Pixel Scroll 1/29/18 The Man Who Scrolled The Moon

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(1) PAIN FOR PLEASURE. The sheer, greedy click-seeking that fuels this kerfuffle is being paid for by the pain of the targeted family, as Foz Meadows makes clear in “A Personal Note”.

And it is an insult, regardless of Freer’s claims that he’s only saying what anyone might think. It is also uniquely hurtful – and again, I say this with no expectation that Freer himself cares for my feelings. Manifestly, he does not, and will doubtless rejoice to know that he’s upset me. Nonetheless, I am upset. I’ve tried to pretend that I’m not, but I am, and having admitted as much to myself, I feel no shame in admitting it here. Before all this, I’d never heard of Freer at all, and while I’m aware that the public nature of my life online means that I am, in a sense, accessible to strangers, there’s a great deal of difference between having someone object to my writing, and having them construct malicious falsehoods about my personal life.

In the past few days, at least one person has asked me if I’m really sure that Toby isn’t Camestros; that maybe he’s doing it all behind my back. Freer, Torgersen and Antonelli have laughed at the idea that, if Camestros isn’t Toby, then surely I must be grateful for their alerting me to the presence of a stalker-impersonator – as though they aren’t the ones rifling through my marriage in pursuit of a link that is not, was never, there.

(2) HELLBOY’S DRAWER. The Society of Illustrators presents “THE ART OF MIKE MIGNOLA: Hellboy and Other Curious Objects”, a selection of works from the comic artist and writer behind the award-winning Dark Horse Comics series Hellboy, from March 6 – April 21.

In this exhibit, the Society will feature highlights from his fan-favorite Hellboy series, as well as other spin-off titles including work from B.P.R.D., Abe Sapien, and Witchfinder. The Society is also pleased to feature samples from his award-winning comic books including the Eisner Award winner The Amazing Screw-On Head (Dark Horse Comics) as well as Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (Bantam Spectra), co-written by best-selling author Christopher Golden. This special exhibit will include an array of comic pages, covers, and rarely seen original paintings by Mignola.

An opening reception for the exhibit will take place on Tuesday, March 6th, beginning at 6:30PM.

In addition, Mike Mignola will be a Guest of Honor at this year’s MoCCA Arts Festival. This 2-day multimedia event, Manhattan’s largest independent comics, cartoon and animation festival, draws over 8,000 attendees each year. Held on April 7 and 8, the Fest will include speaking engagements, book signings, and parties. Further scheduling for Mignola’s appearances including a panel talk and book signings will be available in future announcements.

(3) CONDENSED CREAM OF 2016. If they’re short stories, does that mean they don’t fluff up your Mt. TBR pile quite as much as book recommendations? Greg Hullender notes Rocket Stack Rank is continuing its 2016 catch-up posts:

Here’s our next-to-last article about 2016 short fiction. This one focuses on which publications were most likely to run stories that earned recommendations/awards/spots in year’s-best anthologies.

“2016 Best SF/F Short Fiction Publications”

The two tables of publication coverage are actually a very compact representation of almost all the raw data for this and the final article, which will focus on the sources of recommendations (i.e. awards, reviewers, and year’s-best anthologies).

(4) EXPANDED UNIVERSE: At Featured Futures, Jason recaps the first month of the new year, discussing some new zines and some (old) news in the January Summation.

Covering January short fiction was exciting (and busy), as Featured Futures added Analog, Ares, Asimov’s, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, F&SF, and Galaxy’s Edge to its roster, resulting in significantly more stories read than usual (86 of 455K words) and a similarly larger than usual recommended/mentioned list. In webzine news, and speaking of Galaxy’s Edge, I was going to add coverage of it as a print zine but, coincidentally, it returned to webzine status, once again making all its fiction available on the web. The categorized “List of Professional SF/F/H Magazines” (which doubles as a list of the markets Featured Futures covers as well as being a sort of index of reviews) has been updated to reflect this.

