppy nonsense need to be “boycotted” for what they have done and said, and I am most certainly not saying that the writers they advocated for need to be boycotted for the actions of those who supported them.

This is after all me, the guy who has made such a regular habit of arguing for separating the art from the artist, most of the time in more extreme circumstances. If I can distinguish between Bill Cosby and “Bill Cosby,” if I can praise the occasional film by Roman Polanski, if I can struggle in vain to discuss the filmic achievements of Woody Allen without being slammed by the same stuff that artistic discussions of Woody Allen are always slammed with, if I can further regularly wax enthusiastic about work by writers like Stephen Hunter and Dan Simmons who exist so far from me on the political spectrum that we are almost on separate rainbows, then why the hell would I tell anybody to boycott the work of {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}, to name one, just because I think it’s fun to summarize his persona as {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}? Ditto with {Hurt-Feelings Harry}, {Steely-Eyed Rage-Monster}, Beale The Galactic Zero, and the rest of that crew. I mock them with abandon, but want *none* of them subjected to organized boycott of any kind.

I have said nothing advocating otherwise, and anybody who represents me as having said anything of the kind is, in precise measurement, a goddamned liar.

 

Nancy Lebovitz in a comment on Making Light – May 27

At Balticon, someone asked Jo Walton about the Hugos at her GoH speech, and she said that ideally, the Hugos are a gesture of love and respect, and campaigning for the Hugos is like persistently asking your partner whether they love you. It just isn’t the same.

 

Doctor Science on Obsidian Wings

“Problems with the Hugo Nominations for Pro and Fan Artist” – May 28

[Doctor Science vetted the sample art in the Hugo Voters Packet and says she discovered most of the material from Nick Greenwood and Steve Stiles came from another eligibility year, and that among all artists she traced 14 items to periods before 2014.]

I’ll stop here for the moment, and go on later to talk about things like: how I’m going to vote, what I think the problems with the categories are, and start some ideas about how to fix them.

For a start, though, I urge my fellow voters to click around the 2014 Pro and 2014 Fan collections at Hugo Eligible Art, to get a sense of what your baseline should be for comparison.

 

Gabriel McKee on SF Gospel

“The Way the Future Never Was” – May 27

For a lot of us, SF’s ability to deal with current problems in metaphorical terms is the whole point. It’s why we got interested in the genre, and why we’ve stuck with it—because there will always be new quesitons, and new angles on them. Does Brad Torgersen really want SF to be a genre about space ships and ray guns with no resonance with current society? Does he really want SF authors to abandon the time-honored tradition of exploring social issues with SFnal metaphor? That sounds to me like an SF that’s afraid of the future.

 

Gabriel McKee on SF Gospel

“The Way the Future Never Was: A Visual Appendix” – May 27

To get a better idea of Brad Torgersen’s problem with today’s science fiction, let’s take a look at some good, old-fashioned, reliably-packaged SF….

The Space Merchants cover COMP

Hey, this one looks fun. It’s got space ships and all kinds of stuff. Wait, what? It’s about the evils of capitalism? Bait and switch!

 

https://twitter.com/pnh/status/603691400895582209

 

Lyda Morehouse on Bitter Empire

“Real Talk About John Scalzi, Vox Day, And That Big Big Book Deal” – May 27

Vox Day (Theodore Beale), if you recall, is the mastermind behind the Rabid Puppies (the super-far right organizers of this year’s Hugo debacle.) Beale apparently also sees himself as Scalzi’s rival. Beale has all sorts of “hilarious” nicknames for Scalzi….

So, as you can imagine, Beale’s head is near ready to explode.

He starts off with a simple report of the deal, but then it takes a hard right into God knows what. Beale says that Scalzi’s deal can really only be expected because Tor, his publisher, really doesn’t have any big name authors in its stables beyond Scazli, except maybe one other, and, more importantly, “It’s not as if the award-winning Jo Walton or the award-winning Catharine (sic) Asaro or any of their other award-winning authors sell enough books to support all the SJW non-SF they keep trying to push on an unwilling public.”

What.

Whoa, ladies, that was almost a compliment there for being all award-win-y, but nope. According to Beale, the only reason Walton and Asaro write is push the SJW (Social Justice Warrior) “non-SF” on all of us non-willing readers.

