aka The Summer of our Manufactured Discontent
In today’s roundup: Sarah A. Hoyt, Vox Day, David Gerrold, Steven Brust, John Scalzi, Peter Grant, Laura J. Mixon, Laura Resnick, Spacefaring Kitten, Chris Gerrib, David Gerrold, Adam-Troy Castro, Lis Carey, Larry Correia, Brad Johnson and mysterious others. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Nigel and DMS.)
Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt
“Fun House Mirrors” – June 17
But I’ve been on a slow simmer since the Irene Gallo comments, and that was brought to a boil yesterday.
Why yesterday, you ask?
Because the hypocritical scum (I apologize to any scum I might have offended) who runs file 770 has been gleefully linking anything of mine that even uses the letters H-u-g- and o in the same paragraph, but yesterday I wrote about his hypocrisy in taking a sentence of mine out of context and linking it with a clever-daft punchline of the “Hydrophobia that falls on you from nowhere” to imply I was homophobic.
Did he link yesterday’s post? Are you kidding? Even though he’s fairly sure his blinded followers will rarely click through, he couldn’t afford to explode his narrative. He’d on the flimsiest of “evidence” – i.e. my refusal to go into details on same sex marriage and other accommodations for more “exotic” orientations in a post to which it wasn’t even incidental – declared me homophobic, and he couldn’t risk the narrative being exploded.
I confess that when my Baen colleagues were making fun of file 770 and going on about “Mike Glyer, Fifty Hugos” (the number of nominations he’d had) I thought they were being a little mean. After all, the man was just well-intentioned and blinkered, and believed the narrative.
Guys, I was wrong, you were right. He’s not deceived, but he willfully deceives. He is not a useful idiot, but one who would seek to make idiots out of others. He’s not the sheep, but the judasgoat.
Why does that matter to me? Why do I get so upset if it’s not true? Isn’t it an axiom (at least on the left side of politics) that you only get upset if it’s secretly true?
[I reminded Sarah A. Hoyt the roundup titles are a trope, not a comment on the writers quoted. She did not take me up on my offer to run another excerpt, so I can only commend the entire post to you — “Dispatches From Another World” – June 12.]
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“Updates” – June 17
Since many of you have been asking, no, no one has received any response from anyone at Tor Books or Macmillan. We know at least some of the emails have been read by the recipients. Be patient, we have to give Macmillan time to investigate the situation and discover for themselves just how dysfunctional and unprofessional their U.S. subsidiary is. Remember that Julie Crisp, Editorial Director of Tor UK, left the company “following a review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing” in May, and her public behavior was unobjectionable in comparison with that of Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
Also, Jagi has asked that when you send her your pictures of your Tor books, please tell her what state or country you are from. She’s received them from 65 people to date.
David Gerrold in a comment on Facebook – June 17
So, Vox Day has declared a boycott of Tor Books.
I expect this will be as effective as the Baptist boycott of Disney World.
Apparently the sad puppies are planning to boycott Tor, my publisher. I'm scared.
Oh, wait, no I'm not.
— Steven Brust, pjf (@StevenBrust) June 17, 2015
@aiabx @cstross @StevenBrust Write it under a woman's name. They'll never notice you at all.
— Judith Tarr (@dancinghorse) June 17, 2015
Apropos of nothing, my thoughts last October, when a bunch of shitballs threatened to boycott Tor because of me: http://t.co/U5fRWkFnSQ
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) June 17, 2015
Peter Grant on Bayou Renaissance Man
“The blindness of the ideologically bound” – June 17
And so, when Ms. Gallo accused me – me – of being ‘unrepentantly racist’ purely because I happened to support the Sad Puppy cause, that was the last straw. I’d heard that lie from SJW’s before, of course, and been able to get over it . . . but lies like that are like the Chinese water torture. Sooner or later, something’s going to snap. Her accusations were, to me, unforgivable; and since she’s never seen fit to retract them, they still are. Since her employer has seen fit to allow her, and others like her, to pontificate about something of which they apparently know absolutely nothing, to make false accusations and toss denigrations around like confetti, doing so on company time and using company computers and networks . . . that employer is complicit in the whole mess. Hence my outrage against Tor. Hence the boycott for which I will call on Friday if Tor and its holding company, Macmillan, don’t act against those responsible.