(5) TOWARDS CANONISATION. The advocates of sainthood for J.R.R. Tolkien are calling for support of preliminary events, as well as the planned Tolkien Canonisaton Conference:

Please pray for the following intentions and dates for the upcoming Tolkien year in the lead up to the Tolkien Canonisation Conference in September 2018 in Oxford:…

  • Saturday 17th March – St Patrick’s Day Ceilidh Fundraiser 2018: raising funds for the Tolkien Canonisation Conference.
  • Friday April 13th – (provisional) Lecture on the Theology of the Body and J. R. R. Tolkien in London.
  • Saturday 1st September – Sunday 2nd September 2018 : Tolkien Canonisation Conference in Oxford.

(6) CHANGE AT TOR BOOKS. Publisher’s Lunch reports —

Liz Gorinsky is leaving her position as a senior editor at Tor Books on February 2. She will continue to handle some of her authors as a consulting editor at Tor and edit short fiction at Tor.com.

Gorinsky tweeted –

Catherynne M. Valente added –

(7) ROBERTS’ RECS. A thread by Adam Roberts is aimed at BSFA Award nominators but is interesting for everyone. Starts here —

(8) STORY SCRAPING AT LOCUS. Locus Online miraculously noticed the 2018 Darrell Award finalists today, one day after File 770 reported the story. Since Mark Kelly stopped doing the news posting there, Locus Online has become especially active scraping stories from File 770 without acknowledging where they got them. A little “hat tip” would be appropriate and appreciated.

(9) SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PLANET. It’s time for any book blogger, podcaster, or “booktuber” to nominate for the 2017 Planetary Awards. Click on the link to learn how to participate. The nomination deadline is February 14th, 11:59PM US Pacific time.

The Puppy-influenced Planetary Awards were given for the first time two years ago.  The inaugural awards for 2015 work were posted in May 2016 –

  • Best Novel: Torchship by Karl Gallagher
  • Best Short Story: “Something in the Water” by C.S. Boyack

The awards for 2016 work were posted in May 2017 –

  • Best Novel: Swan Knight’s Son by John C. Wright
  • Best Short Story: “Athan and the Priestess” by Schuyler Hernstrom

The awards are administered by the Planetary Defense Commander, whose identity is findable with a little effort, but there’s no harm in having a handle, right Lou Antonelli? (Wait, maybe I should ask somebody else…)

(10) MORE ON MORT. The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna has an appreciation of the late Mort Walker, who he interviewed in 2010 and 2013: “‘Beetle Bailey’ creator Mort Walker, 94, created laughter ‘nearly every day of his life’”.  Cavna notes that Walker was around so long that Beetle Bailey was personally greenlit by William Randolph Hearst, and notes Walker’s efforts to create the Reuben Award and bring in more women into the cartooning field.

He was drafted into the Army Air Corps during World War II, but within the world of Walker, even that sometimes turned comically absurd. He spent time at Camp Crowder, which he said inspired “Beetle Bailey’s” Camp Swampy. “I signed up to go into psychiatry,” he told me in 2013 of the Army’s specialized training program, “and I ended up studying engineering. It was typical Army reasoning.”

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 29, 1845 — Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” is published on this day in the New York Evening Mirror.
  • January 29, 1964 — Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb premiered.

(12) VOTING BOOTH ABOUT TO OPEN. The official Hugo Awards website announced “2018/1943 Hugo Award Nominations Opening Soon”. (Date not specified.)

Worldcon 76 San Jose advises us that they will open nominations for the 2018 Hugo Awards and 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards within the next few days. They have been working with Worldcon 75 Helsinki and Worldcon 2018 Dublin to coordinate the combined membership information from all three Worldcons, and to do so within the limitations of the three countries’ data-protection laws. When testing of the online nomination form is complete, Worldcon 76 San Jose will release it on the Worldcon 76 web site and make an announcement. We’ll also announce the start of nominations here on The Hugo Awards web site. Paper ballots will also be distributed with Worldcon 76 Progress Report 2, which we understand is going to press in a few days and should mail to members of Worldcon 76 in February. Besides the online form, a PDF of the paper form will be available from Worldcon 76’s web site when it is ready for release.