 

JDZ on Never Yet Melted

“John Scalzi Gets $3.4 Million Publishing Deal” – May 27

Scalzi has alienated a significant portion of his readership with sanctimonious hoplophobic blog posts (example) and by lining up with the Social Justice Warriors in the fighting over the Hugo Awards. My guess is that his backlisting powers will be declining.

 

L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright conducts interview on Superversive SF

“Interview with Hugo Fan Writer Nominee: Dave Freer!” – May 27

7) How did you come up with the idea for your current nominated story?

Eating cheese late at night. It was that or my concern for the state of a genre I love. I happen think all nice boys and girls should love sf and fantasy (and find sf and fantasy to love). I think all nasty boys and girls should too. I am delighted if the rare, nasty, odd, and possibly puke purple creatures crawling out of the East River do too. I just find it worrying when the latter group seems to have become so dominant that the rest lose interest and go and pursue other forms of entertainment and escapism.

 

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“Of Dinosaurs, Legos, and Impossible Hypotheticals” – May 27

There’s another work nominated this year that has stirred similar questions in a more limited way, perhaps more limited because the Dramatic Presentation categories are seen as less serious and crucial in a literary award than the literary categories, and perhaps because as a Sad Puppy pick it is taken less seriously to begin with.

The work in question is The Lego Movie, which contains a couple of scenes near the end that make explicit the implicit framing device for a movie about Lego characters in a world made out of Lego blocks: it’s all a child, playing with toys. It is this moment, in my opinion, that elevates The Lego Movie from merely being charming and fun to actually pretty sublimely brilliant. It explained so many of the odd quirks of characterization and storytelling earlier in the film.

I mean, it changed the movie’s version of Batman from “weirdly out of character, but okay, it’s funny” to “…that’s freaking brilliant” because it wasn’t Batman as adult comic book fans understand him but Batman seen through the eyes of a child, with way more focus on the cool factor of everything and of course he has the coolest girlfriend and of course even the grimdark angst seems kind of fun…

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“Hugo Awards 2015: Best Novella” – May27

This is how I am voting in the Best Novella category. Of course, I merely offer this information regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 367 Vile Faceless Minions or anyone else.

 

  1. “One Bright Star to Guide Them”
  2. “Big Boys Don’t Cry”
  3. “The Plural of Helen of Troy”
  4. “Pale Realms of Shade”
  5. “Flow”

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“Rat Queens, by Kurtis J. Wiebe (writer), Roc Upchurch (illustrator)” – May 27

ratqueens

Booze-guzzling, death-dealing, battle maidens-for-hire.

This is so not my thing. The art is excellent. The writing is quite good. There’s a plot–but here’s where I run into trouble.

 

Joe Sherry on Adventures In Reading

“Thoughts on the Hugo Award Nominees: Related Work” – May 27

… Letters from Gardner: Lou Antonelli’s collection is an interesting one. It’s part memoir, part short story collection, part writing advice, part I have no idea. It shows Antonelli’s development as a writer, some of the revision progress, and how influential some of those early rejections from Gardner Dozois were. It’s not necessarily my cuppa, but it’s not bad.

No Award: No Award continues to rear its ugly head. I read half of Wright’s Transhuman and Subhuman collection (approximately), and I bounced off of it. His essay on fiction writing directed at a nonfiction writing friend was fairly solid, but I had issues with the rest of what I read – mostly in that I disagree with much of what Wright has to say and his essay writing style does little to encourage me to continue reading even despite my disagreement. I can’t get into specifics here because each time I bounced off an essay, I moved onto the next. That said, he’s not wrong that Ulysses is a terrible book.

On the other hand, Wisdom from my Internet is truly a terrible book that has no place anywhere near this ballot. I can understand, more or less, why people may have enjoyed / appreciated Wright’s collection. I’m not his audience, but many people likely are. Michael Williamson’s collection of non-sequiturs and jokes is sort of organized by topic, but most are not at all entertaining and what, exactly it has to do with the field of science fiction and / or fantasy is completely beyond me. But it isn’t so much the lack of relation to SFF that gets me, it’s how bad the jokes are and how disinteresting the whole thing is. I may not think that Wright’s collection is worthy of an Award, but I don’t think Williamson’s should have been considered for nomination. I may never understand how or why it was….