I won’t take this any more. I know I’m far from the only Puppy supporter who’s had enough of the SJW’s lies and slanders and libels. They want a war? They can have one.
Laura J. Mixon
“I stand with Irene Gallo, and I stand with Tor” – June 17
Bullies and abusers rely on the larger community’s desire for comity—our willingness to live and let live—to impose their will and silence dissent. In such a case, it’s incumbent on people with standing in the community to speak up against them, providing a counterweight to their destructive ideas. By speaking when she did, in my view, Irene was doing what other thought leaders in our field like N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, and the Nielsen Haydens have done: guarding the health and well-being of our SFF community by standing up against hate speech.
Some feel the stark terms Irene applied to the Sad and Rabid Puppies movements in her FaceBook post—racist, misogynist, homophobic, neo-nazi—were too harsh and too broadly applied. That she spoke out of turn and had no business criticizing the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaign while promoting a Tor book. They protest that their views are not extreme, and using such terms unfairly maligns them, by lumping them in with someone they don’t support. Some members of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns have indeed distanced themselves from Beale, and perhaps they were initially unaware of just how extreme his views were.
I believe that communities can grow and change. People can learn; viewpoints can shift. I have a seed of hope that someday, through continued dialog and education, we can find a way through this and mend some of the rifts that this conflict has exposed.
But there is no getting around the fact that a misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist, who has spoken approvingly of shootings and acid attacks on women, and of Hitler and the Holocaust, who has called a respected SFF scholar and popular writer an ignorant, “not equally human” savage, stands at the heart of this conflict. Beale’s followers and fellow travelers may not themselves hold all the bigoted views he does, but information on who he is and how he feels about women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others has been widely shared by now. If people are emailing you calling for Irene to be fired, they are unavoidably supporting Beale’s hate-filled agenda.
Laura Resnick on Facebook – June 17
I’m guessing that, for a raft of reasons, Tor and Macmillan will not meet any of these demands, and so it seems likely the Puppies will boycott the biggest publisher in our genre starting on Friday. I’m skeptical that a few hundred people will have an effect on a program the size of Tor, and also skeptical that their numbers will grow. So I’m more concerned about what persons, organizations, or businesses will be the Puppies’ next target. I didn’t think they would stop with the Hugos, and I’m skeptical they’ll stop with Tor, either.
https://twitter.com/tuesdayreviews/status/611230746921963520
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring Extradimensional Happy Kittens
“Answering Peter Grant” – June 17
Sad Puppy activist Peter Grant was one of the most vocal people pushing for this week’s hatemail campaign directed at Tor….
He says:
I’ll do my best not to stoop to name-calling, with the exception of referring to the other side as ‘social justice warriors’ or SJW’s. I do so only because I have no other name in my vocabulary to adequately or accurately describe them. If anyone can suggest a better, more acceptable alternative, I’ll be grateful.
I replied in the comments that the best alternative would be Happy Kittens. Sadly, it seems like my comment was deleted.
I’d like to rephrase my suggestion here: please drop the SJW and start using Happy Kittens if you insists on having a handle for the people who are critical of Sad Puppies. It’s not offensive. It’s kind of funny in the same way as Sad Puppies. It looks ridiculous in an angry sentence. Plenty of good reasons.
Chris Gerrib on Private Mars Rocket
“Puppy Bites Woman AGAIN, Pictures at 11 !!!!” – June 17
I find a notable fact buried in the piles of puppy-doo.
I’m going to dig said fact out and clean it up for you. I’m doing this because facts have been one thing in short supply in this debate. For the most part, what we get are vague statements that some unnamed person committed some undefined offense sometime during a large event. But now we have a fact.
