(1) ASKING FOR A MULLIGAN. The Hugo Award Book Club casts aspersions on a 2001 winner in “Harry Potter and the Undeserved Hugo”.
If Hugo Award voters had the prescience to have recognized (via award or nomination) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1998, perhaps it would be more forgivable. But looking at the situation with 15 years of hindsight, it feels like the Hugos were just bandwagon jumping on an established series that was already extraordinarily popular.
It seems to me that honouring the book with a Hugo Award did nothing to help it find new readers, and this feels like an abdication of what the award should be about.
(2) SOUND THE HORN. Since being chastised for misspelling Froot Loops, John King Tarpinian has been doing penitential research about the cereal. Those of you who were saying you can’t get unicorn burgers may want to know you can get unicorn breakfast cereal, for a limited time — “Unicorn Froot Loops Are Now Enchanting Store Shelves”.
Kellogg’s is giving early mornings a major dose of magic. According to Delish, the cereal giant is remixing its fan-favorite Froot Loops with a very 2017 makeover: unicorn.
Almost unrecognizable without Toucan Sam, eagle-eyed shoppers are sure to get pulled in by the rainbows, stars, and a very cute unicorn. The limited-edition cereal comes with new packaging that features the as-yet-unnamed animated unicorn complete with a requisite rainbow mane, but the real magic is inside the box.
While standard Froot Loops are already a Technicolor addition to any breakfast, the unicorn version is a little more subdued, but ups the ante when it comes to trendy hues.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BZNpru1j9F7/
(3) SPEAKING UP. Neil Gaiman voiced a character on The Simpsons on Sunday – a Coraline parody was part of the latest “Treehouse of Horror” episode.
A.V. Club reviewed the overall effort: “The Simpsons walks us through a visually ambitious but forgettable Treehouse Of Horror”.
The 28th “Treehouse Of Horror” carries on the venerable Simpsons institution by, as ever, tossing a whole lot of stuff at the screen and seeing what sticks. To that end, this year’s outing gives us: An Exorcist parody, a Coraline parody, Homer eating human flesh (just his own, but still), stop-motion segments, horror and fantasy-specific guest stars, a little light Fox standards-pushing (Homer does, as stated, eat human flesh), and the usual string of hit-or-miss gags. That last part isn’t really a criticism in itself. Freed up from the need to calibrate the heart-yucks equation, a “Treehouse Of Horror” rises or falls on the strength of its jokes, although the annual Halloween anthology provides its own unique degree of difficulty.
(4) ON THE CANVAS. Walter Jon Williams does a draft cover reveal for the next book in the Praxis Series. He has been making a heroic effort to complete it but the book isn’t cooperating, as he says in “Punch Drunk”.
I haven’t been posting for several days, because I’ve been trying to finish The Accidental War, which (according to the publisher) is Book IV of the Praxis series, but which (according to me alone, apparently) is Book VI, because I count Impersonations and Investments, and they don’t.
See? It even has a cover! Though this may not be the actual cover when it’s released, at the moment it’s just sort of a cover suggestion the art department is playing with.
Wow! Sure looks like MilSF, doesn’t it?
(5) PENRIC. And at Goodreads, Lois McMaster Bujold has shared “The Prisoner of Limnos cover sneak peek” with art by Ron Miller.
So, as promised, here is the e-cover of the new Penric & Desdemona novella. It will be #6 in the current internal chronology (and publishing order.)
The vendor-page copy will read:
“In this sequel novella to “Mira’s Last Dance”, Temple sorcerer Penric and the widow Nikys have reached safety in the duchy of Orbas when a secret letter from a friend brings frightening news: Nikys’s mother has been taken hostage by her brother’s enemies at the Cedonian imperial court, and confined in a precarious island sanctuary.
“Their own romance still unresolved, Nikys, Penric, and of course Desdemona must infiltrate the hostile country once more, finding along the way that family relationships can be as unexpectedly challenging as any rescue scheme.”
(6) PRODUCT PLACEMENT. Adweek tells how “A Baby Dragon Brings the Heat for Doritos on Twitter”.
You don’t have to be a Targaryen to know the value of a baby dragon.
