(1) 2015 Canadian Unity Fan Fund winner Paul Carreau is a council member of the Federation of Beer. Their latest officially-licensed Star Trek brew is Vulcan Ale.
Federation of Beer announces that Shmaltz Brewing Company of Clifton Park, NY is brewing a new Star Trek-themed beer called Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect, that will be made available on Planet Earth in early October. Under license by CBS Consumer Products, Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect will pay homage to the Star Trek franchise and its legacy, tying into the storyline of The Wrath of Khan as well as Shmaltz’s own brand of He’brew craft beers.
(2) Camestros Felapton uses photographic evidence to set the record straight in “Tentacled Victorians”.
Rumors that Queen Victoria herself was a squid monster where unfounded. Photographic evidence shows she was an octopus-monster not a squid monster.
(3) Amazon has filed suit against 1,114 fake reviewers who “sell fabricated comments to companies seeking to improve the appeal of their products,” according to the BBC. The lawsuit was filed Friday in Seattle.
The defendants, termed “John Does,” have offered their false review service for as little as $5 on the website Fiverr.com, according to Amazon. The sellers were avoiding getting caught by using different accounts from unique IP addresses.
However, Amazon was able to identify the fake reviewers by conducting an investigation and purchasing some of the fake reviews. Amazon is also working with Fiverr to resolve the issue.
“While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufactures place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand,” Amazon said in its complaint.
Vox Day suggests “More than a few SJWs should be shaking in their shoes” because – why wouldn’t he?
(4) Bri Lopez Donovan reports on the latest conrunners’ convention in “JOFCon 2015 Helps Build the Convention Community” on Twin Cities Geek.
I was fortunate to be a part of the “Disability Access” panel, which was actually more about accessibility in general rather than disability access in particular. I and my fellow panelists, Amanda Tempel and Rachel Kronick, started with brief self-introductions before jumping into the discussion by talking about some pitfalls and how they’ve been addressed in various conventions. One of the problems we talked about was the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms at CONvergence. Amanda mentioned how it had been a problem and a point of discussion for years, and how member engagement really pushed the initiative to create bathrooms that were accessible to those outside of the gender binary. The solution she spoke of was convention runners working with their venues to relabel or re-allocate resources, in this case to relabel the gendered bathrooms of a hotel to make them gender neutral for the duration of the convention.
Another issue tackled was the vetting of panelists. Audience members of this panel brought up the lack of diversity on panels that were covering topics of diversity—for example, no people of color on a panel about race in sci fi, or no folks with autism on a panel about spectrum disorders within geek media. Audience members and panels brainstormed various ways to address this, including vetting panelists by asking why they are interested in being on a particular panel and assessing their answers for issues that could arise.
(5) Kevin Trainor asks “SF Won The Culture Wars A Long Time Ago. Isn’t It Time Fandom Started Acting Like It? on Wombat Rampant.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Is a trend becoming apparent to you? Here, let’s add another ingredient to this mulligan stew. In 1997, while I and my wife at the time were mostly busy trying to raise our kids, the regional SF convention in Minneapolis, Minicon, was in crisis. Attendance had ballooned to over three thousand people, staff turnover and burnout were epidemic, and the fan club nominally responsible for running Minicon, MNSTF, had no real idea whether the con was making money, losing money, or investing it in beaver hat futures on the Medicine Hat Commodities Exchange. The MNSTF Board of Directors, wakened from their dogmatic slumber by all the hooting, hollering, carrying-on, shrieks of horror, and assorted gibbering, actually paid serious attention to various proposals regarding the upcoming Minicon. One proposal, advanced by Minicon veteran Victor Raymond, was to split the baby: have one Minicon dedicated to traditional SF fandom, and another at a different time which would be more of a Gathering of the Clans, a three-ring circus and big ol’ party for media fans, anime fans, BDSM folk, and the other subcultures drawn to SF fandom, where being different wasn’t