 

Adult Onset Atheist

“There can be only one SNARL” – May 27

Where did such a foolish name as “Sad Puppies” come from? Larry apparently likes cutesy names; he was co-founder of a gunshop he named “Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns”. The gunshop went under, but the enduring flikr record of it shows racks of plastic-furnitured AK-47s, and glass cases with handguns lovingly laid out for display. “Sad Puppies” is a name derived from the kind of immature humor that wants to be irony when it grows up.

The idea for “Sad Puppies” pre-dates the Hugo kerfluffle. On Larry’s blog one of the first posts he tagged with “Sad Puppies” is a reactionary commentary-style rebuttal to a September 2009 POTUS speech to a joint session of congress, and the next is a similar reactionary commentary to the 2010 SOTU. So “Sad Puppies” in Larry’s mind is political in the strictest sense of the word. Yet somehow everyone else is really political people –whether they say so or not- and poor Larry is just trying to give his embattled writers the only chances available because he perceives them as having been shut out.  And the only way to get “his” writers a fair shake is to shut out any competing works that might try to leverage some unfair literati elitist advantage by not being crappy.

The reason the Sad puppies can pee all over the Hugo process is because of complacency in fandom. When I talk about complacency I am mostly talking about myself. I ask myself “How can you make good nominations when you haven’t read more than a dozen SF novellas this year?” The nice voters packet provides a guided reading list; the trufans have done the heavy lifting. So far this year there are over 9,000 voting members of worldcon, and membership is open for a few more days. For $40 you can get a vote and a nice electronic voting packet; unfortunately many of the stories in it are crap. Some of the Hugo nominations this year received less than 30 votes. There needs to be some way of bridging the complacency gap so the large numbers of fans who care enough to vote for a Hugo are presented with a couple choices worth voting for.  Perhaps that means I need to get off my rear and wade through the vast number of published SF/F stories to make recommendations and vote during the nomination process instead of waiting until after the nominations list is published.

 

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“Let Me Explain… No, There Is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.” – May 27

One of my questions when I started was why the Puppies chose these specific stories.  And after all that reading, I have to say that I still don’t know, and the statements of the Puppies themselves don’t really help.  Larry Correia wanted to nominate stories that would “make literati heads explode,” stories with right-wing themes that would anger SJWs (Super-Judgmental Werewolves?) when they appeared on the ballot.  But we’re very used to narratives of straight white men doing straight white manly things, and even seeing those stories nominated for Hugos.  It’s all just business as usual.  I don’t know about other people’s crania, but my head stayed firmly on my shoulders while I was reading — though it did slip toward the desk a few times, my eyes closing, thinking, Ho hum, another one …

Correia also rejected “boring message fiction” — but then how to explain John C. Wright’s Catholic apologia, or Tom Kratman’s push for more and more weaponry?  And his final explanation was that people were mean to him at a convention.  Okay, but why these stories?  Was putting us through all of this his idea of revenge?

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Short Story: Reviewing J C Wright” – May 26

This is a parable told in the style of Kipling or of old Buddhist tales. It takes a mythology well known to the author and extends it into a second mirroring mythology like Zeno’s Paradox applied to christianity. It was clever and written well, if in a pre-Hemingway style, but overall not a story for me.

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Fan Artist: Reviewing N Aalto” – May 27

Ninni had two pieces included in the Hugo Voters packet. Both were very well drawn and nicely colored. Based on her online portfolio I like her style and find her work pleasing to the eye. I suspect there are some in jokes I don’t get but that’s the nature of being the best fan at something. In short, nicely done.

 

Katya Czaja

“Hugo Award: Professional Artist” – May 27

Ranking Julie Dillon stood out as the clear winner in this category.

1) Julie Dillon
2) Nick Greenwood
3) Allan Pollack
4) No Award
5) Carter Reid
6) Kirk DouPonce

 

 

https://twitter.com/KosmoATD/status/603582414846300160

 

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520 thoughts on “Canterbury Tails 5/27”

  4. Is anybody having trouble viewing the Liu/Scalzi photo in PNH’s tweet? I just did — need to know if I have to fix something.

  5. “John @scalzi interviewing THREE-BODY PROBLEM author Cixin Liu at the China Institute.”

    Did he converse in Chinese? Does he know how a language without gendered pronouns works or did he insist on using ‘she’ all the time?

  6. Adult Onset Athiest wrote:

    The reason the Sad puppies can pee all over the Hugo process is because of complacency in fandom. […] There needs to be some way of bridging the complacency gap so the large numbers of fans who care enough to vote for a Hugo are presented with a couple choices worth voting for. Perhaps that means I need to get off my rear and wade through the vast number of published SF/F stories to make recommendations and vote during the nomination process instead of waiting until after the nominations list is published.