When Doritos U.K. released a limited edition of extra-hot tortilla chips called Heatburst this past spring, it became part of the conversation on Twitter by creating its own “celebrity”—a comical, fire-breathing baby dragon—to represent the new flavor.
As described in the video below, the Heatburst campaign, with the hashtags #HeatWillCome and #BabyDragon, centered on the dragon character. It launched with a series of quirky videos where the baby dragon innocently ignited virtually everything around him. As awareness for the product grew, the baby dragon became a Twitter character in his own right, inserting himself into pop-culture moments and current events to keep the brand top of mind. Doritos U.K. did this using a full-range of Twitter formats, including branded emojis, GIFs, and conversational videos.
(7) CONTINUED WEINSTEIN AFTERMATH. The Hollywood Reporter says female animators sent a letter to executives at major animation studios insisting on an end of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Among the 217 women and gender-nonconforming people who signed the letter are Netflix’s head of kids programming Jenna Boyd, Bob’s Burgers producer and writer Wendy Molyneax, Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar and Danger & Eggs co-creator Shadi Petosky, as well as animators of BoJack Horseman, Adventure Time and The Powerpuff Girls.
The full text of the letter is at The Wrap (“Women Animators Pen Open Letter on Sexual Harassment: ‘This Abuse Has Got to Stop’”.) The demands include:
- Every studio puts in place clear and enforceable sexual harassment policies and takes every report seriously. It must be clear to studio leadership, including producers, that, no matter who the abuser is, they must investigate every report or face consequences themselves.
- The Animation Guild add language in our constitution that states that it can “censure, fine, suspend or expel any member of the guild who shall, in the opinion of the Executive Board, be found guilty of any act, omission, or conduct which is prejudicial to the welfare of the guild.” To craft and support the new language, we ask that an Anti-Harassment and Discrimination Committee be created to help educate and prevent future occurrences.
- Our male colleagues start speaking up and standing up for us. When their co-workers make sexist remarks, or when they see sexual harassment happening, we expect them to say something. Stop making excuses for bad behavior in your friends and co-workers, and tell them what they are doing is wrong.
(8) MAKING LIGHT. Overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis is Galactic Journey’s review of the November 1962 Fantastic.
It seems likely that the threat of violence, which hangs over our heads in these troubled times, makes it necessary for us to make light of traditional terrors. We laugh to keep from screaming. As an example, on the same day that China invaded India, Bobby Picket’s novelty song, The Monster Mash, reached the top of the charts.
Appropriately, the latest issue of Fantastic features another comic version of old-fashioned horrors….
It’s Magic, You Dope! (Part 1 of 2), by Jack Sharkey Lloyd Birmingham’s cover art, which reminds me of the macabre cartoons of Charles Addams, captures the spooky but laughable nature of this short novel by editor Cele Goldsmith’s resident comedian.
(9) YESTERDAY’S DAY
https://twitter.com/michaelmeloni/status/921929732458975232
(10) THE MALL’S OUR DESTINATION. At Pornokitsch, Jared takes us shopping: “Malls, Mallrats and Browsing”.
Doug Stephens wrote a powerful piece on how ‘to save retail, let it die’. In it, he lists all the ways in which retail is doomed (hi, Amazon!) on his way to a, more-or-less, familiar conclusion: retail spaces need to become experiences.
Stephens posits that the future retail spaces aren’t about buying products at all, but about:
- gathering data
- selling experiences that involve the products
Imagine, I suppose, the LEGO store, but solely with the build-your-own minifig display. And lots of covert measurement over which pieces everyone uses… (Ok, this must happen already, but still. Imagine!)
Then, presumably, we all go home and receive Snapchats telling us that a new set of our favourite LEGO can be purchased, right now. Just wink acceptance, and your facial recognition purchasing programme will do the rest. Then, when you lose a piece, you shout at Alexa, and the replacement follows. Whatever. That sort of thing. All beside the point.
(11) LOU ANDERS. Variety includes Lou Anders’ good news in “‘Dark Matter’ EP Vanessa Piazza Sets Multi-Year Producing Partnership With eOne”.
Piazza is also developing “Masked,” based on the original super-hero fiction anthology edited by Lou Anders, who will also be involved in the series adaptation. Notable comic and graphic novel writers, including Lilah Sturges, Paul Cornell, and Gail Simone whose short stories appear in the book, will contribute to the anthology series, working with Piazza and executive producer and showrunner Joseph Mallozzi.