Per Vox, 765 individual people emailed Tor complaining about Gallo. That sounds like a lot, except, 79,279 people bought a copy of Redshirts in 2013. So, if you take 765 and divide it by 79,279, you get .00964. In other words, less than 1% of the people who bought one book from Tor are complaining. You’d have to magnify that complaint number by an order of magnitude to get anybody’s attention.
David Gerrold in a message on Facebook – June 17
A friend has pointed out to me that any attempt to calm people down is doomed unless everyone involved wants to calm down. He then went on to point out that too often there are individuals who will have a vested interest in escalating the uproar. It increases their visibility — and their illusion (delusion?) of power.
It is — according to my very wise friend — a kind of ferocious madness that has to reach a peak before it can burn itself out. It cannot be calmed and those… efforts are doomed. It has to be inflamed by those who are enraptured by the heat they can generate and like any addiction, the dosage has to be increased, they can only crave more and more — until the whole thing becomes a bonfire and they are finally, ultimately immolated in the flames.
He might be right.
I’ve seen flame wars online that have destroyed whole forums — and I’ve seen the perpetrators of these flame wars move from forum to forum, leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind them. I cannot think of a single instance where a call for peace was effective. Even Gandhi died by a bullet.
Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – June 17
I have heard more than one person say that they’re dreading Worldcon.
I won’t say that this is what the Sad and Rabid Puppies want as a group, even if I do think it’s what of a couple of the individual standard-bearers want. I will say that it is certainly what a great number of the trolls slamming so-called SJW writers on their behalf want. (And I do think it would tickle Beale the Galactic Zero no end. This is the guy who cheers spree killers, after all.)
Alas, I am not going to Worldcon this year. It would take an unexpected windfall of colossal proportions. Maybe next year, or the year after.
But if I was, “dread it”? To hell with that. I go to have fun, to catch up with old friends, to make new ones, to find treasures in the Dealer’s Room, to talk about my pop-culture obsessions and to hear others talk about my pop-culture obsessions. I’d be going, this year, to see my friend David Gerrold in his Guest of Honor gig and to see him and my friend Tananarive Due nail their Hugo-hosting gig. You think, if attendance was in my cards for me, I would waste more than one millisecond of brain energy on the premise that some no-neck gibberer with a fixation on his own imaginary oppression might say something nasty to me?
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring Extradimensional Happy Kittens
“Cedar ‘Go Buy A Shooter Bimbo Shirt’ Sanderson” – June 17
Cedar Sanderson is the third member of the Mad Genius Club in this category, and she has produced what is probably the single best blog post in the voters packet I’ve read so far that has actually something do with SFF. In it, she ponders the shortcomings of generic fantasy on the lines of Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland which is a book I should probably read sometime. The text would be stronger if Sanderson had gone into specifics and given some more concrete examples of bad fantasy, but it’s not bad as is.
H.P. on Every Day Should Be Tuesday
“Review of Rat Queens vol. 1: Sass & Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe” – June 17
Each of the four members has her moments, the story is intriguing enough, and the comic is genuinely funny. They’re foul-mouthed, horny, and have a distinct tendency to cause disproportionate property damage. And can drink their rival adventurers under the table as easily as they kill their enemies. They’re joined by a host of cool minor characters, from a long-suffering captain of the town watch who’s sleeping with one of the Rat Queens to the friendly rival adventurer group named the Four Daves (exactly what it says on the tin) to a villainous local merchant to one very annoying town watchman. All in all, it probably has the best combo of awesome female characters around.
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
“Best Editor, Long Form — 2015 Hugo Award Nominees” – June 17
[She reviews all five nominees. I excerpted the one that struck me as the most favorable.]
Sheila Gilbert: Ms. Gilbert is, with Betsy Wollheim, Publisher at DAW. Ms. Gilbert did provide both a list of edited works, and sample chapters. Her writers include Seanan McGuire, Julie Czerneda, and Jacey Bedford, and the sample chapters include both science fiction and fantasy. Within the limits of my ability to assess her work as an editor, I’m very impressed. There are also some new works added to my To Be Read list.