(13) FAN HUGOS. Rich Horton, in “First Hugo Recommendations: Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine”, is among the first to blog about prospective 2018 fan Hugo nominees. (Horton also covers the Dramatic Presentation – Long Form category.)

Best Fan Writer

The two fan writers I want to promote the most this year are a couple I mentioned last year as well: John Boston and John O’Neill. John Boston’s most publicly available recent stuff is at Galactic Journey, where he reviews issues of Amazing from 55 years ago, month by month. (It will be noted, perhaps, that I also review issues of Amazing from the same period, at Black Gate.) John’s work there is linked by this tag: http://galacticjourney.org/tag/john-boston/.

As for John O’Neill, of course his central contribution is as editor of Black Gate, for which he writes a great deal of the content, often about “vintage” books he’s found on Ebay or at conventions, and also about upcoming fantasy books….

Best Fanzine

As I did last year, I plan to nominate Black Gate, Galactic Journey, and Rocket Stack Rank for the Best Fanzine Hugo. I’m particularly partial in this context to Black Gate, primarily of course because I have been a contributor since the print days (issue #2 and most of the subsequent issues)….

I heartily agree with Horton’s interest in finding other fan publications than File 770 to put up for the Hugo (though he does have kind words for this site). It seemed a good opportunity to say so here.

(14) REAR VIEW MIRROR. Meanwhile, DB makes a start on the “Retro-Hugos for 1942” with a canvass of his favorite writers.

…Now for Lord Dunsany. In 1942 Dunsany published five stories, all very brief, and about a dozen poems, mostly in Punch. Most of the poems are hopeful gazes towards military victory, and a couple of them introduce the allegorical figure of Liberty, so they could technically be considered fantasy.

None of the stories are SF or fantasy, though the only one of them that’s worth reading could possibly squeeze in by courtesy. It’s a Jorkens story reprinted in The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1947), where it’s the shortest piece in the book. Jorkens is Dunsany’s long-running clubman character who’s prone to making outrageous claims or telling absurd stories which nobody can disprove. In this brief tale, “On the Other Side of the Sun,” that topic comes up – “I wonder what’s there?” – and Jorkens astonishes all by stating, “I have been there.” His regular patsy, Terbut, demands “When, may I ask?” At Jorkens’ reply, “Six months ago,” any red-blooded SF reader should know instantly how the story is going to end, but the penny doesn’t drop for the hapless Terbut until after he makes a large bet that Jorkens is lying…

(15) RETRO FANZINES. While Fanac.org marshals digital copies of 1942 fanzines in support of Worldcon 76’s Retro-Hugos, Robert Lichtman and Bill Burns have tracked down additional fanzines published in 1942 by Bob Tucker available elsewhere online – specifically, at the Internet Archive, which has scans of Tucker’s zine Le Zombie. Four 1942 are issues listed.

(16) SAVED FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR. WIRED Magazine’s “Cantina Talk: Finally, a Complete Guide to All of The Last Jedi’s Easter Eggs” not only covers the story in the title, but this even more compelling news —

The Last Jedi Adds Some More Material (But Not Onscreen)

The Source: An official announcement from Lucasfilm

Probability of Accuracy: It’s totally legit.

The Real Deal: So apparently, there was more to Star Wars: The Last Jedi than appeared onscreen—but fortunately for fans, it’s not going to remain a secret. Writer/director Rian Johnson is working with novelist Jason Fry to create all-new scenes for the book’s forthcoming novelization, as well as rescuing deleted scenes from the cutting room floor, to firmly place them in the canon. Amongst the things audiences didn’t see in theaters but will read about: Han Solo’s funeral. Prepare your tissues for March 6; you’ll get to read all about it then.

