(1) From the SuperversiveSF livestream, Kate Paulk’s statement on SP4 at 1:05:42 (transcription provided by Mark):
For starters the word slate is not going to appear anywhere. For second [Cross talk] I am not doing a slate, I am doing a list of the most popular works in all of the various categories as submitted by people who read on any of the various blogs that will have me. And I’m going to post ultimately the top ten of each, with links to the full list of everything that everybody wanted to see nominated, and I’m going to be saying “hey if you really want to see your favorite authors nominated your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list as opposed to the least popular”. That is going to be what it is. I don’t care who ends up on that list. I don’t care if David Gerrold ends up being the top of the list somewhere. That’s not the point, the point is that I want to see the voting numbers both for nomination and for actual voting go up above 5,000 up above 10,000, because the more people who are involved and who are voting the harder it is for any faction including puppies to manipulate the results.
(2) John C. Wright – “Neither Do They Grok Nicknames”
How is it that these mackerels have gained hegemony over our cultural institutions, down to and including such trivial corners of life as the Hugo Awards?
These are the same people who did not comprehend that obscure nuance of the English language known as a “nickname” was when used in my Hugo-nominated story One Bright Star to Guide Them. Instead it was generally agreed by the consensus that I had forgotten the name of my own character, on the grounds that she was a woman, and therefore hated by the author. I wish I were kidding. These people are deranged. It is not due to a physical damage to the brain, but to spiritual. Pride and ire darken the intellect.
(3) MRMADWRITER – “Merit’ vs ‘Politics’ in Fiction”
How is it that we live in a time where gender is the dominating topic, and the white male is pushed into a grave and buried in it. I thought equality stood for, if anything the treatment of all ethnic groups respectfully. True equality would be difficult to achieve in regards to the world that we live in today, hence the fact that how well you do in life, is purely based on merit and your determination to succeed. There a plenty of stories where people at the bottom of the barrel have risen to the top. It’s a matter of thinking outside the box and sometimes taking risks. But the Sad Puppies campaign is evidence that free expression, and the position of writer is now under intense scrutiny. If you don’t fit the narrative of the other side, your work is not even worth their time.
(4) Mark Ciocco on Kaedrin Weblog – “Hugo Awards: The Results”
So the Puppies did not do so well in the final voting. I was basically expecting this, though perhaps not to this flagrant extent (the 2500 Absolute No Awarders number is pretty eye opening). More evidence for my Action and Reaction theory, and I stand by most of what I said there. One thing I hope I’m wrong about is “No Award” being the worst possible outcome. It’s always been clear to me that the current Puppy approach does not work (assuming you’re actually trying to get your nominees an award and not, say, burn the whole thing down). My recommendation for Kate Paulk: Please, for the love of God, do not put together a slate. Focus your efforts on garnering participation and emphasize individuality. If you’re dead set on listing out nominees, go for a long reading list as opposed to a blatant slate. Brad Torgersen called for nominees early this year, and the grand majority of them didn’t make his slate (and some things appeared on the slate that weren’t discussed? I think? I don’t really feel like digging through that.) Perhaps coordinate that effort and be inclusive when you list out eligible nominees. We’re all fans, let’s write this year off and try not alienating everyone next year (that goes for everyone, not just the Puppies). Forbearance is a good thing.
The notion that voting on the current year gives you the ability to nominate next year is a brilliant one that might actually keep me participating. That being said, if there’s anything like this year’s clusterfuck brewing, I’m out. I can forgive this year because I think even the Puppies were surprised at how successful their slate approach was. I can understand the Noah Ward voters too. But if the same thing happens next year… I don’t know, why bother?
(5) Cathy Young on Real Clear Politics – “Mutiny at the Hugo Awards”
It’s also telling that Mixon bent over backwards to stress that she supports the righteous anger of the “oppressed” and that most of Requires Hate’s victims were themselves female, gay, transgendered, and/or nonwhite. When a commenter argued that treating members of “dominant” groups as acceptable targets was precisely the mindset that enabled Requires Hate, Mixon insisted that “a case can be made for marginalized people’s right to punch up.”
Despite all these disclaimers, Mixon’s exposé was too politically incorrect for some. Writer and blogger Deidre Saoirse Moen, who drafted the “Puppy-Free Hugo Awards Voting Guide,” also opposed the award to Mixon, at least partly because “it just feels like a white woman elder putting the younger woman of color in her ‘place.’” That Mixon ultimately got the award could be seen as repudiating the extremes of left-wing cultural politics. But in a way, it also affirms that criticism of such extremes is allowed only from within the true faith and from within the establishment (Mixon happens to be married to current SWFA president Steven Gould).
In this stifling atmosphere of “progressive” authoritarianism, the Sad Puppies’ mutiny makes sense.
Those who revile the Puppies as bigots if not outright fascists point to the pseudonymous Vox Day, a.k.a. Theodore Beale, the leader of his own “Rabid Puppies” faction whose Hugos slate largely overlapped with Sad Puppies. A writer and indie publisher kicked out of the SWFA a few years ago, Beale is also a prolific blogger who urges a radical Christian takeover of America and espouses views that actually can be called racist and misogynist with no exaggeration. (Among other things, he maintains that blacks are inherently more violent and less civilized than whites, that female suffrage is bad because women will “vote for whomever they would rather f***”, and that curtailing female education is rational because “a society that sends its women to college stops breeding”).