(12) INDIE FOCUS. The inaugural issue IndiePicks Magazine is now on the street. You can read an electronic copy via their website. Subscriptions to the electronic and paper versions are also available.
Their sff reviewers appear to be Alan Keep and Megan McArdle. Their horror reviewer is Becky Spratford. And their YA reviewer is Magan Szwarek.
(13) EARLY ELECTRONIC MUSIC. NPR on the creator of the Doctor Who theme: “Forebears: Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music’s Forgotten Pioneer”.
All that changed in 1960 when she went to work at the BBC as a studio manager. She soon became enamored of the Radiophonic Workshop, a division of the media conglomerate dedicated to electronic experimentation. The invention of tape recording in the 1950s allowed sounds to be manipulated in entirely new ways; in a time when radio dramas ruled popular entertainment, the Workshop was a creative — and coveted — place of employment. In 1962, Derbyshire was assigned a position at the workshop, where she’d work for over a decade, becoming a sound specialist and a leading voice in musical counterculture: The weirder her soundscapes became, the more wondrous they felt. She created music for the world’s first fashion show with an electronic soundtrack (and considering the commonality of techno/dance music on the runway, she left a legacy in that field, too). She organized robotic noise in a way that felt truly alien, shocking sounds whole decades ahead of this music’s time.
(14) GUARD YOUR ARTISTIC FREEDOM. Max Florschutz issues a warning in “Being a Better Writer: Preaching to the Choir” at Unusual Things.
They adjust the story that they’re telling so that it is no longer aimed at the general audience, but at those who already buy into it. And that means changing the presentation.
For example, say someone writes a story that is going to preach to the choir with regards to one of the US’s political parties (which happens a lot, unsurprisingly). Writing a story that appeals to the group already supporting that party is going to result in a different story than one written to a general audience. A story that was written for a general audience on the topic would need to, for starters, approach all of its topics from a neutral starting point, as it would need to assume that those approaching the work didn’t share or even know of the authors ideas and views. It would then need to examine the ideals it wanted to present from a variety of points, answering the reader’s questions and concerns—which could be fairly vast—as it attempted to explain the stance of the author. It would also need to do so while maintaining a level voice and giving the various viewpoints a fair shake.
But if we compare that to a title written for an audience that wants to be preached too, most of that will disappear. For example, that audience does not want to start from a neutral point. They’ve already left that ground. They want a position already ensconced in their stance. Nor do they want to examine their own beliefs from a variety of angles—that can raise uncomfortable questions and truths that they’d rather not deal with—so each angle approached must be designed to reinforce that safe space they’ve already built for themselves by making sure that all other ideas, themes, etc, are wrong. It also can’t have a level voice nor give equal treatment to other views; after all, those views are wrong. Lastly, to preach to the choir, the work needs to reinforce the idea that the audience is safe where it is, that they have made the right or smart decision by believing what they believe.
And the truth is, creating this kind of work is extraordinarily popular. Everywhere. Because there’s a guaranteed audience as long as the “choir” exists. Michael Moore films, for example? One-hundred percent preaching to the choir. Baptist-ploitation films like God’s Not Dead? Also preaching to the choir. And many, many others—crud, you readers along could probably fill the comments with thousands of works from all sides of any spectrum or idea that preach to the choir. It works because it appeals to a set audience that wants to be told that they’re right, to be reinforced without thinking critically (or in some cases, by being giving a thought that sounds critical, but actually isn’t). And that audience? They eat this kind of pandering up.
… So, with that said—specifically the bit about a quick buck—why wouldn’t you want to preach to the choir? Why not go for it?
Well, the answer is pretty simple: Once you do, it’s hard to go back. Once you’ve started writing stories that support that little “safe zone,” you’ve effectively shackled yourself to it and to that audience. That audience is going to want more of the same, and if you don’t deliver it, they will become unhappy.
(15) I’M NOT OKAY, YOU’RE NOT OKAY. Douglas Smith spends the first four paragraphs of “On Writing of a Different Culture” at the SFWA Blog apologizing for world history before getting to the point:
So, yes, I was a tad paranoid of being accused of cultural appropriation.