(17) FUTURE IMAGINED. BBC interview with 2016 Hugo winner — “Hao Jingfang: China’s award-winning science fiction writer” (video).

She tells the BBC a lot of her stories originate from thought experiments, and her latest novel imagines “a dark possibility for the future” where robots have replaced human’s jobs.

(18) THE MARKETPLACE OF THE INTERNET.  Kim Huett sent a link to “Boring Talks #02 – Book Pricing Algorithms” with a comment: “Those of you into buying books online (assuming some of you indeed are) might like to listen to the following cautionary tale brought to us by BBC radio. It will confirm everything you ever suspected about the practise…”

A book for $1.7 million? To a computer, it made sense. Sort of. Tracy King explains.

(19) WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME? If you play poker you may be interested in a new infographic, “Poker & AI: The Raise of Machines Against Humans”. It details insights and research about the evolution of poker-playing artificial intelligence.

But what about the poker industry? Surely there must be an AI capable of playing poker at high levels. The answer is yes, there is. This infographic will show you how the poker’s AI developed throughout the history, as well as where it is now. You can find a lot of interesting stats and information in this infographic, but if you are interested in reading more about poker related stuff, visit our website.

(20) WHERE THE BOYS ARE. This belongs in Connie Willis’ next satirical speech about things science fiction predicted (none of which ever were) — “U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging”.

Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit and Jawbone, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.

Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as blazes of light because there is so much activity.

In war zones and deserts in countries such as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.

Not just men, of course, but it made a good headline.

(21) OH NOES! Just think what a career he might have had, if he hadn’t been muted by the Guild!

https://twitter.com/AHILBERT3000/status/957832994470989824

(22) DISCOVERY SPOILERS. There, that should be enough warning about — “‘Star Trek: Discovery’: Jason Isaacs Apologizes for Lying, Admits to Feeling Like a ‘Drunken Hippo’ When Fighting Michelle Yeoh”.

“I’ve done nothing but lie since September,” he said to IndieWire. “I knew, perfectly well, everything before we started. And that meant that every interview was a lie and every conversation I had with my friends… Actually, with quite a lot of my family, was a lie. Anybody on the street was a lie. Anybody in Toronto. So I apologize for all that, but that was the only way to tell the story well.”

(23) PEJORATIVE’S PROGRESS. Inverse’s Ryan Britt looks back on “How the Word “Terran” Became a Sci-Fi Slur”.

In the Mirror Universe of Star Trek, humans aren’t called humans. They’re called “Terrans.” The word “Terran” comes from the root Latin word “terra,” meaning “dry earth,” which is where we get the phrase “terra firma.” But the word “Terran” has been prevalent in science fiction long before it cropped up again on Star Trek: Discovery in 2018. As it turns out “Terran” has a long history of being a dirty word for “human.”

(24) BLACK PANTHER. Marvel Studios’ Black Panther – “Let’s Go” TV spot.

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Kim Huett, Martin Morse Wooster, Standback, Jason, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]

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98 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/29/18 The Man Who Scrolled The Moon”

  1. Mort Walker said that Lt. Fuzz was himself, and Plato was collaborator Dik Browne. I never suspected.

    A pixel is only a pixel, but a good file is a scroll.

  2. 24) Amongst other cool-looking things about this film, I can’t wait to see Andy Serkis play an actual human being for once.

  4. (1) The Puppies and all their ilk are too disgusting to bother distinguishing among them.

    (21) Surely this is satire. If it isn’t, I don’t want to know.

  5. (1) there’s a great deal of difference between having someone object to my writing, and having them construct malicious falsehoods about my personal life.

    THIS. Exactly this.

    Look, I am not a friend or fan of Foz Meadows. Before this, the only thing I knew about her was that she had objected to my writing in one of her blog posts a couple of years ago and had objected to my father’s writing a couple of years before that. And her objections to what each of us had written were not measured and dispassionate; my impression was that she utterly despised each of us for the things we had written.