    This, to me, is the biggest issue.

    I don’t know if “complacency” is the word I’d use. Because, really, there’s a lot of sense leaving the bulk of nomination to those readers who read enough short fiction to make some informed choices. Let’s face it, that’s not a huge crowd – how many of us are spending our reading hours now on something eligible for 2016, vs. how many of us are reading the 2014 nominees? 🙂

    But I think increasing interest and involvement in the short fiction arena is the way forward. I feel like short fiction is the nichiest of niches – and any specific magazine or anthology is even nichier than that.

    Short fiction has a discovery problem. The Hugos are one of the attempts to solve the discovery problem, but nowadays, just nominating for the Hugos is a discovery problem in and of itself.

  8. Beyond Anon – There appears to have been an interpreter there, however I think had that been an issue I trust that Cixin Liu would manage to understand him though he’d wonder why he would be speaking like an alien spaceship.

  9. MickyFinn: I have it back now, too. Maybe my browser just needs a nap. I”ve had it open all day.

  10. Generally speaking, I go by “she”, but it’s not a big deal for me. With the way my knees are feeling right now, brain-in-a-jar is sounding more than usually attractive …

  12. From the Goldstein article: ” Okay, but why these stories? Was putting us through all of this his idea of revenge?”

    I’m wondering this as well. Last year the Day novella got on because Correia did essentially want to gin up some outrage. But this year, that wasn’t part of the many justifications for SP3. So why was the slate selection so poor?

    I’ve tried looking, and I can’t find that any of the nominated works been nominated, much less won, anything else anywhere else.

    So why *these* works?

  13. Brad isn’t a very good reader, and Beale is essentially self-interested. That’s pretty much it.

  14. Nick: and Brad went with giving nominations to his friends and acquaintances.

  15. SJWs (Super-Judgmental Werewolves?)

    I always thought it was Single Jewish Woman. Which confused me because I’m none of those, and yet people keep calling me that.

  18. @Glenn: “I always thought it was Single Jewish Woman. Which confused me because I’m none of those, and yet people keep calling me that.”

    What happened to your siamese cat?

  20. Well yeah, RP being a marketing ploy is utterly unsurprising so Day can be ignored.

    I’m surprised that the rest of the ELoE (Hoyt, Wright, & Correia – anyone else?) would have gotten at least some works that got a majority positive reception. From what I can tell, (ignoring Butcher), the work with the most positive response seems to be Totaled and …Samurai, but even then most of the reviews are that they are, well, average to above average. Even the ones that I liked I concur with that particular assessment.

    So if SP3 is all Brad by his lonesome…well that explains a great deal. Relying entirely on one persons opinion makes from a very flimsy structure.

    I guess at some point I would love to understand the criteria by which the slate was assembled, because right now it makes no sense whatsoever. But I suspect I’ll never get satisfaction regarding that query

  21. @snowcrash:

    So why *these* works?

    That’s really, really bugging me as well.

    I must’ve seen dozens of reviews of Puppy short fic nominees. But all by non-Puppies. When I search for positive discussion of the stories that the Puppies themselves nominated, I’m just not finding any.

    For a few stories, I went and googled references dating before the ballot announcement. I found a small group of mentions that this story is unremarkable, that that one doesn’t work except as a minor segment of a larger work, that kind of stuff. No buzz at all. No mentions, no discussions, certainly no squeeing.

    But it’s even worse than that. Because now those stories are on the ballot. And I still don’t see any pro-Puppies talking about them. How on earth can you say “We’re here to promote excellent fiction,” and then devote zero attention or interest to the actual stories you’re saying are excellent and not receiving enough attention? The mind boggles.

    Puppies: if you like the stories you nominated, please, please, talk about them. You’ve got a whole ballot full of stories hand-picked for your personal satisfaction, and you’re still talking exclusively about “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love.” I mean, wow, I might stop taking you seriously or something.

  22. Someone else articulated it well the other day. People who aren’t very strong readers are satisfied if they read a sentence and that sentence forms a picture in their heads. So Anderson’s dizzying and nonsensical flight between tenses, or “A Single Samurai’s” bad ending are meaningless.