Let me first explain why I was drawn to Cree and Ojibwe culture for The Wolf at the End of the World.
If you think you’re doing something wrong, wouldn’t it be better to not do it? If you haven’t done something wrong, why are you apologizing?
(16) JOE HILL. Lisa Taylor reviews “Strange Weather by Joe Hill” for The Speculative Herald.
Strange Weather is a collection of 4 short novels, each telling a unique story. They are all independent of one another, and could be read in any order. I may not rate this one quite as high as most of the works I’ve read by Hill, but I suspect most of that comes from my preference for longer works. The stories are quick and varied covering funny to horrifying to creepy and the main character in each are varied.
(17) PERSONAL BEST. Here’s a record that will appear with an asterix next to it.
I've never looked sexier. pic.twitter.com/5rHRYi30vW
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 22, 2017
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, ULTRAGOTHA, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Dann, Andrew Porter, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ryan H.]
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[FIRST]
[Gaul-stalk!]
First! OK, Second.Somewhat gauling.
1) Meh. It won. get over it. (disclaimer – got 50 pages into the first HP and gave up due to boredom. Haven’t seen the movies, either)
9) Cuuuute!
17) Er
Hmmm….wasn’t the title supposed to be Small Angry Pixel? I think that’s what the original suggestion was.
2) I’m assuming this classic Dave Barry bit still holds for Unicorn Froot Loops:
“Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, “Part of this complete breakfast.” The way it comes up is, my 5-year-old will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they’ll show a commercial for a children’s compressed breakfast compound such as “Froot Loops” or “Lucky Charms, ” and they always show it sitting on a table next to a some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always says: “Part of this complete breakfast.” Don’t they really mean, “Adjacent to this complete breakfast, ” or “On the same table as this complete breakfast”? And couldn’t they make essentially the same claim if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a dead bat?”
“A. Yes.”
@1: I’m not sure whether the book club is misunderstanding Jenkins, but I don’t think that the Hugo should be used to elevate a work whose public profile isn’t as high as its quality. It’s a pity the older authors aren’t more accessible, but maybe (e.g.) Simak’s other pastoralisms show their age worse than Way Station. I too was surprised that Potter #3 was nominated but not the previous ones, but nominations back then were even more of a crap shoot than now — when there’s only half a thousand total ballots, getting on can be random — but the details show that the Rowling also had the top nominations count (and the one I’d be most likely to vote below it came in second…).
@14: several cogent comments, but he’s wrong about writers being channeled by pandering; pseudonyms are useful. (They’re also useful otherwise; imagine a Holt reader confronted by a K. J. Parker book.) There’s also a touch of arrogance; I happen to agree that a balanced book makes more interesting reading, but I wouldn’t presume to speak for the universe of book buyers. And I’m amused by someone talking about writing quality who doesn’t watch out for his spellchecker (that’s being charitable about the reason for “tenets” becoming “tenants”); no, I didn’t proofread any of it, I just tripped hard over that one. He’s hardly alone in error — e.g., the latest WGBH program guide misspells “throe” as “throw” (maybe they should get some of their volunteers to proofread?) — but they’re not claiming to teach people to write better.
edit: Fifth!
1) The thing I regret in retrospect is that it seems to have broken the bias against fantasy in the Hugos and now there is a lot more fantasy vs. SF getting nominated. All worthy fantasy works, but I just wish the totals were more SF. ( And 9fox and the Obelisk series were both fantasy, anyone who says they were SF is just wrong)
10) I’m not sure how the logistics of buying things will work in the future, but what I’m certain about is that we will see a lot more variety and personalization. In a 100 years we may be back to the situation of 300 years ago where every piece of clothing was a unique one of a kind piece.
Unicorn pixel loops, part of a complete scroll.
Bonnie McDaniel: Quite right! For fixing the title you should help yourself to the giant economy size appertainment!
Since we’re on a cereal tangent
“A Scroll of Pixels makes a Scrolling Boy”
Heh. Re: cereal tangent, for those who remember Mikey and Life cereal:
“He won’t scroll it. He pixels everything.”
Or maybe:
“He scrolled it! Hey, Pixy!”