    But she was indeed reacting on her blog to items written for public consumption. Fair enough. If you write something in public, some people will react to it publicly—and some of those people will be very critical of it.

    Foz Meadows did not randomly attack me on the basis of fabricating nonsensical claims and salacious speculation about my private life–which is what these people have done to her. Her criticism of something I wrote was not an intrusion; whereas what Dave Freer and his clique are doing to her is an intrusion. Exactly as she has stated. These bullies and trolls are publicly constructing malicious falsehoods about her personal life.

    That is appalling behavior, and Ms. Meadows has my complete sympathy for this situation. I don’t have to like her or be her friend to recognize that the way these people are behaving toward her is shameful.

  10. (1) And the puppies edge even closer to being a hate group.

    (3) I like discussing Hugo nominations as much as anyone, but I think there is a danger here in the idea that one should put in exactly five nominations. The result here is that Rich Horton puts in two movies he liked but didn’t think great. The last slots tend to be made up of hugely commercial blockbuster stuff.

    Sure, it helps block the puppies now (if they decide to be active this year), but it also makes it harder for interesting non-mainstream material to get onto the ballot.

    (I also consider both Wonder Woman and Logan as really good movies, but I think neither of them are good science fiction or fantasy.)

    (14) I mentioned Futurian War Digest yesterday at the same thread.

  11. @Karl-Johan Norén: “(1) And the puppies edge even closer to being a hate group.”

    I realized on reading your comment that I can no longer distinguish between some elements of the Puppies and a hate group. Which kinda means. . . .

    – – – – –

    (3) CONDENSED CREAM OF 2016. “If they’re short stories, does that mean they don’t fluff up your Mt. TBR pile quite as much as book recommendations?”

    It’s like dessert; as a friend of mine used to say, there’s always room for more – it fits in the nooks and crannies! (As I say: especially the crannies.)

    (8) STORY SCRAPING AT LOCUS. (Le sigh) (at Locus)

    (9) SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PLANET. “Defending the planet from bad science fiction” is weird and sad for an award. Awarding something to X isn’t defending from Y; it’s not like by awarding X, you’re preventing Y from getting any other awards. And presumably he feels he’s awarding good SF, so why have the tagline/concept focus on negativity?! Oh, right, because it’s a Puppy (or Puppy-adjacent) thing. I mean I do think the whole planetary, commander, defense combination is cute SF branding; but that tag line bugs me anyway. (I remember when the award started; I had forgotten about the tag line, I guess.)

    /grumble

  12. 21) I’ve never been able to take that twat seriously, but I started viewing him in a very different light when he informed me that while he didn’t hate foreigners, he just wished we’d “stop beginning wars with Germany and needing Americans to come over and save our asses”. (I have screenshots).
    Y’know, how the collective “foreign countries” all STARTED the war with Germany (also a foreign country) and provoked Hitler to war and all his atrocities. The man was just minding his own business until my country, Australia, messed with him and started WW2. Which probably explains Mad Max. History is a lie, sheeple!

    I’d like to imagine that it’s just a perverted cocktail of satire and stupidity mixed with American patriotism, but being the cynic I am, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the dude’s reached the Earth’s core and is still intent on digging.

  13. I realized on reading your comment that I can no longer distinguish between some elements of the Puppies and a hate group. Which kinda means. . . .

    Teddy was always running a hate group.

  14. 1) The whole Camestros is Toby thing is weirdly pointless and obviously a tool for foul people to attack Foz and her husband.
    It had not actually occurred to me that Camestros was an Aussie. Timothy the Talking Cat apparently tweets from Buenos Aires.

  15. The man was just minding his own business until my country, Australia, messed with him and started WW2.

    You’ve obviously been conditioned to forget the 1938 Anschluss, when the Nazis absorbed Australia into Germany.