    Hey, I get it! He’s mad and now he and his kid are on a spaceship!
    So what if the narrator dies at the end! It’s just a story!
    An AI should cogitate and communicate just like a twentieth century person because anything else would get in the way of the story! (ie imagining two people talking)

    Also, there are plenty of nostalgic themes: God is important, even in posthuman times people will be the center of the universe, family is good, we need to be focused on the stars, etc.

  23. @ Standback
    Well, Steve Moss occasionally turns up and talks about how much he likes this work or that one. He’s a very generous reader, he does all the work of creating a rich world with deep characters in his own head and then credits the writers for them. I don’t think I’ve seen any other pro-Puppy reviews.

    To the more general point of Why these works? I’m pretty sure it all boils down to Torgersen’s friends and Day’s bank balance (and neither of them being able to recognise a quality story if it danced naked in front of them).

  26. Oh, I was hoping she’d put up an example of what she liked, rather than trashing the usual suspects. It would have been more interesting.

    I don’t even get her criticism of AJ – it did something she wasn’t expecting and that’s bad because..? (And why wasn’t she expecting it? The cover has a space ship on it!)

    I really wish the Amazon rankings thing would go off to die quietly rather than constantly being thrown up as some sort of objective measure of quality. Even ignoring the wishy washy ranking maths, I reject the premise that the book that sells the most copies must be the best.

  27. The best was when Kate was surprised the amazon numbers she was showed didn’t match the ones she remembered. Amazon rankings change hourly—no need to dig through the “data” to understand that.

  28. I might almost believe that the criteria used in constituting these slates was to deliberately select the worst possible entrants, the better to troll you with, my dears, were it not for the fact that their Dramatic Presentation nominees were, by and large, pretty good. I mean, you might not agree with all of them, or even any of them, but there sure as hell wasn’t a Wisdom from My Internet among them.

  29. >> their Dramatic Presentation nominees were, by and large, pretty good. I mean, you might not agree with all of them, or even any of them, but there sure as hell wasn’t a Wisdom from My Internet among them.>>

    Apparently, Brad and his pals actually _watch_ movies and TV.

  30. Alternately: If you want a bunch of people to vote, sight unseen, for a bunch of works that you tell them to, you had better not fill up the Dramatic Presentation slots with clunkers, lest casual fans, who might not have read any of the short stories, but who certainly have watched TV and gone to the movies, begin to question your taste.

  32. @Ray: Maybe someone should make a movie out of Wisdom From My Internet so they’ll have a more appropriate nomination next year?

    The whole film would be of Williamson at the computer, typing his tweets and hitting “send.”

    I’d want to have Williamson played by Johnny Depp.

  34. I doubt the Puppies have any friends in Hollywood, so they had to pick the same way the rest of us do – they had to choose something they liked. Unless, possibly, they thought the LEGO Movie’s lack of an Oscar nomination meant that it had something in common with them.

  35. Joe Sherry: That said, he’s not wrong that Ulysses is a terrible book. Since you asked for it,

    no thats no way for them have they no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in their nature sweeping our awards like that on our bottoms the samurai that doesnt know a mountain from a kaiju thats what you get for not keeping them in their kennel throwing out message and writing in that pulpy way without the style they need to be admired like a Priest or even Butcher sure you might as well be in bed with what with a puppy God Im sure Scalzi has some better book to selfpimp an old Dog would O well I suppose its because Sonia was so buxom in her chainmail theyre not shutting me out for their stupid jealousy why cant we all remain friends instead of quarrelling by the Lord God I was thinking would I troll around the blogs there anonymous so nobodyd know me or pick up a puppy and not care a pin how literary just read it on the bus or one of those gipsies in Castaliahouse had their camp pitched near Mad Genius to try and steal their votes I only posted bad reviews a few times Ill show him the rocketship we gave him to make his head bigger not too much filking and then mi fa pieta Correia then Ill let them have a good earful and if they want to kiss my bottom Ill get on all fours they can stick their hugos 7 miles up their Ill tell them I want AS or 3BP I want to honor great works then if they give me that well I could have written out a ballot and write their names on it a few times Ill read their lousy shorts smellrump or the first bad thing comes into my feed then I asked them with my eyes to ask again yes and then they asked me would I yes to say yes my nomination and first I put my arms around them yes and friended them so they could tag my roundups all trackbacked yes and their slate was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

    Spokane-Kansas City-Helsinki 2015-2017

  36. There aren’t as many widely available and terrible sf/f films and tv shows to choose from. Short of nominating the Transformers film they’d have to pay attention to indie stuff to screw up too badly, and they don’t strike me as people who have an eye on the film festival circuit. 🙂

  37. @meredith: Oh, there are no end of terrible horror movies they could have chosen from, most of which would be perfectly eligible for nomination aside from their awfulness. 🙂

  39. A Sad Puppy film selection which was a. terrible and b. did not make the final ballot was THE MAZE RUNNER, which was clearly chosen because the film was based on a novel written by Brad’s co-religionist.