Font Folly
“Hugo Ballot Reviews: Graphic Story” – June 17
[Preceded by reviews of all nominees.]
Rat Queens is hands-down the winner of slot number one on my Hugo ballot in this category. And with Zombie Nation at number five, the only thing left up in the air is where how I’m going to rank Saga, Sex Criminals, and Ms. Marvel, because I want all of them and Rat Queens to take home an award, dang it!
Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation
“Somebody sent me a Sad Puppies holster” – June 17
I’ve not been saying much about the Sad Puppies controversy lately, because right now it is out of my hands. Some employees of a publishing house said some pretty outlandish things, and their customers are ticked and writing lots of letters. I’m staying out of that one.
But some author friends had this made for me and sent as a gift. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be identified.
Sad Puppy 1911 Holster Right Hand
Tor & File770 insiders say #SadPuppies are setting bad examples by getting high on unicorn farts. Heeellooo, colors of the rainbow!
— finger chomper (@sadrbtpuppies) June 17, 2015
https://twitter.com/Cherokee_Viking/status/611347536373157888
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For people looking for alien viewpoints: An all-time classic: “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” by James Tiptree, Jr.
This is my favorite post title riff yet. 🙂 (My first fandom was probably Pink Floyd.)
For well-done animal points of view, The Grass King’s Concubine, by Kari Sperring, has some scenes from the perspective of shapeshifting ferrets, and like everything else in the book, it’s absolutely wonderful.
Also, for anyone who likes paranormal romance, Robin D Owens’ Celta series has really good telepathic cats.
Gabriel F –
Yep, it’s a different kind of fandom right there with it’s own insular language, knowledge and understanding. A holster isn’t in any way a threat, he’s just showing it off. It is a pretty cool holster.
@RedWombat How do you see this going AFTER the Hugos? …. Hoyt does something that tries to be a wrapup but gets sidetracked into screaming at Alinsky…
You forgot Marxists.
February I see foundering on the fact that Paulk is not as well known as Torgersen
I’m still baffled by that. Six months ago I knew Torgersen as primarily the slightly less insane right-wing commentator on Scalzi’s blog, and know there’s someone *less* known?
I don’t think that will matter though, in terms of effort. Paulk seems to be even more convinced of her inherent rightness then Torgersen, and will no doubt be utterly happy to provide cover for Rabid Puppies 2, which is where the real arsehole-ry will happen.
One thing that I’m *reallllly* interested in is in the analysis that will happen once the full nomination numbers are released. Would love to see what Camestros, Nathaniel Givens and Chaos Horizons, as well as some of the commenters over at Making Light make of it, in terms of Puppy numbers and straight-ticket adherence strength.
Out of sheer hillarity, would also love to see what Dave Freer makes of it, and just how many undeclared (and unsupported!) assumptions he throws in while doing it.
@Gabriel F
Though if we were really a hive of scum and villainy, we could attempt to strawman it up and say Larry was dangerous / all puppies are gun nuts / etc …
Not generating outrage for the puppy mill usually gets ignored; but if file770 was a braying echo chamber I would have left a long time ago.
Thank you for stating it as a reasonable question to be answered. And I think the other insights are spot on regarding some mixed feelings about how the whole campaign is being run.
Thinking some more about behavior and habits of thought…
Tor.com recently ran a piece called Welcome to Being Done With A Game of Thrones. Chris Lough, who mostly blogs about visual-media stuff, wrote a moving piece about the sense of discouragement and dissatisfaction a lot of readers and viewers feel about the series at this point. There’s vigorous but essentially polite disagreement in the comments – some folks feel very much the same, others not at all, various shades of opinion in between.
I genuinely can’t imagine any official Castalia House blog hosting a post like that, nor any of the Puppies leaders inviting a guest post of that sort. But it’s clearly okay with Tor for someone they pay to disagree so strongly with what’s up with one of their very most successful authors. It’s not a threat to their integrity as the people involved conceive of it.