automatically considered bad. Another proposal, which was the one MNSTF wound up going with, was called the High Resolution Minicon Proposal, and whatever its authors’ original intentions, it was seen by most of Upper Midwest fandom as “Thanks for all the time and money you’ve sunk into Minicon over the years, you fringefans, but we’re tired of you now, and you need to fuck right off.” What became immediately apparent was that the vast majority of Minicon’s attendance and staff had in fact been made up of those “fringefans” for quite some time, and in the years following the implementation of the HRMP, Minicon’s attendance imploded to a low of about 400 people. Meanwhile, those fans who felt snubbed by the HRMP organized three other conventions: Marscon, more focused on media and gaming but still mainly an SF convention; Convergence, essentially Minicon 2.0; and Diversicon, which was ironically even more focused on traditional SF & fantasy but had split from Minicon over the issues of a “dry” consuite and open staff meetings, which Minicon had rejected. So in the end, what Victor had campaigned for happened anyway, but instead of successfully managing the change and remaining the preeminent SF club in the upper Midwest, MNSTF dropped the ball and dwindled into obscurity, which their graying membership seems quite happy with. The same thing, with minor variations, also happened at Boskone and Disclave and other regional conventions, so i think it’s reasonable to draw a few conclusions about SF fandom in general from these examples.
Let’s fast forward a few years. By now, everyone is familiar with the Sad Puppies story: Larry Correia noticed a drop in Worldcon attendance correlating with an increase in Hugo Awards to works of SF that weren’t terribly successful in the marketplace, but were written by the Right People and tended to have the Right Characters expressing the Right Views. Over the next two years, he tested the hypothesis, encouraging his readers and friends to join Worldcon and vote. Membership numbers at Worldcon increased, votes for the Hugo increased, and in the third year of Sad Puppies, when massive numbers of people bought supporting memberships and nominated works by John Wright, Tom Kratman, Michael Williamson, and other authors considered “badthinkers” by defenders of the existing order – the same people, mind you, who had encouraged Larry to go out and get more people to join Worldcon if he felt it wasn’t sufficiently reflective of the SF market- the backlash from people such as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, John Scalzi, David Gerrold, and various unhousebroken employees of Tor Books was vitriolic. The Sad Puppies (and their co-belligerents, the Rabid Puppies led by Vox Day) were libeled as racists, homophobes, neo-Nazis, misogynists and pretty much every politically correct insult in the book. In the end, despite the Puppy Kickers’ hypocritical preaching against the evils of “slate voting”, a bloc of 2500 voters chose “No Award” over any work nominated from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies list – a list, mind you, that SP3 leader Brad Torgersen had not delivered from on high, but instead crowdsourced from anyone who wanted to suggest works worth nominating. Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list was almost identical to the SP list, but as far as anyone knows, it was a list he chose and distributed to the Dread Ilk. This massive “No Award” result, which doubled the number of such from the last ten years, was loudly cheered and celebrated by those in attendance at the Hugo Award banquet; this cheering was encouraged by MC David Gerrold, while thousands of fans around the world were subjected to this display of vile behavior thanks to the Internet.
(6) Meantime, Kevin J. Maroney has his say, “Once More Around the Sun”, at New York Review of Science Fiction.
As I’m sure you know by now if you have even the faintest scintilla in the Hugo Awards, the “No Awards for Slates” option won out in this year’s Hugo final voting. This is the approach I advocated in my previous editorials, excluding the Puppy finalists not on grounds of quality or lack thereof, nor on the politics or personal foibles of the people running either of the Puppy slates. This was entirely a vote against the underhanded tactics that resulted in those finalists reaching the ballot. (The kindest thing that can be said about slate voting in this type of open-ended popular vote is that it is “technically not cheating.” That’s not a kind thing to say at all.) The people who were dragged onto the Puppy ballots without being consulted can be assured that this vote absolutely was not a personal rejection of you but of an unacceptable process.