  17. (21) This whole SFFC Guild keeps reminding me of an old Fry & Laurie skit, where they play a pair of inanely gibbering nerds who show up at a woman’s door uninvited, fundraising for their society/organization and asking her become part of it. When she asks what the society is for–what it does, what its purpose is–that have no idea and suggest that if she joined it, maybe she could come up with a purpose for it. And when she decides it’s time for them to leave, she has trouble making them go away and leave her in peace.

  18. Jeremy Szal – yeah I saw that exchange. I had no idea Australia had made such a habit of starting wars with Germany. Sheesh.

    I think they hit the Earth’s core and have started digging through N-dimensional space – somewhere that has many large pockets of bad air they keep breathing.

  19. @Karl-Johan … You make a good point about nominating items that are fine but that possibly don’t deserve a Hugo. I think I will, indeed, limit my nominations to the ones most deserving.

  21. @Rich Horton: Of course, I can’t stop anyone from nominating however they please (as they should!). But I think it’s more important to say, if you only read one novel last year that blew your socks off and the rest was so-so, then don’t let that stop you from nominating the sock-busting novel.

    Ie, it’s more important that you nominate something really good than that you fill the entire nomination form.

  22. Liz Carey:

    (21) Surely this is satire. If it isn’t, I don’t want to know.

    If you click on the timestamp for the tweet you’ll be sent to the Twitter thread and get the context. Yes, it’s quite obviously satire, the quoted tweet is making fun of Paolinelli and JdA.

  23. My normal (novel) nomination process (scary, I actually seem to have one, now) is “rank the eligible novels in internal order, nominating starting from ‘the best’ until either no more spaces, or not really Hugo-worthy”. So far, that has meant running out of spaces.

    Films, perhaps a little bit trickier, in that I don’t keep as close tabs on my film-watching as I do my reading. But, again, roughly the same process, possibly more likely to run out of films, though.

  24. My Hugo nomination process is that I start a list with all the categories early in the year and add anything I like during the year to the respective category. When it’s time for nominations, I look at my list and whittle it down to five or fewer nominees.

  25. Kendall: I would say that dessert fills in the crannies, while short fiction fills in the Nooks.

    The Man Who Mooned the Scroll

  27. 1) Part of me is flummoxed by the argument that Camestros must be Foz Meadows’ husband because both like sci-fi and philosophy. Have they ever met a philosopher? Zombies, tele(trans)porters, possible worlds, and brains in vats are our stock-in-trade. Of course, it’s not like the argument is made in good faith. It’s simply made to harm Meadows. They don’t care it’s a transparently bad argument. Heck, maybe they like its absurdity since it is perhaps more infuriating to deal with.

    2) “Not just men, of course, but it made a good headline.”

    I really enjoy your headlines, including “Where the Boys Are.” I also really appreciated this addendum.

  28. @Shao Ping, it’s obviously because only two people live in Australia, so Camestros must, therefore, be either Foz or her husband.

    Aristotle.

    <eyeroll>

  29. By complete coincidence unrelated to any recent events*, a copy of A Tyranny of Queens by Foz Meadows happened to fall into my pile of book purchases this afternoon. I went looking to see if Foz has a Patreon the other day but came up empty, so book sales it is…

    *Well, either this or unapologetic virtue signalling.

  31. 1) Sad puppies, Rabid puppies, GamerGaters, anti-SJW people, MRAs…That there is a Venn diagram which forms a perfect circle. While they may quibble about being lumped together, out here in the rational world there is no meaningful distinction between those groups, or the members thereof. And yes, they are a hate group.

  33. Black Panther’s suit disturbs me, I hate that flexible armor with no rigid plates is proof against even blunt impact, but I’m going to try to ignore that because the movie looks *awesome*.