It seems to me that this is one of the fault lines between the Puppies leaders and those they’re attacking: their targets regard honest engagement as more important than a party line, even when large amounts of money and rep are at stake.
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pup
…I can’t do anything useful with Ummagumma.
Oh, and I’ve caught up! Yay!
So what do you guys think – which is better for Buy Tor Day – what’s available from Hachette/ Macmillan/ Titan, or stuff with actual Tor imprint?
Can you clarify how a subtitle like today’s reference to “Manufactured Discontent” is NOT a comment on (certain of) the writers quoted?
I will make a valiant attempt to drag the punning back to SFF and away from rock!
The BichonSpaniel Man
The Persistence of Viszlas
A Boy and His Puppy (surely this has been suggested….)
Beggars in Spinone
Barking Chrome
Puppy Is Three (SP3, get it??)
The Last of the Whinybeagles
The Game of Rott and Bichon
Mimsy Were the Bordercollies
Microcosmic Dog
And harkening back to one that people were playing with earlier:
Day of the Canids
I truly do not understand why the Puppies feel that it is inaccurate to describe them as racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, given that they go on and on and on about how they hate social justice and all who support it. What do they think “social justice” means, anyway? As far as I can see, it is just the current expression for the concept that everyone should be treated fairly regardless of what demographic group they fall into. It’s very similar to what used to be called “civil rights.”
Historically (and presently), the people in the U.S. that have had the greatest experience of social injustice have been ethnic minorities (especially African Americans), women, and sexual minorities (especially homosexuals). If a group of Americans say loudly that they oppose social justice, then other people will naturally assume it is because they dislike one or more of those categories.
In theory I suppose that a Puppy might oppose social justice for some completely different reason. But in practice, race, gender, and sexuality are the Big Three target areas for bigotry. People who support social injustice have no right to object to being called bigots.
And no, the Puppies themselves are not being unfairly discriminated against just because other people have different tastes in reading matter. Instead of putting so much effort into trying to annoy other fans by blocking everything but Puppy favorites from consideration for existing awards, why not set up dedicated Puppy awards, as many people have suggested? That would be an ethical, constructive way to reward the authors that the Puppies like—and to have a positive influence on the voting for other awards, by bringing outstanding works of the preferred kind to the attention of fandom in general.
@Gabriel F.: “Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” Like… is the link there supposed to be vaguely-but-too-vague-to-take-offense threatening or just… what?”
Because the holster has a sad puppy on it. If I remember correctly, that’s the one Mike Z. Williamson mentioned a while back.
@Iain Coleman: “I’m struggling to reverse-engineer why anybody thought the No Award Showdown was (a) a good idea at all”
Because if more people wanted No Award than the top-voted work, No Award should win. No Award can be knocked out early if everyone sees something on the ballot they like, but the Showdown preserves the “I would rather no award be given than X get it” imperative that the IRV process could otherwise override.
MCR: Three Body Problem
Rot13, AKA Necromicon: http://www.rot13.com/index.php
V qvqa’g trg nf sne nf lbh, ohg V yvxrq gur fnzr guvatf, rfcrpvnyyl Lr Jrawvr, naq gur bcravat jvgu gur Phygheny Eribyhgvba. V erzrzore gur qvssvphygvrf V unq jura V gbbx na haqretenq pbhefr va Wncnarfr yvgrengher va genafyngvba, naq gura fbzr lrnef yngre, jvgu gur svefg pbhefr V gbbx va Nzrevpna Vaqvna yvgrengher (juvpu jnfa’g va genafyngvba, ol nhgubef yvxr Zbznqnl naq Reqevpu jub jrer envfrq va gur Ratyvfu juvpu jnf cneg bs gur nggrzcgrq sbeprq nffvzvyngvba bs gurve phygherf). V nz dhvgr fher n ybg bs zl ceboyrzf jrer va zr nf n ernqre – qrsvavgryl V jnf zvffvat guvatf. V yvxr lbhe cbvag gung vg’f yvxr gjb qvssrerag abiryf. Gur fprarf V yvxrq gur zbfg nsgre gur bcravat jrer jura Lr Jrawvr jnf va gur sberfg pnzcf, ure ernqvat bs Enpury Pnefba’f obbx—V guvax V sryy bhg bs gur obbx snveyl fbba nsgre ure frpgvba. V’ir ernq fbzr vagrerfgvat erivrjf bs vg (Fgenatr Ubevmbaf’ erivrj vf nf nyjnlf rkpryyrag)* naq znlor V’yy or noyr gb trg onpx vagb vg fbzrqnl!