There are larger issues involved in the Puppy movement that I don’t feel the need to rehash right now, issues of culture war, of reader communities and their protocols, of the powers and perils of our deeply interconnected communications. But at its core, the Puppy fight was about a group of people deciding to “not technically” cheat their way into an award and they were rebuffed, and that much, at least, is good. The Puppies will be back next year. It’s not particularly clear what they hope to accomplish in a fourth bite at the apple they claim is poisoned, but it will certainly be something.
(7) Today in History:
October 18, 1851 — Moby-Dick by Herman Melville was published. Much later, Ray Bradbury turned it into a script for John Huston.
October 18, 1976 — Burnt Offerings, from Dark Shadows‘ Dan Curtis, opens in theaters.
(8) The Superheroes in Gotham exhibit at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library will be open through February 21, 2016.
Superheroes in Gotham will tell the story of the birth of comic book superheroes in New York City; the leap of comic book superheroes from the page into radio, television, and film; the role of fandom, including the yearly mega event known as New York Comic Con; and the ways in which comic book superheroes, created in the late 1930s through the 1960s, have inspired and influenced the work of contemporary comic book artists, cartoonists, and painters in New York City.
Michael Powell reviews the exhibit for the New York Times.
The curators found in a private collection the Pow! Bam! Wham! Pop Art-era Batmobile and put it in the lobby. They mounted the Penguin’s umbrella and Catwoman’s hot unitard upstairs, along with Action Comics No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) and art originals of the singular Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man.
The exhibition focuses on comic book founding fathers. They were predominantly Jewish kids — with a few Italians and the occasional wayward Protestant mixed in — from the Bronx, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. And in the 1930s and ’40s, they created a world.
Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn), a creator of Batman, and Will Eisner, a son of Jewish immigrants and the creator of the Spirit, attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, as did the wisenheimer bard Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), who created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk and many more.
(9) Christopher Lloyd told The Hollywood Reporter he’d be glad to do Back to the Future: Part IV if somebody reunited the whole gang. “Doc” also says he’d like to toss out the first pitch if the Chicago Cubs get to the 2015 World Series, as predicted in Back to the Future: Part II.
(10) Book trailers by SFWA Members are collected here on YouTube.
(11) Brian Z. lays that pistol down in a comment on File 770.
Meet me in the thread, pixel, pixel
Puppies all around, pooping, pooping
Tear those puppies down, scrolling, scrolling
Droppings in the ground where flowers grow
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy people laughing
Filers all around, love them, love them
Never make amends, dish it, dish it
There’s still time to cry, crappy, crappy
Save an unkind word for tomorrow’s whine
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans…
(12) J-Grizz scores one for the home team.
Pixel pixel little scrolls
God Stalk! Brackets, maybe trolls
Reading comprehension’s bad
Perhaps that’s why they are so sad
Pixel pixel little scroll
Filking’s just the way we roll
(13) Yipes.
I bought a $10 hat. Fear me. pic.twitter.com/BuKDNHiFQF
— Simon Bisson (@sbisson) October 18, 2015
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
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@junego: “Did you ever consider or want to be a scientist? I’m a big fan of all science, especially biology and geology/geoscience.”
I’ve been a code junkie since the early 1980s. All of the logic, none of the mess… unless you need to make a blood offering to the gods that bless newborn computers. Been reading SFF (mostly SF) even longer, although I’ve shifted over to more urban fantasy in the last decade or so.
And now I’m doing a final edit pass on an indie author’s erotic paranormal romance that involves trans characters but no vampires or werewolves. Literally the last thing I ever expected to be working on, but such is life. (Okay, so the next book in the pipe’s even stranger, but it’s still down the road, I insist on putting one book to bed before encouraging a new one.)
@Rev. Bob that’s a strange coincidence. Someone challenged me to write something like that for NaNoWriMo. Except just paranormal romance, not erotic and she insisted I include motorcycles. Is this person going around making the same dare to everyone?