It’s hard to tell to what extent Vox Day’s public persona is performance art played for shock. In any case, this year’s Sad Puppy leaders, Correia and Brad Torgensen, repeatedly stated that they do not share Vox Day’s views and regard him as an unpleasant tactical ally, the Stalin to their Roosevelt and Churchill. (Hoyt, in turn, has written that she find his views “repulsive.”) They didn’t quite disavow him; but Torgensen has told Wired magazine that even if they had, their detractors would have found some other reason to demonize the Puppies.
Given the tenor and frequent sloppiness of anti-Puppy critiques, Torgensen is almost certainly right. Thus, in a Chicago Tribune piece on the Hugos controversy, Roosevelt University professor Gary Wolfe mentions Vox Day and his inflammatory views—then adds that “others” in the Puppies’ ranks “have even argued against women’s right to vote.” But Vox Day is the only one who has done that. Far more typical of the Puppies’ views is Best Fan Writer nominee Sanderson, who considers herself a pro-equality, anti-misandry feminist—and who nonetheless got skewered as an “anti-feminist” for (among other things) defending astrophysicist Matt Taylor’s public appearance in a shirt with scantily clad women on it.
As for Vox Day, the Puppies say that the progressive guardians of the fandom and WorldCon voters played right into his hands by “no-awarding” the categories with only Puppy nominees. Vox had planned to instruct his followers to vote “no award” on everything, in the explicit hope that a large number of “no awards” would help him “burn down” the Hugos.
(6) Louis Antonelli on Facebook
OK, it’s been a week since the Hugo nuking and Sasquan convention ended. I’ve gotten a lot off my chest and aired a lot of grievances. Seven days. I’m actually feeling played out. At this point, I think I’ve made all the points I’ve needed to make, done all the good I could. I’m feeling like it’s time to turn the corner, close the chapter on this fiasco and move forward.
A little Facebook poll – what do y’all think? Give me a “Like” or thumbs up if you’d to see a change in focus. That’s not to say I’ll always be a sweety pie – but let’s face it, both sides have had a lot to say and think this past week. I’d like to know what you think – is it time to move on?
(7) Steven Barnes on Facebook
On SJWs, racism, and the attempted control of language
There is a story that the Buddha was lecturing, and a man mocked him, insulting everything he said. Finally, the Buddha paused. “Excuse me, my friend,” he said. “If I offered you a present, and you declined to accept it, to whom then does the present belong?”
“To you” the man said smugly.
“Precisely. And if you offer me insult, and I decline to accept it, to whom then does the abuse belong?”
And the man was speechless.
####
I don’t respect shifting language for political purposes. It feels like Orwell’s “Newthink” to me. Very close to what NLP refers to as “slight of mouth” patterns. Here’s a pair of examples, one from the Right, one from the Left.
- Social Justice Warrior. Look at those words, and the only thing it could mean denotatively is someone willing to fight, and die, and change the world to achieve an idea of equality and justice. Literally, I can think of nothing I’d be more honored to be considered, and nothing that more accurately describes the human beings I respect most in all the world. The attempt to demonize it is nothing more than a linguistic mind control.
- Racism. The primary definition of this term is, simply, the differential attribution of worth or capacity based upon race or ethnicity. Nice, neutral definition–anyone can have that, (probably most of us have a little of it) it is global and pervasive and would seem to arise from tribalism and the tendency of children to think their mommy is prettier, their daddy stronger. But over the last twenty years, academics have shifted that to be “perception of differential capacity based upon race or ethnicity PLUS the power to enforce your decisions and leverage your attitudes”. That’s another interesting “slight of mouth” pattern, because it leads to the attitude that disadvantaged groups “cannot be racist.” Since all of our cultural vitriol is directed at this term, it is an interesting “escape hatch”: WE can say whatever we want, YOU have to shut the @#$$ up.
I don’t buy either of these. I’ve been attacked by both sides for disagreeing with them, and that’s fine by me. So I state clearly, for the record: I think the term “Social Justice Warrior”, denotatively, is one of the finest things a human being can be. Want to use a different, connotative definition? You are welcome to do so, and in so doing, allow us to examine your values, politics and thought patterns.
I think “racism” is a perception, a judgement about human beings, separate from whether that perception is correct, and separate from the actions you take once you’ve come to that conclusion. I disagree that there are major differences between whites and blacks (for instance) morally or mentally, and believe that in almost all cases those who believe there are are being self-serving. That immeasurable human evil has flowed from those beliefs. The great Octavia Butler believed that the most dangerous quality of human beings is
- our hierarchical thinking.
- Our tendency to place ourselves higher on that hierarchy than others.
Further, almost everyone changes that definition so that THEY “aren’t racist.” THEY don’t burn crosses on lawns, use “The N-word.” They have black friends, or have dated/married a woman of the group in question. CAN’T be racists. Can’t possibly have an attitude about the AVERAGE member of the other group, or any sense that whites would have survived slavery and its aftermath with greater ease.
And on the other side, why, they can believe blacks are mentally, morally or athletically superior genetically…but they aren’t racist because they are members of a group with lesser power.
O.K. That’s all fine. If that’s the way you make sense of the world, and it works for you, I’m happy. Let me know how that works out. I’ll probably never accept either position, and if that bothers you, you may call me whatever you want, or think whatever you wish.