(10) The bit about the self-re-ordering dog food hurts. In the last year I’ve been through no less than three neighborhood pet food stores. They keep closing down, citing high rents and internet competition. Now my SJW credential’s food arrives via Amazon because we live in a catfood desert.
(16) I wonder if he’s riffing on his dad’s 4-novella collection Different Seasons.
I’m not too happy with the King & Sons authorial dynasty after reading Sleeping Beauties (Stephen King writing with son Owen), hated it thoroughly and blogged at length about why. I’m reading the new Phillip Pullman now and having a much better time.
@bookworm1398
And 9fox and the Obelisk series were both fantasy
I’d only halfway agree on Obelisk. I know Jemisin calls the Broken Earth a fantasy series, but it’s always struck me as having very strong SF elements, particularly in The Stone Sky. There’s clearly genetic engineering and quantum mechanics (those terms are even used in the book, the latter to refer to the construction and state of the obelisks), and the “magic” is the life energy the genetically engineered orogenes can manipulate. And then we get into all the geology, and history, and obvious knowledge of plate tectonics. I mean, if she wants to call it fantasy, that’s fine, but I think of it as an edge case.
“Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats” by Gene DeWeese & Robert “Buck” Coulson (1977).
Pixel Scrolls
They’re Gr-r-reat!
And 9fox and the Obelisk series were both fantasy, anyone who says they were SF is just wrong)
By that standard, only a tiny portion of published SFF would qualify.
#1 The reason to not nominate the first two Potter books was they weren’t Hugo-worthy. It wasn’t until #3 – Prisoner of Azkaban – that it all really gelled. I know a lot of adults who bounced off the first two but loved PoA.
1) I’ve never understood why people were so upset about this at the time. There were two massively popular juggernaut franchises going up against each other and the one that was more popular at the time won. And yes, they were both fantasy, but so what? Sometimes, the Hugos do award popular works. Okay, so I would probably have voted for Midnight Robber, if I’d been eligible to vote that year, but it’s pretty clear that Midnight Robber had no chance of winning.
14) He makes a few good points, but using rightwing dogwhistle terms like “safe spaces” makes me suspect he isn’t exactly standing on neutral ground either. And besides, not every position needs to be considered. I don’t think a writer needs to give racist, misogynist and homophobic views fair consideration.
The post is also way too US-centric, e.g. writers outside the US may not particularly care about which US political party a writer favours. And some positions that are completely uncontroversial and common sense in one country may be fringe views in another. For example, I often have problems with the fact that so many US and UK science fiction writers, including some who consider themselves leftwing, support nuclear power, because in Germany being in favour of nuclear power is a far right fringe position.
1) “Certainly, there were other books nominated that year that were more worthy of the Hugo Award.”
The author proceeds to… not even link to a list of that year’s finalists, let alone mention any titles or explain why those books were “[c]ertainly . . . more worthy of” taking home the rocket. The best that we get is a small photograph of George R.R. Martin and a caption that indicates that he was nominated that year, but anyone unfamiliar with Martin (or the years in which his novels were released) is left to guess at which of his books “should” have won.
Granted, it’s only been within the last handful of years that I’ve paid anything approaching close attention to the genre awards, so I don’t have any knowledge of what arguments did or didn’t occur following Rowling’s win, but this essay boils down to “It was popular, so it shouldn’t have won.” It seems as though the author hates Goblet‘s win more than he or she loves any of the year’s other finalists, and all that I’m left with is a sour taste in my mouth after reading that.
7) The Aftermath is truly global. We have had two anchors on TV, two journalists and one TV-boss removed from their jobs as yet, with more investigations (both workplace and by police) pending.
Hampus Eckerman: The Aftermath is truly global.
A journalist has compiled a list, with citations, of Hollywood figures who’ve been accused of harassment, assault, or worse.
And Googling
An Open Secret Uncut
on YouTube yields a very disturbing, graphic documentary (by an Oscar-nominated director) of abuse in Hollywood, including names of people who have been convicted and yet are still working there today.
I’d like to believe that all of these things coming out mean that the dam of silence and tolerance has now been broken, that abusers will be ousted or shunned, and that behavior will change. I’m dubious. But I’m still a little bit hopeful. 😐
Wow, it seems I’ve been doing it wrong all along. Here I’ve always voted for the book I thought most deserving of being called “Best SFF Novel of the Year” (at least from among the options I’ve been offered). And apparently I should have been voting for “Author Most Deserving of Wider Recognition”?