@Doctor Science: “I’m thinking of getting a Kobo (which won’t have the dings my Nook screen does) and then rooting it, so I can read Mobis and Epubs at will!”
Why root? My Kobos are designed for EPUB, but they’ll read DRM-free mobis right out of the box…
@Iphinome: “Is this person going around making the same dare to everyone?”
I am not aware of any dares involved in this book, aside from the usual first-book “dare ya to go through with it” kind of thing. The way I hear it, the idea came together about a year and a half ago, and 180Kwords later, the end is in sight.
J.B. writes the stuff, I edit it and put it into EPUBs, and we’re both trying to get the first half of the book locked so the teaser short story can go online by Halloween and start the timer on the rest of the publication schedule. I really need to nag about the contest pages, though. There needs to be one online with full rules, plus a mention in the short so people will know about it…
(We’re doing an Easter egg hunt to promote the book by giving away the third short story. Be the first to find a given pop culture reference, win a signed ebook copy. Easy concept, but we need to bash on the fine print.)
Nicholas Whyte on October 19, 2015 at 11:41 pm said:
The great thing about the puppy theory of secret Tor press releases is that press releases, rather fundamentally, are not secret!!!!
That’s why it’s such a brilliant secret plan: it’s a publicly released secret memo!
No one would ever suspect a thing, kind of like The Purloined Letter, you know.
Those fiendish plotters at Tor have thought of everything.
@Rev. Bob,okay I feel better. I got a dare list, including things like urban fantasy, trans protagonist, romance, motorcycles….. And it ended with the promise of a box of cookies if I pulled it off.
I want those cookies.
Solomon Grundy want cookies, too…
In brightest day, in blackest night,
No cookie shall escape my sight.
With Girl Scout cookies comes great responsibility…
…and empty wallets.
@Rev Bob
If the story can be told, how did you end up editing books? (You may have said before, but I don’t recall)
ETA: Which I think is a cool and interesting job, at least on paper.
😉
Raises hand
I was a translator for twenty years and I have had much the same experience. Towards the end of my career I translated a book by Forsyth. It was not the kind of book I would normally read and it wasn’t, IMHO, a very good book. But.
It might have lacked in characterisation and style, but every three pages something catastrophic and exciting happened. You might not have noticed it reading it, mostly because you’d be tearing through it like a freight train, but while translating it I could see the craft and ability that went into constructing that feeling of increasing pace, and took my hat off. Not all writing ability is turning a stylish turn of phrase or constructing believable characters, although that is what I look for in a book, mostly. There are different kinds of crafts and they deserve just as much respect.
Also, I learned a lot translating. Most of it was with my first translations which I did not for money but for love – I translated a couple of Tiptree’s short stories. And those are awesome little angry clicking machines, hurtling towards a great abyss while they cavort in graceful and deadly martial moves.
Oh wow, I got a massive reply from Brad!
http://wombat-socho.livejournal.com/1399499.html?thread=2250443#t2250443
I feel honoured.
I don’t know, it sounds a bit like a place where you’ve had all the orgasms…
Although I do think Tank Marmot is kind of adorable.
Yes, it was. Kudos and respect to him.
I didn’t have a problem with where The Traitor ended up, but I didn’t like the getting there. Specifically, I didn’t like the fact that the world-building is a bit by the numbers, I didn’t like that I didn’t believe in the central character (I did believe in Tain Hu, though), and I really dislike books in which everything is machinations within machinations. Also I really didn’t like the Coyotes. It pulled me out of the book for stupid reasons – while wolves and Generic Fantasy Beasts Coyotes are animals that inhabit for me a precise geopolitical region, North America; and it didn’t sit well with me to find them in a world that was definitely not North America. It’s a stupid reason, but there you go.
May I also add: the audiobook is not great. I tried it when I got stuck in the middle (I read the end), but the delivery is too monotonous for me.