But come Christmas morning, that box will be under YOUR tree, not mine. Have fun.
(8) James Worrad – Sad Puppies, Post-Hugo Blues & Loose Genitalia…
“And what’s even sadder is this pathetic collection of power-hungry little Hitlers have destroyed what was once a genuinely respected award. “
Such is the outlook Kate Paulk, author, blogger and leader-apparent of Sad Puppies 2016 (Buckle yourselves in, folks!). A baroque example, admittedly, but at heart fairly typical of the SP campaign’s disconnect from the reality on the ground. To Paulk, if you didn’t use your vote like the SP’s told you then you were in lockstep with the shadowy cabal of mean, hissy-fitting SJWs/Communists/Decepticons. No excuses.
The idea most Hugo voters were motivated not by politics but by a wish to stick it to a bunch of pompous gits intent on ruining a much-loved event is not even laughable to Paulk. It’s more like she cannot even register the fact. To vote unpuppish was to be a… I dunno… a Stalin clone in a test tube or something. You were willing to burn the ground and salt your loins rather than let anyone else have it.
Any glance at 2015’s winners dispels this garish canard. How, for instance, would a mass ‘SJW hissy fit’ explain that win in the fan writer category, Laura Mixon’s takedown of a troll who hid their psychopathology behind a mass of faux social justice rhetoric? Surely a lockstep leftie march would have crushed that eventuality before it began? Instead the ‘Mixon Report’ won with votes to spare.
And why? Because fandom’s wide and battered middle finally woke up and drew a line in the sand. Against the worst excesses of leftwing hypocrisy on one hand and the most thuggish excesses of right-wing stupidity on the other. Simples.
[Thanks to Mark and John King Tarpinian for some of these links.]
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It’s possible that Roger Stone is an early variation of a solution Heinlein hit on for the great problem of how to keep the protagonist’s parents from stepping in to help the kid. One solution is to have them off-stage or dead but there’s another variation, the obstructionist jerk parent: see, for example, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Or the one in Time for the Stars.
Any recommendation list designed to limit the number of works a nominator is driven to is a slate.
Freer:
I’m not going to read all the comments, but for the nephew, has anyone suggested Bujold’s Falling Free?
Yeah, it’s like a Disney animated flick: The protagonists are going to be orphans sure as snowfall.
OTOH, I remember when I was 15 the LAST thing I wanted was my parents leaning over my shoulder. I don’t think today’s teens are much different. Although ‘helicopter parenting’ may be removing the agency and maturing of a lot of kids these days, based on what friends who are college profs tell me.
I’ve been rereading all your reviews, they are a fun read. Don’t agree with everything, but there’s a world of difference between Panshin’s “Heinlein in Dimension” and Spider Robinson’s “Rah, rah, RAH!” Glad I have them all on my shelves, given some of the problems finding them now.
Just gonna leave this here, in case your “To Be Read” lists were not full enough already:
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s9_dnav_bw_ir33_b?_encoding=UTF8&node=5522564011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-4&pf_rd_r=1W61FP5M5BSGENYZT732&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=2105645062&pf_rd_i=3003015011
Oh man, the early Miles books would be great for a teenager! Man, I wish I’d known about them when I was a kid. I swear every one of them starts off as “wow, this is going to be a boring book” and then something crazy happens and almost gums everything up and then something even crazier strips Miles and his friends and family of all their advantages and they’re fighting for their lives until the end of the book. So much fun. Maybe a little formulaic, but it works. Reminds me of the “Stainless Steel Rat” books (or my memory of them – I’ve been told the suck fairy hit them pretty hard, and I haven’t re-visited).
Concur. Sequel is Homeland, but there are some sex scenes in it and it is indeed fairly dark in places.
I suspect it wouldn’t be a problem for a 12yo, but this moose is nearly five times that age and on the other side of The Pond, so YMMV. (It’s YA, and I’d far rather expose young people to well-written human relationship descriptions than the run-of-the-mill Hollywood gun porn in which violence is the always the answer.)
@McJulie: Thanks for the kind words about the bit from my blog post. Interestingly, Ken Burnside stopped by the comments and said he actually had the point I made (about identification with the Heroic Engineer) in one of the versions of his post, but it disappeared somewhere along the editing and reposting chain. Since he walked right up to the point in the text I quoted, I believe him.
@Zil: “Yeah, it would definitely be convenient to automate it fully for best novel, since the vast majority of them have ISBNs that can be looked up through… uh, the name of the site suddenly slips my mind”
I use this obscure little site called Amazon to look that up. 🙂 Trouble is, ebooks and hardbacks and trades and mass-markets all have different ISBNs… not to mention foreign editions.
@bloodstone75: “Once the SP4 manifesto manifests itself, and the participation guidelines become clear, do we:”
I vote for #4: Do our own thing and don’t give them the oxygen. Nothing we say or do over here is going to affect what they do over there, except possibly to egg them on to further histrionics… which I would hope we can agree is a result we do not want. I think any sort of interaction would give them more legitimacy with one faction or another; “the only winning move is not to play.”
@cmm: “Why not just call every magazine that pays contributors in money (as opposed to copies) a prozine?”
Presumably to avoid the “here’s a buck, that’s money” problem. SFWA and other organizations traditionally define a “professional rate” that acts as a floor; pay below it and you’re not a qualifying market.