* http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2015/05/the_threebody_p.shtml
Spoilers in the very detailed review!
@Tom Galloway, not apocryphal. I heard the story first-hand from the person who stopped Bradbury.
@ Snowcrash
They could get Peter Grant…
*hides*
May:
>> I will make a valiant attempt to drag the punning back to SFF and away from rock! >>
Of course, PUPPY AT THE GATES OF DAWN, which someone suggested as a Pink Floyd reference, does double duty, since it’s also a WIND IN THE WILLOWS reference, and thus SFF.
Also another entry in the fiction-about-animals list.
Since Roosh V. came up in another thread…
People say that an alpha cannot be
an alpha if he says he is
And they get all upset because
we’re not cleaning up
after we do our biz
So take a good look at my face
Try not to notice the other place
What do you mean that I’m crowding your space
and why don’t you smile
While we’re talking I
will needle you about your thighs
hoping it will make you melt
As for the granted lack
of hygiene round my crack
well it all goes back to the veldt
So take a good look at my face
Try not to notice the other place
What do you mean that I’m crowding your space
and why don’t you smile
Don’t need you
(I need you)
Don’t need you
(I need you)
Online
I’m dominating
At home
I’m masturbating
I put you down
Although my briefs are brown
Dudes want to be me
Do I come off seamy to you
So baby take a good look at my face
Try not to notice the other place
What do you mean that I’m crowding your space
and why don’t you smile
RedWombat:
For my nickel–huge flare up the week after Hugo night, as Puppies howl (with triumph or rage, I do not presume to guess); VD releases the screenshot he’s been sitting on for eighteen months where somebody says something casually that can, with the proper squint through a glass smoked in manticore tears, be construed to be uncomplimentary/about Hugo rigging/whatever; Paulk vows that they will fight again/triumph again/hold the last hill against the SJWs; people who discover they were knocked off the ballot will write More In Sorrow Than In Anger posts/I Don’t Want To Deal With This posts/All Puppies Are Dead To Me Forever Although Not Literally Because That Wasn’t A Death Threat WTF Is Wrong With You People posts; GRRM does a wrapup; Eric Flint does a wrapup; Torgersen does a wrapup; Hoyt does something that tries to be a wrapup but gets sidetracked into screaming at Alinsky; Making Light does a wrapup; File770 does the meta-wrapup; two or three people come out on File770 or Making Light or Torgersen’s blog claiming that they were actually secret agents for the other side all along and it was TOTALLY A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT YOU GUYS AND YOU FELL FOR IT; JCW says something that would be insulting if it had fewer adjectives to cushion the blow; and it all generally trickles away into nothingness until roughly next February.
February I see foundering on the fact that Paulk is not as well known as Torgersen, although that may vary depending on whether they eat No Award at the Hugos.
First the Gaiman/Nachos story (Luthien the cat glared at me for waking her up by loud guffaws), and now this.
I want to nominate you for ALL the prizes.
Or internet.
Or something!
I think we have a winner.
Labrador of Light?
Estee:
What do they think “social justice” means, anyway?
I think I know this one!
They think that people who talk about “social justice” don’t actually care about *justice*. They think “social justice” is a front, a way to justify calling people (them) names, hating, abusing, and bullying, while being self-righteous about it all.
Anyway, my greatest impression of authors from conventions and festivals is that they look rather ordinary, and that I wouldn’t give most of them a second glance out of context.
Just think – the guy in the queue at the checkout smiling pleasantly at you might be… Shaun Hutson.