I wish people would write these rules down somewhere! 🙂
Whoops, forgot the box.
How about: Harry Pixel and the Philosopher’s Scroll?
(1) I believe giving the 2001 Hugo to Rowling was a poor choice, but that has more to do with the qualities of the book than because it was fantasy or was popular.
To me, the main value of the Hugos is the celebrate the works that are made within our (jncreasingly large and fractured) community, or works that are cherished by it. The Harry Potter books certainly are cherished by large segments among us, but I’m not sure the Potter fandom really feels welcome or at home with sf fandom. If the Hugo was supposed to be a signal about that, it was a signal that failed.
As for fantasy versus science fiction, I consider Dune or Hyperion to be pretty high on the fantasy. What has changed is more that books that previously might have been labeled as science fiction are labeled as fantasy (due to marketing reasons) and that there happens interesting stuff in the intersection between fantasy and sf.
(5) I don’t know if it’s just me, but those cheap digitally made covers on e-books and PoDs just leave me cold. They’re just bland, devoid of all personality.
(1) ASKING FOR A MULLIGAN
The mistake here is assuming that the Hugos are about anything. There’s no theme*, no mission statement, just a bunch of votes that coalesce in occasionally-odd ways. If you want themes and meanings and targeting at the deserving then you want a juried award of some sort.
(Now, there’s nothing wrong with wishing for the Hugos to be about something or recognise whatever you feel is deserving, I wish for my favs all the time; I just don’t think their rejection is particularly meaningful)
There’s a valid point that Goblet is a bit of an odd choice for the only HP book to get the award, but surely the even odder thing would be for no HP book to have won.
The article answers its own question to some extent – Goblet came out when HP was peaking with the sort of people who vote at the Hugos. I forget when I started reading HP but it was probably round about Azkabhan. I’m pretty sure there was a slew of adults diving into the series at around that point, it wouldn’t be long after that they released versions with adult covers to meet the demand, etc.
*okay, I admit the secret theme is kittehs, but don’t tell anyone!
15) “If you haven’t done something wrong, why are you apologizing?”
Because, as a Nazarene once demonstrated, you don’t have to do something wrong to be crucified.
1) Its been so many years, I don’t quite remember what I voted for. It wasn’t Harry Potter, because I didn’t start reading the novels until the third movie came out. I think it was it was Martin, Macleod, Hopkinson, Sawyer and then Harry Potter, but I can’t be certain. I do remember musing about going, since it was right down in Philadelphia, but ultimately did not.
‘If you think you’re doing something wrong, wouldn’t it be better to not do it? If you haven’t done something wrong, why are you apologizing?’
Sometimes being a writer involves towering hubris and crippling insecurity clobbering each other, eternally.
17) Ils sont fous ces Romains!
“If you scroll it to 88 mph and provide 1.21 jigapixels…”
The first awards announcement from the 1953 progress report has something close to a mission statement:
“It has long been felt that some formal system of awards should exist in modern science fiction whereby outstanding accomplishments of writing, editing and artistry in the field could be properly recognized and made known to the world.”
Link: http://fanac.org/fanzines/Philcon/Philcon2r3-03.html
As for the question of fantasy vs. sci-fi at the Hugo Awards, the first mention of fantasy being acceptable for the awards comes in the 1955 progress reports.
“It should be noted that, while the award carries the connotation that only science fictional material will be considered, we hasten to add that fantasy and weird material can be included.” To me, this reads as if it’s an afterthought for liminal works, but that’s open to interpretation.
Link: http://fanac.org/fanzines/Clevention/Clevention1r2-10.html?
10) The JC Penney example the article starts with makes me suspicious; one of the things that failed about the JCP re-fresh was that Johnson decided to take the approach he’d used at Apple instead of what he’d learned at Target, and the two kinds of retail space are dramatically different in terms of things like brand and price sensitivity. Not every approach will work across sectors, and he had spent too much time in the tech-bro world and had caught the bug that sector has that makes them oblivious to the fact that other sectors operate the way they do for actual reasons. He was just a bad fit. There is a lot of similar techno-capitalist-utopian thinking in this article that doesn’t take into account the fact that none of this crap ever works as advertised, if it works at all, and his “bright new age” analyses of the social impacts of some of these things is pretty chilling, in that he completely ignores the social impact beyond what it’s going to mean for labour costs.