@junego:
Since you asked… 🙂
My day job is all about creating pages for and otherwise maintaining a small company’s website, which means that I spend my time neck-deep in web code. It also means that when a new page goes up, I’m usually the last eyes that see it – which makes me the copyeditor of last resort. In a crunch, if there’s no time to kick copy back to the proper editor, it’s my duty to take care of it on the spot and get an official fix done later.
When I started reading ebooks, my web-dude side was appalled by the low standards that frequently got applied to even books published by major houses. Some of it’s picky crap like specifying too-small fonts for no damn reason, but sometimes there are more serious problems – like the five different Tom Holt books that had metadata so wrong it broke the purchase experience until I contacted the etailer and got a message to the publisher. Sorting those out got me hooked on touching up metadata. It was necessary if I wanted those books to be usable, and while I was in there…
By the time I got into indie fiction, I was making lists of copyediting goofs as I read, so I could go back and fix them in my copy later. In a couple of cases, I contacted the author to offer them a copy of the same list – why not, right? It led to some beta reading gigs, too, and that’s always neat.
Anyway, when a new author contacted me about lending a hand with the formatting and editing aspects of her* new book, I was curious enough to say yes. I liked his* idea – start with the hoary “wake up in a sex-changed body” trope, but take it seriously – as well as the goal of combining explicit sex scenes with detailed characters and a genuine plot. I never have liked the notion that smut has to be badly written or poorly edited, so I jumped at the chance to help someone aim higher. There’s plenty of sex in the book, and so far those snippets have gotten the most attention, but I like how those scenes illustrate aspects of the characters instead of simply being Horny Bodies In Motion. I also ended up learning more than I ever expected to need to know about some obscure Roman deities. (Really, J.B. – Ultio and Vejovis?)
So, well, here we are. I didn’t expect it to take this long, and I thought the final draft would be considerably shorter, but I’m interested to see what comes next. J.B. likes to play with the idea of gender identity and roles, and I’ve gotten some hints of some of the other stories on his plate. (Last week, she posted a “gendervague” encounter on his Tumblr – an explicit scene between two people whose genders are never revealed to the reader.) I can’t wait to get my hands on ’em, and I hope other readers like what I’ve seen as much as I do. 🙂
* J.B. has a gender, but refuses to say what it is. Instead, she has fun answering to whatever pronouns people assign to him. I try to switch it up, in hopes that maybe she’ll slip up and correct me, but it hasn’t happened yet…
They way the slate was assembled is a red herring
The way the slate was chosen is THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT!
Nice to see that Brad R. has now accepted that he served up a shit sandwich, but still thinks people should have eaten round the edges. There was some lovely crisp fresh baked bread in that sandwich, even if the filling was kind of stinky.
Brad R. has now accepted that he served up a shit sandwich
I think you are too generous!
*looks at Bob’s post*
*exhales* At least I know my little November distraction won’t be inadvertently copying
@ Anna:
I learned a lot typing. When I was a teenager, my father paid me $0.50/page to type his manuscripts on an electric IBM typwriter. While he wrote and revised book after book, I became a good self-taught typist by typing 2 or 3 drafts of each novel.
In typing those drafts, I also saw all the changes and revisions that he made to each manuscript to improve them. I had no interest whatsoever back then in becoming a writer (I knew what kind of life it was, after all), but I realized when I started writing 6-7-8 years later that I had absorbed a lot of craft that way.
@Iphinome:
There is that. Unless you were planning to put Minerva in a bikini and have her hop on one of those motorbikes, you should be in safe territory. 😉
I pretty much agree about the world-building and the central character, and I think that’s why I’m ultimately leaning towards thinking it’s a good book but not necessarily a great one — on the other hand, it’s also the author’s first novel.
(I don’t mind machinations within machinations as long as I can ultimately follow them, and everything was laid out pretty clearly in this one, I thought. And Coyotes didn’t bother me — I did blink for a moment when they create a new word out of Greek roots, but in retrospect I actually think that was the point; I’m pretty sure the author was lampshading the fact that, yeah, English is the language he’s got to write in so he’s decided to go with English words, and words whose origins don’t make sense not-on-earth can be presumed to be literary translations.)