Have fun sleeping with that thought.
Still pondering TGE and things that resemble it—my overloaded personal information-retrieval system finally coughed up what had been in the back of the brain for a while: E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, originally published in 1926. I wonder whether Addison/Monette is a fan of Eddison? The point of similarity is that the contending nations in Worm are Witches and Demons, as opposed to Elves and Goblins. Goblins, Imps, Pixies, and Ghouls are among the other groups mentioned by Eddison, although they all look like European humans. In the three later books in the series he used made-up names instead.
Eddison’s prose is extremely dense and definitely not for everyone. When I first encountered the books, I was put off by it and wondered why so many of my friends raved about these odd stories. Then, years later, I looked at them again and something clicked. Suddenly I found that I agreed with my friends after all. The experience really sticks in my mind as an example of how one’s taste can change with age, sometimes in ways that bring new pleasures.
The other classic 1920s fantasy author that I really liked from the get-go was James Branch Cabell. I still have his books, but I’m a little afraid to look at them again, just in case the Suck Fairy has been at them.
@RedWombat
That is utter perfection.
@Jim Henley
You just managed to make me laugh and full-body shudder at the same time. It hurt a bit.
@Kurt Busiek-re Wind In the Willows/Piper At the Gates of Dawn
There’s also a song by Van Morrison “Wind In the Willows” and the Richard Cowper novella, Piper At the Gates of Dawn.
May I toss a title idea or two out?
Wind In the Hugos
Puppy At the Gates of ‘Quan
I tossed that second one out on another thread, I think, but I may not have, so I’ll put it here.
@Doctor Science
And also that the trend toward leftism will cause the same sort of societal collapse that Cicero predicted 30 years prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic.
Which is ridiculous.
I mean, we all know that society is going to collapse when the mayor turns into a giant snake demon and we don’t have any hummus to attack him with.
@redwombat–that is a fine story. Thank you!
And, ironically enough, their favourite term of abuse, “SJW”, was first used by people in progressive fandom to describe the minority of people in their midst who behaved in precisely this way. The Mixon Report is progressive fandom cleaning house by detailing the awful abuses by one of the leading examples of this behaviour, Winterfox AKA Requires Hate.
The Puppies have chosen to believe, or to act as if they believe, that everyone on the progressive side of things is like Winterfox (even though progressive fans were her main victims). What they would do, if they had the slightest integrity and capacity for self-reflection, is do a Mixon Report on Vox Day. I won’t be holding my breath.
A Shar-Pei in Time
A Swiftly Tilting Mastiff
… I can’t think of anything riffing on A Wind in the Door that doesn’t involve dog-farts.
“A Game of Roans”
“A Feast for Curs”
“A Dance with Dachshunds”
(Sorry if these have been suggested already!)
Anyone remember a relatively old pulpy series of books featuring a protagonist named Blade who jumped from world to world?
I’ve still got insomnia, and pictures of larrys codpiece really don’t do it for me. I’m a costumer, and once you’ve reverse engineered the images we have of very late Henry VIII it becomes very uninteresting…
@Lioness: Oh “A Dance with Dachsunds” instant-wins.
@XS: Thank you! Your pain does me honor. 😉
@Iain Coleman
The problem with that is Vox Day’s abuses are already on public record and people have already made up their minds whether they can stomach them or not. Requires Hate was exposed because she’d adopted a much softer persona and in that persona, she was starting to get published. I think Laura Mixon decided that people needed to know the kind of person they were reading when she did the work she did. People already know what kind of person Vox Day is.
Sorry, idontknow,
It sounds as if I should remember it, but I don’t…
Yeah, I’m not recommending it, mind you, because if I remember, it had a couple of rather explicit sex scenes in every book and its treatment of women was pretty poor, but it just bugs me that my memory is going and I can’t remember what the series was called.
CPaca on June 18, 2015 at 2:51 pm said:
Yes, it’s a possibility; however, one or two people aren’t enough, particularly if they become so obvious that the meeting moves around them. Also, I’ll call people to order for non-germane debate and rule out of order non-germane amendments. My patience is not infinite, but my authority is limited; if a majority thinks I’m wrong, they can overrule me.