@Charon D.: My SJW credential needs special food that I have to get from the vet, which is so far away from where I lived that I bought the food in supplies that will last three or more months… and I just moved to a new city and haven’t found *any* place to buy it yet (I bought a fresh supply just before moving, so I’m good for a few months). It may be the thing that finally makes me end my 14-year Amazon boycott.
@bookworm1398: And those custom clothes cost a little less than what a car would today, which is why people who weren’t rich owned only one shirt and wore it every day for years on end. It’s possible things will come down in price, but there are a whole lot of problems related to things like feedstock and design that aren’t even close to being solved yet (I’ve mentioned Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies book before, but he goes deep into the unsolved problems of revolutionizing the manufacturing of consumer-grade goods in that book) before we make it to cheap custom one-offs without relying on basically slave labour, which is what we do now. A really exceptional quality off-the-rack shirt (from someone like, say, Outlier) is easily a few hundred dollars, and they are on the cutting edge of textile manufacturing.
14) I’m not certain I’d take writing advice from this guy. It was barely readable, and full of a ton of assumptions and “always” this or “always” that nonsense, which are giant red flags.
15) It’s possible to take a course of action that you think is acceptable as long as you’re able to do it just right, and to then have anxiety about whether or not you actually accomplished the “just right” part. That’s a healthy anxiety to have, and I applaud this guy for worrying about whether he got it “just right”.
Edit:
5) @Karl-Johan Norén: Agreed. The illustration is okay, though not great, but that type is… not even that.
I thought that I, as an occasional Hugo voter, was supposed to vote for the work I thought was best, however I defined that. I think good criteria include [but are not limited to] whether a book is interesting, original, thought-provoking, emotionally satisfying (whatever that means to the individual reader/voter at the time), and well written (in terms of such things as characterization, language, consistent plotting, or whether you have to have read previous books to appreciate it).
Things I wouldn’t consider good criteria include [again, are not limited to] whether I know the author personally, and if so, whether we like each other; how popular the book is, and with what audience; and whether the author has already won a Hugo.
“This book shouldn’t have gotten the Hugo, because too many people who aren’t part of our community already know about it” doesn’t taste any better than “this book shouldn’t have gotten the Hugo because none of my friends have heard of it.”
I don’t *hate* Goblet’s win. I even moderately like the book. It just seems odd to have awarded the fourth book, when that’s kind of a low point in the series.
One can think that Hugo voters made a mistake that year without *hate*.
(In terms of your question about pronouns, ‘they’ is probably most accurate. Almost all the posts on the HBC blog are the result of multiple people writing collaboratively. I took the lead on this one, but other people also contributed to it.)
16) I’m with Charon D in wondering if it’s a riff on Different Seasons. I’ll probably have to read the one and reread the other.
@Ivan Bromke – It just seems odd to have awarded the fourth book, when that’s kind of a low point in the series.
The chief difficulty of making pronouncements like that is proceeding as if it’s true, instead of subjective. That book was the high point of the series for me and after that it slowly sank into books that were too big and sprawling for my tastes (I never read the last 50 pages of the last book, because I no longer cared).
Every Hugo voter has their own set of criteria, so yours can certainly include helping a book find an audience. None of mine do. I vote for things I love that I also consider award worthy based on a lifetime of reading. Somehow all those votes with all those individual metrics and preferences coalesce each year into what that idiosyncratic group thought was best.
It just seems odd to have awarded the fourth book, when that’s kind of a low point in the series.
The fourth book was the apex of the series. Every book afterwards was increasingly bloated with self-importance oddly combined with an aimless drifting. The earlier books were slighter and not nearly as well crafted.
As I recall (and I may be wrong) the fourth book was when the craze really started – the earlier books had been very popular, but because the fourth book was somewhat delayed, the release of the fourth book was the first time that there were huge lines at bookstores and libraries on release day.
Here’s a link to a link to the Harry Potter Hugo discussion at Locusmag (in the letter column) https://file770.com/?p=34225&cpage=3#comment-614246
6) given this is sponsored content, I am not sure “ADWEEK tells” is entirely accurate. Maybe “Twitter pays to make it look like ADWEEK tells”?