Laura Resnick: I had no interest whatsoever back then in becoming a writer (I knew what kind of life it was, after all)
So, barn door, horse — I’m laughing my ass off here. I suspect that your dad is, too.
Though I have to say that your perspective as a prolific and successful author certainly adds a lot to the dialogue here on Izvestia 770.
@Rev. Bob nope, no bikinis, I chose the wrong time of year for that. And, while I’ll admit that I know nothing about motorcycles and will have to make heavy use of research, I think trying to ride in a bikini would be uncomfortably cold. I’ve heard tell of people skiing in bikinis before but I’m not sure I believe it.
*Double checks unfinished outline. Hey I still have over a week to make notes*
No Minerva either. I could try to put a bikini on the sea snake, but I think it’ll fall off.
@Iphinome:
Minerva’s a god. Since when does she care about temperature? 🙂
I hear you on the research, though. I did what fact-checking I could on the manuscript, but there’s a lot of “I hope J.B. has better sources than I do” in there. (Although I must say that you can find a lot of stuff on YouTube if you know where to look.) At least nobody’s going to look askance at you if your browser history’s full of motorcycles…
Speaking of, fun fact time. Despite Meat Loaf being so associated with them, all the shots of him riding a motorcycle in RHPS were faked. They used a stunt rider for the long shots, and they kitbashed the bike and the wheelchair together to get the closeups. I don’t know if he can ride now, but he couldn’t then.
@Iphinome, PLEASE no motorcycling-in-bikinis. I ride. I see “bike babes” in flip-flops and short-shorts, and it makes me cringe every time. Boots save you from breaking your ankles if you dump the bike. Long pants save you from serious burns if you brush up against the pipes. (The guy who taught my husband to ride had massive keloid scars on one leg, from wearing shorts on a bike, getting pinned under it, and the pipes burning his leg. I’ve carelessly just barely brushed the pipes of my own bike with my knuckles when getting something out of a saddlebag and had bad blisters on my hand as a result.) There’s a reason that serious bikers wear leather, and it’s not just fashion….
Or, as the saying goes: Sweat washes off. Road rash doesn’t.
(Now, if this is some fantasy universe where the bikes are spelled against dumping, that’s different. But in this world, unexpected gravel in blind corners happens. More often than you’d like. <wry>)
Sorry for the mini-rant; I love riding, but I see far too many people just asking for serious injury on the road. The helmet doesn’t protect you if it’s strapped to the side of your bike, you idiot! <ahem> Sorry again.
Cassy B. You don’t need to worry. Nothing in my notes calls for anyone to wear a bikini at any time, not even the sea snake. If that isn’t enough assurance then, please, take heart in knowing that the intended audience is three people. Two who will beta read and one who will give me cookies for finishing the task.
@Iphinome, I truly apologize for the rant above; women (or men!) in bikinis on running bikes turns out to be a hotbutton issue for me. Who knew? <wry>
<edit to add> Now I kinda want to see a photo shoot of a guy in a bikini sexily draped over a motorcycle…
Hmm, I don’t think Tank Marmot is in the same category. The nickname wasn’t created to be an insult.
@Nicholas Whyte
I’m not sure whether to congratulate you or commiserate with you. 🙂
I note he hasn’t yet noticed that the Ancillary books aren’t published by Tor…
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Yes, how the slate was put together is a huge part of the distortion it produces. I can see why Torgersen might want us to stop talking about it, though. I can’t imagine it would go well for him if Puppies stopped blindly believing his excuses and started to wonder why almost all of the selections were his friends, colleagues, and people he wanted to suck up to.
@Cassy B ask and ye shall receive
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/if-men-posed-like-motorcycle-babes_n_4101152.html
@Laura Resnick — I’m fascinated by your story about how you got into writing. I have known many people who were frustrated by difficulty selling the fiction they wanted to write, and would talk about how they should just write commercial romances or something like that — but you’re the only person I know of who actually did that.