@various: “better definition of slate”
If you’re telling people to nominate from a given list – regardless of their opinions and whether they’ve read it or not – it’s a slate. Doesn’t matter if it’s one book or a hundred; what matters is that the slatemaker is saying “substitute my judgment for yours.” It’s a travesty of the process and an insult to the participants.
@Cubist: (The Wizardry Quested)
I should have remembered that; it’s on one of my wish lists. Never got an ebook publication, though, so it keeps slipping off of my radar.
My wife selects the juvenile and YA books for the county library, and I asked her about books for a precocious 12-year-old who liked The Martian. These were her recommendations off the top of her head from among more recent YA titles:
Life as We Knew It – Susan Beth Pfeffer
The 5th Wave – Rick Yancey
Not a Drop to Drink – Mindy McGinniss
Ship Breaker – Paolo Bacigalupi
Blood Red Road – Moira Young
@Greg Hullender:
Naw. I’m simply thinking that something has to be good enough to be good enough. You’ve got a worthwhile insight in that slatemongers occasionally use phrasing that suggests that they don’t care if you read so long as you vote. But since that element really isn’t key to their mode of operation, a critique aimed primarily at that point will fail when they simply fix that tiny glitch and go right on slating, and you find that you’ve been complaining about something that didn’t really matter.
You’re suggesting, I think, that I’m reaching for “perfect” and therefore can’t be satisfied. But is it really impossible to explain why slates are objectionable in a way that describes the SP3 and SP4-as-already-outlined-by-Paulk and doesn’t cover traditional recommendation lists?
Seems like it must be. Just as a jumping-off point, if your list of recommendations is significantly larger than the ballot, and is ordered in some arbitrary way such that there aren’t an obvious favored few, it’s not a slate.
If Paulk were, for instance, to visit a bunch of puppy websites scooping up recommendations, and crunch the numbers, and then post the dozen-or-so most popular items in each category, sorted by alphabetically by title or author’s last name, and there’s no other conspicuous gamesmanship by which an obvious favored five candidates stand out, then I think we’d all have to recognize that that’s not a slate.
Meanwhile, if she collects her data and orders it by popularity, or otherwise gives some indication of which are the Magic Five, then we’ve got a slate.
Nothing perfect about it. It’ll work.
Well, I found the Panshin more useful….
I wonder which critical study of a beloved author most enraged their fans? Leaving aside the Gruniad’s recent hit piece on Pratchett.
@cmm
I haven’t seen these mentioned yet.
If you want something different on the YA dystopian front, try ‘The Vandal’ by Ann Schlee
The ‘Riders at the Gate’ books by C J Cherryh iirc are Pg13 wild west type adventure on an alien planet (sex and a massacre occur but off-stage)
‘Sword of Knowledge’ also by C J Cherryh leans more towards fantasy but plays off the trope of technology being taken for magic. Some violence, minimal sex.
‘Midshipman’s Hope’ by David Feintuch – spaceships, aliens, and non-instant space flight. Also tackles/includes bullying of various types.
Has anyone said Ellen Klages’s The Green Glass Sea yet?
****does a VICTORY lap**** Having read the info on Aan’s script, and comments by other talented types here, and by careful copying, I added clack to the list of those whited out on my browser*****
No doubt some fall awaiteth me out there, but I am feeling cock-a-hoop!
Fantastic comments to and around Tom Galloway regarding his pedestrian complaint about Tempest’s challenge.
@Cat: Thank you for writing that brilliant and evocative response to Tom Galloway’s comment on Tempest’s challenge. It is so great—both in how you talk about your own experiences, as well as acknowleding the limitations of your understanding of the possible experience behind Tempest’s statement.
@ SL Huang: [Bradford] was still reading plenty of authors different from her, because non-cis/het/white/male people are a huuuuuuge variety of demographics. Someone who is trans/gay/black/male is going to have a much different lived experience from someone who is cis/asexual/South Asian/female, for instance — and nobody is going to match both those people along every demographic axis, but both qualify for the reading challenge. She could’ve easily been reading plenty of authors entirely different from her without reading any cis/het/white men.”
*hands you the internet prize for today*
I’ll be interested to see if Galloway even tried to respond to you or acknowledge the true complexity of Bradford’s challenge that he and many other people (mostly white men from what I’m seeing though I’m sure #notallwhitemen) could not even begin to imagine.
@MaxL: for some reason, the writers of lesbian romances don’t seem especially fond of Christian fundamentalists. Can’t imagine why, though.
*falls off chair laughing* **searches for more internets to award**
In the early 1980s, I started what turned into five year’s of reading only women authors; when this came up in discussions, people went all pear-shaped on me about the horrors of it. I pointed out that throughout most of the mumble mumble years I’d been in some school or other (I was sort of a professional student for a while!), the vast and overwhelming majority of literature assigned had been by dead white men (there was ONE women writer’s course at my undergraduate—taught by “the department feminist”—that satisfied the ‘minority cultures’ requirement—that and Japanese literature in translation which I also took—for one reason and another, the lit courses available didn’t cover even the Few Token Women allowed back them: George Eliot and Emily Dickinson). And I got this dumbfounded look and variants of “that’s different!” I got fucking tired of explaining it and started NOT talking to quite a few men (I never declared myself a radical separatist because with the jobs I had, I had to work with men, and I had real doubts about the utility of such a stance during Reagan’s years of Mutual Assured Destruction, but I spent a lot of time hanging out with women). And then one day, years later, I picked up Alice Walker’s The Color Purple at the University of Washington bookstore, started to read, and the whole bottom of my universe dropped away as I realized I’d only been reading WHITE women and hadn’t even thought of it……so that started another period of searching out authors whose works I had not realized existed. Whole new universes unfolding for me.