  40. @Ray Radlein
    True, I’d forgotten horror! Luckily for us, so did the Puppies.

    @Nick Mamatas
    I haven’t seen the film nor read the book, but I thought there was quite a bit of positive buzz in the YA community about the book.

    @Brian Z
    My eyes are bleeding. 🙁 (But well done!)

  41. Just now mentioned via a posting to the Mailing List That Must Not Be Named, but hosted on a public blog: Blogger ‘Doctor Science’ has presented evidence strongly suggesting that some example works included in the Hugo Packet, representing the work of nominees for Best Professional Artist, and Best Fan Artist, are ineligible on account of either first publication having been before the eligible year, or in some cases inclusion in the wrong category (e.g., work apparently never offered for sale being included in the Hugo Packet to represent a non-professional Best Fan Artist nominee).

    Images in question are by:

    Best Professional Artist:
    Nick Greenwood (SP3, RP endorsements)
    Kirk DouPonce (RP endorsement)

    Best Fan Artist:
    Steve Stiles

    I assume these are all innocent errors, but voters should be aware of the issue. ‘Doctor Science’ also includes the excellent suggestion that voters get to know a useful Tumblr site called ‘Hugo Eligible Art’, which ought to be useful for future years’ nominations as well as getting to know the current year’s field.

    Internet go ‘splodey again, now? ;->

  42. Meredith:

    omg, I figured out why Kate P. was confused by AJ:

    For instance, with Ancillary Justice, the prose was far too clunky and the signalling was all wrong. The initial worldbuilding signals were all fantasy-adventure, so the sudden inclusion of classic space opera elements threw me – and this in the first few pages.

    By “the signalling” she means that the opening scene, because it has *snow* and a *tavern*, signaled to her that this was “fantasy-adventure”. Which never takes place with spaceships.

    Holy cow. I would *love* to get her to say what makes the prose “clunky”. It probably means “too sophisticated”, but I’m not sure …

  43. Doctor Science:

    Shush you. At least they’ve moved on from judging books by their cover.

    To their opening scenes.

    PROGRESS!

  44. @Rick Moen, yes, I read that in the round-up. I’m disappointed about Nick Greenwood’s dubious submissions in particular, as my ballot was looking something like:

    Julie Dillon (because I love her stuff and she should win All The Hugos)
    No Award (because slates)
    Nick Greenwood (because his not-2014 stuff was good)
    Alan Pollack (because it was perfectly competent and if a Puppy must win…)

    I think I might have to revise it if the work I liked wasn’t what he was presumably nominated for.

    Although based on his twitter account I think I can hazard a guess what he was really nominated for and I think it had a lot more to do with ideology than art.

  45. @Meredith: Ah, sorry, should have checked the roundup before posting. Mike Glyer has been way ahead of most folks, and really I should have expected that he’d already covered it.

  46. @Doctor Science

    I know!! Its like she’d never heard of things being set planetside before!! I had to just sit and. Stare. At her words for a minute, they were just so odd.

    @snowcrash

    Its just a shame they haven’t managed to judge by the cover and the opening scene at the same time. I think we have a long way to go before they manage a whole book. 🙂

  47. “By “the signalling” she means that the opening scene, because it has *snow* and a *tavern*, signaled to her that this was “fantasy-adventure”. Which never takes place with spaceships.”

    Has she never seen Star Wars?

  48. Re photo of Liu/Scalzi not showing properly.

    Yeah, I keep seeing some kind of timecode on it slowly counting down…
    🙂

  49. As an aside, and since it’s obviously not in the Hugo packet, Amazon has Marko Kloos’ Terms of Enlistment and Lines of Departure on sale for Kindle today for $1.99 each.

  50. STAR WARS, at least, strays with a spaceship being chased by a much bigger spaceship.

    CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, now, that much have been confusing…

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