  36. All the evidence so far is that there will not be a Puppy campaign this year large enough to constitute a threat. SP have moved on to other things, and VD’s support is very small, having clearly declined significantly between nominations and voting last year. He might get a nominee in Fan Artist. So I don’t see any requirement to fill out a full ballot in order to stop slates. (I was always doubtful of the idea that a large influx of new voters would defeat the slates, since this implied not just that lots of people would nominate, but that lots of people would nominate lots of works in lots of categories, and I was doubtful that ordinary readers [like me] were in a position to do that. But in any case the need has passed.)

  37. @Darren —

    I was browsing through an artist/comic writer’s DeviantArt gallery* this morning and found a cat sleeping on SFF.

    Looks like that one wins the prize for “Most Sff Slept On”!

  38. Regarding the Camestros/Meadows thing, I am fairly sure they did really believe it, since they made jokes about it for quite a while before saying anything in public. Now, having been shown wrong, they are, in the immortal words of Mr Day, doubling down.

  39. @ Maximillian

    His suit from the comics has vibranium woven through it which adsorbs most impacts.

  40. The intersection between philosophy and science fiction has always been a notable thing, but it’s been having a special boost recently, with works by Jo Walton, Ada Palmer and Adam Roberts. Admittedly none of these people live in Australia (so far as we know). (But why are they so ready to accept Camestros’s claim that he lives in Australia, if they think he’s lying about everything else?)

  41. @Andrew M
    Teddy announced that he was boycotting Worldcon because of it’s outrageous treatment of JdA, which I took to mean that he wasn’t going to be slating any more.
    The new rules introduced last year seem to have done a good job of ensuring that while there might be some slated works, there remain quality works as well. Frankly, if there’s enough support to push an item onto a category then I barely care, so long as there are other choices.

  42. The sheer, greedy click-seeking that fuels this kerfuffle is being paid for by the pain of the targeted family …

    The level of cruelty exhibited by Brad Torgersen, Lou Antonelli and Dave Freer shocks me. This isn’t just the usual rhetorical nastiness that can be flung around on subjects of fan controversy sometimes within SF/F. This is a deeply personal attack on a married couple that is libelous and bigoted. They are openly making vile statements about an LGBT person’s sexuality and marriage because a blogger with a pen name got under their skin.

    It shows an appalling lack of character on their parts not to recognize that the cause they are pursuing isn’t worth the damage they are inflicting.

    Even if they had successfully unmasked Camestros, instead of floating a flimsy guess built on poorly reasoned suppositions and IP address data they will neither reveal nor explain competently, how would that justify accusing somebody of having a bogus marriage that could be similar in nature to notorious pedophiles?

    The impulse to say these things goes so far beyond decency that it could be described, if one believed in such concepts, as evil.

    Sometimes in life you behave in a way that causes a good friend to take you aside privately and say, “What the hell, dude?” If these three have such friends, now would be the time for that intervention.

  44. The whole Camestros identity saga seemed perfectly silly until I read Foz MeadowsPersonal Note , now it just makes me feels depressed.

    Also, what @rcade said.

  45. I admit, at first I just rolled my eyes over their weird obsession with Foz’s husband, but this is despicable. What wretched little people.

  46. @rcade: unfortunately, it’s part of the personality make-up. They constantly feel like they are “losing” (in imaginary, world-shattering battles) and can and will justify any action that they think will give them a winner’s ribbon.

    That, and/or they have gotten to the stage where their own dehumanizing of others has now been incorporated into their thinking.

  48. @rcade

    The level of cruelty exhibited by Brad Torgersen, Lou Antonelli and Dave Freer shocks me.

    Sadly, it doesn’t. GG made it clear that there are people who would cheer on a suicide if it put them on the side of the group they wanted to impress.

  50. Doctor Science: The Roberts work which is specifically relevant to the intersection with philosophy is The Thing Itself. His latest work, which is Hugo-eligible, and which I am thinking of nominating, is The Real-
    Town Murders    . (I’ll write it up for the 2017 recommended SFF page when I have a bit more time.)

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