So I wasn’t surprised to see hedz exploding all over the internets as priviliged people whined about the terrible terrible oppressive forces led by Bradford ripping all their nuggets books away by force.
I do read a few male authors these days, but still privilege white women and women of color in all my areas of reading. I teach a marginalized literatures course on occasion, and am likely to be assigned it next spring, so am happily planning women’s sf as a focus.
Meredith on August 31, 2015 at 11:15 am said:
@UncannyValley
My usual method is to sadly ask questions until Kevin Standlee magically turns up in the thread because A WSFS Rules Question pinged on his radar and then I know the answer. Sometimes other commenters get there first, but if not, a wild Standlee appears eventually.
My understanding was that you summoned assistance by chanting Kevin Standlee three times, and he’d appear.
.
Lou keeps promising he’s going to shut up about the whole thing for a while. PROMISING.
Hasn’t happened yet. So he can’t keep promises either, eh? Unsurprising.
For people who claim their guiding star (snerk) is Mil SF With Manly Engineer, they sure did a great job shutting “The Martian” out of any consideration. If they hadn’t jammed a bunch of no-talents onto the Campbell ballot, Andy Weir likely would have won. And there was a whole buncha allegorical fantasy crap in the Pup nominees.
—————-
Recommendation for the nephew who likes the SF (and, frankly anyone reading these words): DERELICT and its sequel ITHAKA RISING by L.J. Cohen. YA, but no love triangles or apocalypse. A team of protagonists, and a damaged AI/spaceship left over from the war. Like Heinlein juvies minus their more problematic issues. Sold in all the usual places. Buy them now, await the upcoming third novel. No horror or sexin’ at all.
And you cannot go wrong with Diane Duane’s “So You Want to be a Wizard” and subsequent volumes.
@ Iphinome: because queer theory is at its heart post-modernist. If you work under the assumption that all identities/narratives are valid you start hearing a lot of stuff that sounds like not me, not that, there are a lot of ways to be x. *sigh* Causes merry hell when you try to talk about things on a larger scale than the individual.
It is the difference between being upset that people are oppressed for who they are and being upset that people are oppressed for being what they are and even what the tools of oppression are.
Or at least that’s my not-a-professional-academic but a personal fan of critical theory understanding of why queer theory followers keep yelling at me.
Well, I’m sorry that “queer theory followers” keep yelling at you, but there are people yelling at other people in eveyr corner of the internet. I am still not understanding what you mean by some of these claims.
For example: the “all identities/narratives are valid.” The queer theory I work with (it’s a growing/big field with lots of disagreements because, well, human beings) isn’t grounded in “validity.” It’s not a word that is central: and the whole accusation that queer theory is post-modern (I use “accusation” because so often people’s dismissal of a bunch of the theories I work with is that they’re post-modern—but they don’t define post-modern which has a lot of levels of meaning–including in the case of some of the academics I know “I don’t like that so I’m going to ignore it.”).
I don’t do Big P Postmodernism (all the P connotations intended), i.e. deconstruction, de Man, “everything is relative” (which even at that is a bit simplistic). I use post-modern to mean, simply, chronologically, a whole group of related but different critical theories that evolved and began to be practiced post World War I which share a common assumption that there is no possibility of a universal/foundationalist theory that explains everything. That doesn’t mean every explanation is equally valid—in some faux-egalitarian sense–it means that there are competing narratives and theories at play at any given moment, some with more cultural capital than others, and those shift over time.
I’m also not sure what kind of larger scale things you’re talking about (and no need to be specific – if you’ve been yelled at, I don’t imagine you want to revisit )—but it’s true that there can be problems with larger group claims about any of the disparate gender, sexual, and romantic minority groups—because of the history of suppression, marginalization, exclusion, and in some cases downright oppression. Since I work with texts and not people (i.e. I’m in humanities, not social sciences), the claims I tend to work with by nature are limited.
A while ago in a discussion of what “homonormativity” means, I posted my favorite list of the varying definitions of “queer” by Alexander Doty (a film critic) (I was trained in New Criticism/literary studies, but morphed away in my doctorate because I was all “omg, critical theory lets me talk about science fiction YAY, go critical theory,” but I also have training/interest in sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and digital humanities).
Doty in his book on queering film (which questions the usefulness of queering as a concept) opens by breaking down the different definitions of “queer” that he sees in circulation: he also makes a very important point in the introduction that I emphasize in my work: “queer” is not inherently “progressive” in any ideological sense. I cite his work quite a bit since I got a snarky reader report on my queer reading of Eowyn in LOTR saying that said reader didn’t understand why I was using “queer” when clearly I meant “lesbian.” (And since I’m neither a lesbian nor meant lesbian reading, I realized I needed to define “queer” in the analysis of texts I do.)
Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. London and New York: Routledge 2000. Pages 6-7
“Queer/queerness has been used:
1. As a synonym for either gay, or lesbian, or bisexual.
2. In various ways as an umbrella term
a. to pull together lesbian, and/or gay, and/or bisexual with little or not attention to differences (similar to certain uses of “gay” to mean lesbians, gay men, and sometimes, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered people).
b. to describe a range of distinct non-straight positions being juxtaposed with each other.
c. to suggest those overlapping areas between and among lesbian, and/or gay, and/or bisexual, and/or other non-straight positions.
3. To describe the non-straight work ,positions, pleasures, and readings of people who don’t share the same “sexual orientation” as the text they are producing or responding to (for example, a straight scholar might be said to do queer work when she/he writes an essay on Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, or someone gay might take queer pleasure in the lesbian film Desert Hearts.)
4. To describe any nonnormative expression of gender, including those connected with straightness.
5. To describe non-straight things that are not clearly marked as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered, but that seem to suggest or allude to one or more of these categories, often in a vague, confusing, or incoherent manner (for example, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs or Katharine Hepburn’s character in Sylvia Scarlett).
6. To describe those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorization of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (I would contend that Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures is a queer avant-garde film by this definition). ”
So before I can talk with anybody about queerness, I want to know what definition they are using (acknowledging that it is also a controversial term, and I would never apply it to someone who did not claim it themselves).
Lurkertype: *high fives another Diane Duane fan*
I have made a number of my friends very happy by recommending Duane’s Wizard series for gifts to their nieces over the years.
And I am a HUGE HUGE HUGE fan of her adult queer fantasy Middle Kingdoms series. And her Trek tie in novels.
Well, OK, I just fangirl everything she does. (So does Elizabeth Bear! (spoilers for some of the Trek tie ins at the linked post)
Just finished Sense8 and….meh. It doesn’t really pay off. We get a pair of unsatisfying mini-climaxes, but nothing big. Overall, it’s got the texture of a soap opera with the occasional excellent fight scene.
For YA, try D.A. by Connie Willis
Burnside:
I have no reason to doubt this, but from my own experiences in the military, I find this ironic, as I never encountered as mediocre and conformist a group of people as military officers. Being equipped with a ready supply of slave labour, an ample budget, and disciplinary powers unheard of elsewhere to suppress dissent, while being largely shielded from measurable performance goals seems to give them a rather inflated sense of their own competence.
I (respectfully) disagree. Let´s do some math: 5%, with 5 stories per ballot mean 100 stories by length category.
I disagree with your disagreement. We are awash in short stories right now. I am one of the few bloggers I know of who regularly reviews short fiction, and to be honest it is somewhat exhausting. In many ways, it is like trying to drink water from a fire hose.
I just read the July/August issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It had one novella, three novelettes, and six short stories. They put out six issues per year. That’s thirty-six short stories just from one magazine. I thought the best short story of the bunch was The Silicon Curtain: A Seastead Story. I’ll bet if you asked a dozen fans to name their favorite from the issue, you’d get answers all over the place, because the stories in the issue were all pretty damn good.
Analog and Asimov’s each put out ten issues per year, two of which are double issues. Each issue has four or five short stories, the doubles have twice that.That’s forty-eight to sixty short stories each. We’re at close to 150 short stories a year and we have only covered three magazines.
Now consider the existence of Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beyond Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Tor.com and we can add another couple hundred short stories to the list.
And we haven’t even gotten to outlets like Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, or Galaxy’s Edge.
And what about anthologies? I read Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Cookie Cutter Superhero recently, which appeared in the Kaleidoscope anthology. If I had read it before nominating time I would have put it on my ballot and kicked something else off. There are so many stories that appear in anthologies that we can add at least a hundred more to the list.
There are literally hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands of works of short fiction that come out every year. That’s why nominations are so spread out in the short story category.
For the twelve-year old, James Schmitz’ The Witches of Karres.
@TechGrrl1972:
I remember hearing a comment from someone who was working as a college dorm representative talking about running into parents who tried to extract from her promises that the college wouldn’t be attempting to seduce their poor innocent children with their liberal wiles and lies about evolution.
She referred to them as ‘black helicopter parents’.
When I read the title of this thread, all I can think of is this exchange from Thurber’s “The Great Quillow”:
“You, smallest of men, you with the white hair, who are you?” demanded Hunder.
“I am Quillow, the teller of tales,” said the toymaker, but unlike the others he did not bow.
“Bow!” roared Hunder.
“Wow!” shouted Quillow.
Oh! Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn books and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan series! Both have airships and adventure; the Leviathan books are a bit more steampunk in flavor. And maybe Philip Reeve’s Hungry City and/or Larklight books.
mede: I don’t understand pretty much anything in your #6 queer paragraph, but I followed along till then. But you don’t understand the exact little tricks of feeding my elderly kitty, so there we go. We’re all different and that’s okay.
I am such a fan of Diane Duane I actually own paper fanzines with some of her fanfic (not Trek) work! I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of hers I didn’t like.
Microtherion: Reminds me of a fannish time when my group was going to have to interface with… erm… some guys who thought they were much, much more important and competent than they really were. And they needed to be kept out of a few things so that stuff would run smoothly.
My junior-officer friend volunteered, for as he said brightly, “I’ve been professionally trained to deal with assholes!” He always got to show generals and such around his very specialized technical unit and let them think they were in control while people who actually knew what was going on got things done. And didn’t care who got the credit for it. He was, of course, magnificent at it.