Re cereal, there’s been a phrase kicking around in my head for awhile due to James Nicoll’s Young People Read Old SFF:
“Give it to Mikayla. She hates everything.”
(1) The first two books were aimed at 10-12. year olds and it shows (I do say this with respect, my 9yo loves them). The third had a much better crafted story and also appealed to adults much more. So thats when Pottermania started and Hugo voters also discovered the series for them. At least thats my pixel and Im scrolling with it.
There is a dragon in it. His argument is invalid.
If I understand 1) correctly, the problem is that an award decided by popular vote… went to a popular book? I’m afraid I can’t work up enough energy to get outraged over that.
There are plenty of Hugo winners that I wouldn’t personally give house room to (no comment implied as to the Potter book – I’ve never read any Harry Potter so I can’t judge its literary merits; there’s no denying its popularity, though.) But in those cases, the only conclusion I can draw from this is “these works have or had enough fans to outnumber me”, which is sort of how democracy works, isn’t it?
@Hampus
*high five!*
I’ve always felt that Rowling wrote the books to describe the world as Harry Potter himself saw it.
When he was young, he had a child’s view of the world, and the books were more simple.
As he grew older, the world he saw became more detailed and complicated, and the books themselves became more detailed and complicated.
That was my understanding as well.
15: Douglas Smith was writing for Amazing when his novel was released and, in preparing for some promotional bits, he was very very careful on making sure that nothing associated with it could be construed in a negative way towards the First Nations.
I believe he was being properly respectful and that his “apology” derives from lingering doubt, not because one is really needed. Call it an abundance of caution.
1. yes, exactly, what they said! 🙂 The Science Fiction Achievement Awards should never be given to a work that isn’t entirely factual, entirely scientifically accurate and isn’t marketed as space opera…..
Democracy works better when there’s more debate, and more thought put into more informed votes.
My larger point is that in retrospect that particular choice of which book got the award doesn’t look so good. That this is a conversation that fans should have, and that perhaps next time we’ll make a different choice.
The Hugo Awards process is IMHO, the best process for an award in Sci-Fi. I love the democracy of it, but just like large-scale national democracies, we shouldn’t be blind to when voters make a choice that in the light of history doesn’t look so good.
Bonnie McDaniel on October 23, 2017 at 8:39 pm said:
A fantasy with SFnal elements is usually called “science fantasy”.
Now you can (and people do) argue whether science fantasy falls into the SF or fantasy bucket–or even if it should have a bucket of its own–but historically, I think, more people have voted for the fantasy bucket, arguing that one of the defining characteristics of “true” SF is plausibility. (Many “hard SF” fans would like to disqualify even that wibbly-wobbly form of SF which avoids magic, but still tends to ignore the laws of physics, and frequently relies on Applied Phlebotinum.)
And on the flip side, the people who don’t care about fine distinctions between SF and fantasy are likely to go along with classifying science fantasy as fantasy because they don’t care.
So, while It may strike you as unfair, “it contains SFnal elements, so it should be SF” is an argument that’s unlikely to carry the day.
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@John Lorentz: Yes, I think that’s probably why the HP books get more complex and sophisticated as they go along. But the pleasant result, which I think helped with their popularity, is that the books grew with their audience. A kid who was just the right age for the first book was several years older when the third book came out, so the fact that the third book was more suitable for someone several years older meant the series kept its fans.
Whether deliberate or not, I think it was a stroke of marketing genius.
I read the first two Harry Potter books back when they came out and like/hated them for various reasons. I may have started the third, but I was done with the whole thing by then, and DNFd. Years later, after being urged by some trustworthy friends to give the series a chance, to see how it grows, I tried reading them again, from the beginning, and noticed the evolution of the story, from middle grade to YA to… YA for less YAs. Seen all together as one story from an ever-more-sophisticated PoV, I think the entire series is very successful (as a story – obviously it’s very successful as defined by Puppies).
Democracy works better when there’s more debate, and more thought put into more informed votes.
You seem to be implying that there wasn’t thought put into the votes for the Rowling book, which is a pretty damn arrogant position to be taking.