Do you still read romances? That is, did you learn to like them? Or did you stop reading them as soon as you weren’t writing them anymore?
Iphinome on October 20, 2015 at 3:04 am said:
I would look silly in a bikini, but I’ve done a lot of skiing while topless in shorts.
@Iphinome, Heh. Thanks. I needed that….
@Cheryl S: as one more data point, I just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and I. Hated. It.
PhilRM:
Can you say why without spoilers, or is it more of a visceral thing?
@PhilRM
“[…]I just finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and I. Hated. It.”
Interesting. Can you share why? I’m learning to appreciate the different reasons people find the same story either wonderful or awful. ;-}
I really liked the book. Without being too spoilery (I hope), some of my reasons were the way it was written to lead you through the puzzle of what was happening keeping the tension and mystery high; the interesting characters with depth who I came to care about; the worldbuilding that is so close to our own history but with physics that are just different enough to “explain” the fantasy elements; I loved the ending.
I’m interested in knowing why, too, @PhilRM.
I too am becoming more interested in the why of book opinions and I think it’s because they’re stories too, the other part of the interaction between writer and reader.
Ultragotha wrote:
Lin –
My profoundly atheist father’s idea of heaven is the place where you’ve read all the books and know all the answers.
And Anna Feruglio Dal Dan replied:
I don’t know, it sounds a bit like a place where you’ve had all the orgasms…
I’m profoundly atheist myself and I agree with Anna. My “idea of heaven” if I may use the term, is a place where there are many many books still to be read and some still to be written and new answers to learn and figure out all the time.
I hope I won’t be done with learning–or reading–while there’s still an I to exist.
@Cally @junego @Cheryl S: Without (I hope) getting into spoilery details, I thought that Mori turned out to be just creepy, manipulating the lives of everyone around him for his own ends, never even considering whether he had the right to do so.* I also thought that the novel had a misogynist streak a mile wide.
*For those of you who have read it, I think the novel provides no evidence that Grace’s summary on page 303 (Bloomsbury/American edition) isn’t completely correct. I came away agreeing with Matsumoto’s sentiment on the last page.
@junego: this is getting into the weeds, so I’ve rot13’d it:
Ohg V qba’g guvax gung ubyqf hc: Tenpr’f rkcrevzragf snvy gb qrgrpg nal rgure qevsg, vzcylvat gung guvf vf bhe jbeyq, be, ng gur yrnfg, gung gurer vfa’g nal rgure va gur abiry’f jbeyq rvgure. Fb rvgure ure rkcynangvba sbe Zbev’f novyvgl vf jebat, be fur’f fvzcyl na vapbzcrgrag rkcrevzragnyvfg.
@PhilRM
I think you may be misremembering. Grace became convinced it was all true.
Nf V erzrzore vg, Tenpr sbhaq gung gur rkcrevzragf gung jrer gelvat gb svaq rgure jrer shaqnzragnyyl synjrq va guvaxvat gung rgure jbhyq ernpg gb gur zbirzrag bs gur Rnegu guebhtu fcnpr. Erzrzore ure rkpvgrzrag nobhg gur punyx qhfg? Fur ernyvmrq gung vs rgure rkvfgrq n pynveiblnag jbhyq or noyr gb qrgrpg fbzrbar’f vagragvba gb qb fbzrguvat guebhtu ernpgvba jvgu oenva npgvivgl. Fur jnf noyr gb bhgjvg Zbev, fgnl narnq bs uvz, naq oybj hc gur ohvyqvat orpnhfr fur fgnegrq znxvat enaqbz qrpvfvbaf jvgu nyzbfg ab sbergubhtug fb ur pbhyqa’g ernq ure vagrafvbaf.
@junego: Yes, you’re correct – I’d forgotten that bit.