Regarding Burnside’s facts:
A. He knows entirely different SF writers with no day job than I do.
B. He’s not mentioning the military wannabes who eat this stuff up; probably a much larger readership than actual military.
C. Conflating Heroic Officer with Competent Protagonist is… problematic.
File770 commentariat’s collective 1941 Retro Hugo wisdom.
Laertes said:
“I don’t understand. The puppies hate message-fic. So how can it be that Larry Correia writes gunhumper message-fic?”
Bingo. I keep asking the same thing.
And BTW – if they have such great editors, why don’t they have one work on Larry’s stuff. I mean really. MHI 2 would have been lots better if it didn’t drag at the end..
Re fiction for younger readers:
The Magic 2.0 series is fun. I like the premise. And they never make the obvious joke.
Aaron said: “Does anyone want to take bets on just how representative the sample of fandom will be reading the blogs she will post on will be? I suspect that the list of blogs she posts her request on will consist of Correia’s blog, Torgersen’s blog, Wright’s blog, Hoyt’s blog, Williamson’s blog, Baen’s Bar, and a couple others places such as maybe Antonelli’s blog. In short, she’ll be collecting data from people who frequent Puppy watering holes. ”
And they are all pretty much the same people. They just go from one to the other and say pretty much the same thing.
Did she not read “The Three-Body Problem”, or more to the point, did she think that we didn’t read “The Three-Body Problem”? Because anyone who read the book would not be saying the things she has been saying. It’s like she’s trying to insult Hugo voters, from a position of ignorance…
I’d go further and just recommend the whole Vorkosigan saga beginning with “Warrior’s Apprentice”.
@Sjw75126:
And that’s totally fine. I think it’s totally un-ironically non-sarcastically awesome if a bunch of gun-humping culture warriors want to put together some kind of right-wing-friendly SFF reading list, which a bunch of conservatives then read, and find stuff they love, and argue with each other about what they like best and why, and then tons of them nominate that stuff, and a bunch of it gets on the ballot and lands in my mailbox next summer as part of the Hugo packet.
That is fannish and wonderful and comes from a place of love of what I love. Bless ’em.
Long as it’s not a goddamn slate, that is. Long as they don’t name some kind of leader, and then that leader massages the list and arranges it such that, wink wink, we all know which five The Team needs to get behind, because we want to stick it to the YouKnowWho’s. They do that, and they get no-awarded so hard they’ll be squirting tears for weeks on their soggy blogs next August.
Apologies if this has been discussed already but…
1. Scalzi made a blog post today telling people arguing on the Internet to quit bragging about their Mensa memberships because it doesn’t help them.
2. VD, of course, responded in full on VD style, complete with accusations of sour grapes, assertions that Scalzi has lost arguments with him, and going so far as to track down an interview in which Scalzi revealed his very average GPA to make the case that John is not very smart, certainly not good enough for Mensa, which he only joined to have the card and never went to a meeting SO THERE! There’s even a bonus smack down of a commenter in which he states that the commenter did not understand his use of the term “ambiguity” because he was using it as ARISTOTLE! did.
3. Reading the VD post right after listening to the complete audio of “John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author” as read by John Scalzi made the entire experience hilarious instead of grating. It literally reads like more of the same from Alexandra Erin’s book. Which points out how good a satirist Alexandra Erin is. I would never otherwise suggest that anyone read VD’s blog for any reason, but if the Pratt book is fresh in your mind, it’s really pretty funny.
PS A nip or two of whiskey may have contributed to the experience as well.
Aaron at 7:01 pm,
Well said!
My short story reading is sparse, so I often don’t nominate the full five and in the past have relied on other nominators. It’s because most of my reading is after the nomination period ends; I wait for people like Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan to compile their year’s best anthologies. This year, I plan to make more of an effort.
@SJW75126: The puppies don’t hate message fic. They’re just fine with message fic, so long as the messages are ones they approve of. They say that they’re against message fic, because they think that “Up with stories, down with messages!” will fly better with the general public than “Up with our messages, down with their messages!” – and to be sure, they’re right.
OGH linked to an article by Steve Rzasa that pretty much came out and admitted that “up with our messages, down with their messages!” is the truth.
Shorter version: as Aaron said, they’re hypocrites and liars.
Hampus Eckerman said:
“Ah, so it is the most popular authors that should get Hugos? Well, then. Here is the list:
http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Science-Fiction/books/16272”
I have told them the same thing. Want to freep an award without having to pay. Freep the Goodreads Choice Award which has lots more votes and many more voters. But don’t expect to have any impact.
I can say the same for forums giving the popular selections. In 2014, the big vote getters for works flavored SF/F was Deborah Harkness (51,462 votes) and Diana Gabaldon (50,933 votes).
So if they want popular, Kate The Mensa and Sarah The Impala might need to introduce a bit of romance into their lives.
@rrede
I was speaking of the big P. There’s a focus on… identities. It’s both hard and more than a little insulting to try to be cricial about something so subjective and patronizing to tell someone you don’t care about how they feel. On a personal note, I do care, it just isn’t germaine to what I’m trying to discuss at the time. Someone takes it personally and then the yelling.
Four tries to type an answer and it’s just too hard to both be vague enough for the subject to be unguessable, and to describe the problem at the same time. I withdraw my previous comments.
I’d argue that queerness attmepts to not only umbrella those established catagories but to break down perfectly useful distinctions between them.