May Tree on June 18, 2015 at 5:36 pm said:
Yes. The system goes by different names, including the very misleading “Australian Ballot” because Australia uses is for elections in their Parliament. Also, Hugo rules have an extra twist called the No Award Showdown, but in general IRV and STV are the same thing.
Iain Coleman on June 18, 2015 at 7:14 pm said:
What’s in there now is the result of a compromise that came out of a proposal initially introduced at the 1991 WSFS Business Meeting (Search for Item C.4) that initially proposed to make No Award a candidate that can’t be eliminated; that is, if it has fewer votes than any other candidate, instead of being eliminated, No Award stays in the race and the next-highest candidate is eliminated. After immense haggling, the wording currently in the Constitution was adopted instead. No candidate has ever been eliminated on a No Award showdown, nor has No Award won at all since 1977.
Doctor Science said:
They think that people who talk about “social justice” don’t actually care about *justice*. They think “social justice” is a front, a way to justify calling people (them) names, hating, abusing, and bullying, while being self-righteous about it all.
Hmm. Could be. It would be awfully stupid, but then, these are people who don’t know the meanings of words like “reactionary” and “hydrophobia.”
More thoughts on the Puppies—
I think that at the beginning, at least some of them really did think that they were doing fandom a favor, because they truly believed that they were in the majority (whereas in fact they seem to be about 15 to 20 percent of SF fans, at most). Since they believed that people who think as they do were the majority, it seemed reasonable to assume that if (for instance) books by gun-lovers were not winning awards, it must be because of secret liberal conspiracies and not just because the majority of fans find gun porn boring.
I very much blame Toni Weisskopf for not puncturing the conspiracy theory as soon as she knew about it. Instead, she seems to have catered to it in a completely irresponsible way. As a pro, she knows perfectly well how the Hugos really work. If she had explained it clearly to the Pups, instead of pandering to their paranoia, we might all have been spared a lot of unpleasantness. Shame on her.
@Iain Coleman
Vox Day has been documented somewhat for a while by places like FSTDT, but it isn’t a case of a community self-policing itself like how you described the Mixon report. It would be nice to see someone in that corner step up and take on that task, though it would likely mean painting a target on their back. But then that’s exactly what happened with Mixon and others that spoke up against Winterfox.
idontknow, I bought several of those Blade books when they were new, in the early/mid 1970s. Sort of an interdimensional James Bond, who existed mainly to have sex scenes with 1-dimensional women. At that age, I enjoyed them as zero-calorie softcore porn.
You know, if Larry Correia–Larry Correia–thinks Sad Puppies has gone too far, and is trying to back away from it…
*shakes head*
No offense is intended but that doesn’t sound like the Larry I remember from last year. I’m going to wait and see on that one.
…although when I heard it, it ended with, “Bradbury, Schmadbury, you still need a badge to get into the huckster room.” ?
@Jim Henley
It might
reach more victimsbe a greatly appreciated submission to We Hunted The Mammoth, come to think of it. 🙂Hi all! De-lurking to offer up a Bradbury homage roundup title:
Dark They Were, And Cold-Wet-Nosed
I don’t remember, but I assume that the name of the series was “Blade”.
I think the character’s first name may have been “Richard”, but that’s a very faint memory.
Different beasts entirely. Vox Day is a known asshole who admits to being an asshole on a regular basis. His core followers just don’t care. A Mixon style report, in addition to not adding anything new to the conversation, can’t hurt VD’s ability to operate the way it hurt RH.
@Morris Keenan
Yeah, they definitely fit under the category of ‘things I probably should not have been reading at that age’ when I read them.
These are the books you’re asking about.
IDK:
Anyone remember a relatively old pulpy series of books featuring a protagonist named Blade who jumped from world to world?
A dim spectre in my memory says “Piers Anthony, duh”. But might I be confusing it with Sos the Rope etc.