For me, the weirdest thing about hearing the Puppies take offence at “Cheering is appropriate; booing is not” and “Please do not applaud every nominee but save your applause for when the winners are announced” is… is that actually the first award ceremony they’ve ever heard those instructions given at?
In my book, and in my experience, booing is never seen as appropriate. Wherever even the thinnest veneer of professionalism or camaraderie is maintained, you just don’t boo. You don’t hiss. The only noise you make loud enough for the people on stage to hear is applause, because anything else is just rude. The 2015 Hugo ceremony was by far not the first place I’ve heard an MC admonish booers in the audience. Why do the Puppies think this rule was made up just to silence them?
And as for “please hold your applause until winners are announced,” I have heard that at every single Hugo award ceremony, and a number of World Horror and World Fantasy award ceremonies, I’ve ever been to. Because if we took time to applaud every nominee we would be there at least an hour or two longer. (Also, our hands might get sore.) Sure, this time around it had the additional effect of protecting the Puppies from a conspicuous contrasting lack of applause for their nominees (or, if seen through a Puppy filter, to prevent anyone expressing support for Puppy nominees, whatever), but I’ve encountered it countless times as a purely practical time-saving strategy.
These are not new rules made up for Worldcon 2015. These are pretty much basic award ceremony etiquette and efficacy. The Puppies are not that special.
Gah.
@PhilRM
Sorry, if I’d read both emails before responding I could have put all this i to one. Anywho…
On Mori’s character and actions and motivations. I think that’s part of what makes the ending so interesting. Zbev vfa’g bzavcbgrag. Ur sbetrgf gur “shgher/cnfg” gung qbrfa’g unccra vs crbcyr’f qrpvfvbaf be enaqbz riragf punatr pbaqvgvbaf. Gurer ner cynprf va gur fgbel jurer vg ybbxf yvxr ur’f va pbzcyrgr pbageby naq bguref jurer ur frrzf orshqqyrq. Va gur raq vg’f abg pyrne, vzub, ubj zhpu ur znavchyngrf naq ubj zhpu ur’f ng gur zrepl bs uvf tvsg. Gung’f bar bs guvatf gung znxrf guvf n terng fgbel.
Thank you for the discussion.
The Puppies are not that special.
In the mind of the Pups, everything is about them. People voted for Chicks Dig Time Lords as a personal insult to Brad. People nominate John Scalzi’s books as a personal attack on Brad. People like Ancillary Mercy just to get under Brad’s skin. People liked The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere just to spite Brad.
Its all about Brad. No one ever does anything except to either curry favor with, or say “fuck you” to Brad.
in fact I’m thinking of getting a Kobo (which won’t have the dings my Nook screen does) and then rooting it, so I can read Mobis and Epubs at will
I have a Kobo. It has no problem with reading epubs. It’s also supposed to handle mobis. (The Kobo format is DRMd epub, if I understand it correctly.)
Wait – I thought people nominated Scalzi’s books as a personal attack on Vox Day?
Wait – I thought people nominated Scalzi’s books as a personal attack on Vox Day?
In Beale’s head they do. But in his heart, Brad knows they do it as an attack on Brad. And Larry knows they do it as an attack on Larry. Every Pup is personally attacked by every nomination for Scalzi. Them and them alone.
@junego: This was a point on which I found the novel unconvincing: Zbev xabjf gra lrnef nurnq bs gvzr gung ur unf gb tb gb Ybaqba gb zrrg Gunavry. Fvk zbaguf orsber gur obzovat, ur xabjf gb yrnir gur jngpu sbe Gunavry, gvzrq gb gur frpbaq.
Va nal pnfr, fvapr Zbev vf jvyyvat gb hfr uvf novyvgl gb znavchyngr riragf gb guerngra Vgb jvgu gur zheqre bs uvf jvsr hayrff ur’f nyybjrq gb yrnir sbe Ybaqba, nalguvat gung yrffraf Zbev’f bzavcbgrapr vf n tbbq guvat va zl obbx.
If we all liked the same things the world would be a much less interesting place.