And some of this but again not with just filling the gaps but breaking down the established categories in the same way trans has moved to not only umbrella transsexual, transgender, et all, but to replace them.
I prefer categories to amorphous blobs. Let’s pick something out of the above list, bisexuals. There’s quite a lot go on. You have people who are attracted to both sexes, you have people who’ve been intimate with both sexes. You have people with bisexual identity, you have people with a hetero or homosexual identity but also fit into attraction to both sexes and/or intimacy with both sexes. Then you define your terms. Then you get yelled at because a lesbian who’s had sex with men doesn’t want to people like that refereed to as bisexual or the opposite, someone who identifies as bisexual being angry that someone who’s been intimate with both isn’t being counted because identity is trumping behavior.
Laertes said:
“And that’s totally fine. I think it’s totally un-ironically non-sarcastically awesome if a bunch of gun-humping culture warriors … argue with each other about what they like… then tons of them nominate,,, a bunch of it gets on the ballot …and lands in my mailbox next summer as part of the Hugo packet. …Long as it’s not a goddamn slate, that is. Long as they don’t name some kind of leader, and then that leader massages the list …”
Yes I agree, but that isn’t how it works for them. They want everyone else to read their message. They think the majority are wrong fans having wrong fun to use pup terminology. I have see this before except it was with State School Boards and student text books rather than World Con and Hugo awards.
How do I get an icon picture. Maybe a lovely spaceship. I thought it might be a profile edit but I couldn’t find a place to do that.
New blogpost from GRRM about the Hugos:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/440444.html
Steven Schwartz on August 31, 2015 at 11:26:
Consider the meme in gamer culture that only the weak play in Casual mode. In light of that, the frothing rage at being told that white male is the easiest setting for life makes more sense.
Speaking for Gun Culture 2.0 here, I carry a gun pretty much everywhere. I consider the right to self-defense to be a basic human right. I picked up Monster Hunter Nation because I wanted to read an urban fantasy novel that got the guns right. And I hated it. I got to the point where the good ol’ boys (and token girl) are slapping each other on the back for being part of an organization that started when grandpa so-and-so got a posse together to run the wrong sorts of folks out of town. Our protagonist stands before the oil paintings of his boss’s illustrious ancestors that hang in the old plantation house, and did you know that the real racists aren’t in the South? No, the real racists are all up in Washington.
After that it was a hate read. I’m not proud.
Thank god for Seanan McGuire. Incryptid is everything I wished Monster Hunter Nation had been.
Sjw75126 : you need to associate an image with your email address (your starting point is https://en.gravatar.com/)
It should be a fairly simple process.
David Goldfarb –
Eric Flint’s latest blog post he mentioned the different message style fiction different of the main Puppies wrote, in a way that actually made them sound interesting because they sounded like unique works instead of retread of material.
But one way I’ll defend the idea of hypocrisy on the Puppies end is that while folks might see pro-‘Have a gun on you always’ message in MHI, I don’t see that. But, I’m a fan of firearms. I don’t on one because I’m too clumsy and I know I’m more likely to shoot my foot off than an intruder, but I geek out about the different types, history of, etc. I might be so close that I can’t see the message so I assume it isn’t there. So when some of them say ‘what message is in our favorite works?’ the message of the book is just a truism to the point that it’s invisible.
There are also times I’ll have friends test read something and they’ll notice an implication or hint at a message I didn’t mean to make as well, I don’t get mad at them for seeing something I didn’t mean since it’s up to me to make it clear and ultimately my call to accept the advice or ignore it. Sometimes people read a different story than you even meant to write because the world you think you created and the world the reader is imaging can end up different like a weird game of telephone. I’ve read interpretations of books I enjoy where I understand how they came to a conclusion I just never even for a moment had in my headspace. We’d read the same thing but were so different in our interpretations that it was difficult to understand how we’d read the same book.
of course with Speculative Fiction part of what I like about it is that when it blows my mind and makes me think in ways that I hadn’t considered. I think that’s what makes the genre awesome. I want my ideas challenged and how I look at things turned upside down. Maybe not all the time, I like to see monster blown up real good too. But the idea that SFF shouldn’t make you think is bizarre to me.
Whenever anyone brags about their IQ and/or Mensa membership, I’m reminded of this quote from Stephen Hawking, when asked what his IQ was:
“I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.”
I don’t know if these have been suggested as reading for the youngster, but the Ozark trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin is a solid YA set to read.
I would also recommend the Riddle Of Stars trilogy by Pat McKillip.
Book recommendations for a 12-year-old who liked THE MARTIAN:
The Dragonback novels by Tim Zahn, starting with DRAGON AND THIEF
Damn it, I had a couple more but they went clean outta my brain. I’ll post more if I remember them.
rrede on August 31, 2015 at 6:45 pm said:
You seem like the kind of person I would love to have a conversation with in a non-academic setting about this subject. Though I fear I would end up contributing little and it would look more like a student at a lecture 🙂
Iphinome on August 31, 2015 at 8:40 pm said:
Oooh, yeah. Don’t do that… And I’d guess it’s more that she’s concerned about you referring to her as a bisexual. People get to pick their own labels for that sort of thing. Some will happily choose bisexual, others won’t.
Even the senator caught tapping his foot under a men’s room stall gets to be straight if that’s how he identifies. What makes it hypocritical is that sort of person usually doesn’t believe people get to choose their own labels.