Pixel Scroll 7/20

Eight stories, two videos, some smack and a snack in today’s Scroll.

(1) What does John King Tarpinian eat each year to commemorate the July 20th anniversary of the first Moon landing?

moon-pie-large

And if anybody asks John “Where were you that day?” he has a good story to tell them.

I was just 15 and my father took a buddy, Mike, and me to Zuma Beach and he returned home.  My parents and Mike’s parents were so engrossed in the landing they forgot about us.  This was in the olden days with no cell phone and the pay phone was broken so we could not call them to remind them about us kids.

There was a group of people with a 9” B&W TV watching the landing on the beach so we joined them.  The battery eventually drained so I took it upon myself to lift up the locked hinged viewing door of a lifeguard station to get at the electrical outlet so we could plug-in the TV and watch Neil and Buzz.

In John’s honor, here’s a Bradbury bonus:

(2) Vox Day did a little housekeeping on his blog to address a chronic problem in a clear, direct and motivating way:

For the love of all that bleeps and bloops, stop whining about spell-checker mistakes and autocorrect errors in your comments already! It’s considerably more annoying for the rest of us to read the inevitable follow-up post explaining that of course you know how to spell whatever word you just misspelled, it’s just that whatever device or software you are using introduced the error without you noticing it before hitting the blue button, than it is to simply skim past the misspelled word itself.

Drawing everyone’s attention to your claim that you really know how to spell a word that you observably didn’t know how to spell correctly is simple pride and vanity, and worse, it’s completely misplaced vanity.

Here’s why. It doesn’t make you look any less stupid to be knowingly using a device that regularly introduces errors than it does to make the occasional spelling error or typo in the first place. In fact, it makes you look at least twice as stupid, because first, either you don’t know how to turn autocorrect off or you actually rely on it. And second, given how often these errors are introduced, you are probably making more spelling mistakes due to using it than you would if you simply relied on your own spelling capabilities.

If you use a spellchecker, that’s fine, but then own it. If it screws up, it’s on you. Deal with it already and stop talking about the stupid things. To quote the VFM, WE DON’T CARE.

I see little of this at File 770 since I installed the editing option, so don’t take it as an oblique message. I just enjoyed the rant.

(3) Check out Joe Phillips’ posters recasting Old Hollywood stars in modern superhero movies.

jp-teentitans

If you’re curious to see what Marilyn Monroe would look like as Power Girl, or Humphrey Bogart as Hellboy, wonder no more! Joe Phillips’ Silver Screen Heroes series has brought this vision of a better world to life. Phillips not only has a good eye for likenesses, but also a good eye for casting. Clark Gable as Tony Stark is an especially inspired choice!

(4) George R.R. Martin’s plea on Not A Blog for fans to vote in the Hugos was picked up as a news item in the Guardian.

George RR Martin is urging “every true fan” of science fiction to vote in the Hugo awards before the ballot closes at the end of July, for what the Game of Thrones author said was “proving to be the most controversial and hotly contested Hugo race in the award’s long history”.

Larry Correia endorsed the voter participation message and gave it a signal boost:

For once I agree with GRRM. Everybody should vote. The deadline is coming up fast.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/20/george-rr-martin-hugo-awards-vote-game-of-thrones-science-fiction?CMP=share_btn_fb

Since we wrote a novella worth of giant blog posts back and forth, GRRM knows damned good and well the Sad Puppies campaign wasn’t motivated by racism or sexism, but that doesn’t stop him from casually tossing the “neo-nazi” accusation out there… but you should believe him when he says there was like totally never any political bias in the system.

(5) Dr. Kjell Lindgren, Sasquan’s Special Guest, is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station this Wednesday, July 22. Glenn Glazer reports NASA will be covering the launch on television. It will be at 5:02 EST.

Kjell Lindgren of NASA, Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:02 p.m. EDT (3:02 a.m. Thursday, July 23 in Baikonur). NASA TV coverage will begin at 4 p.m.

The trio will ride to space in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which will rendezvous with the space station and dock after four orbits of Earth. Docking to the space station’s Rassvet module will take place at 10:46 p.m. NASA TV coverage of docking will begin at 10 p.m.

The crew will open the hatches between the Soyuz and the station around 12:25 a.m. Thursday, July 23. Expedition 44 Commander Gennady Padalka of Roscosmos, as well as Flight Engineers Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos, will greet Lindgren, Kononenko and Yui. NASA TV hatch opening coverage begins at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday.

Lindgren, Kononenko and Yui will remain aboard the station until late December. Kelly and Kornienko, who have been aboard since March 27, will return to Earth in March 2016 at the end of their one-year mission. Padalka, who also has been aboard since March 27, will return to Earth in September, leaving Kelly in command of Expedition 45.

(6) On the SFWA Blog, Lynne M. Thomas, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, discusses the importance of archiving. She is responsible for collections that include the literary papers of over 70 sf and fantasy authors as well as SFWA’s official archives.

(7) Adam-Troy Castro’s “That Sledge-Hammer was Always Meant To Hit There: A Hugo Theory” reacts to Michael Z. Williamson’s announcement that he is voting No Award in all the Hugo categories.

So far I’ve only seen the rant from {Moronic Massacre-Mocker}, who is being given a time-out from Facebook for hate speech.

But if we permit consideration of the possibility that it has become a meme, it represents a serious shift in strategy and a complete rebranding of the desired goal.

We wanted the ship to sink. We always wanted to make a point about icebergs.

We wanted our village to be sacked. It proves our moral superiority to the huns.

Yes, I just slammed myself in the balls with a sledgehammer. I meant to do that.

Maybe they know how many supporting memberships they paid for and how many they did not. Maybe they’ve convened in panic and discussed how to still pull a nominal victory out of all this. Maybe they’ve said, “We have to sell the premise that if we go down in flames, it’s what we always intended.”

Maybe they’re terrified.

This is just a conspiracy theory, mind you. It might or might not have any validity. But the shift from, “VOTING NO AWARD IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!” to “WE ARE NOW VOTING NO AWARD EVEN IN OUR OWN CATEGORIES!” does give me pause….

(8) Michael Z. Williamson’s FB timeout, referenced by Castro, presumably was triggered by the grotesque “joke” MZW posted after the Charleston church shootings.

Although MZW is temporarily banned from posting to one account he is rolling along posting his usual fare as “EH Michael Williamson”.

MZW FB

[Thanks to Craig Miller, Glenn Glazer, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories.]

219 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/20

  1. 1. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
    – changed my mind when I imagined being forced to choose one of them to reread

    2. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    3. James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)
    – hard, not sure about Use of Weapons vs any other Banks SF – tend to the opinion that nothing he wrote after Consider Phlebas is meaningfully better

    4. Frank Herbert: Dune
    – the only one of the three I read multiple times

    5. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    – unfair of me, not having read The Female Man yet, but I can hardly assume something I haven’t read deserves to push someone ahead of or into a tie with Le Guin

    6. William Gibson: Neuromancer
    – also unfair of me

    7. Abstain
    – haven’t read either of them yet – something to take on after I’ve finished Hugo voting, amidst reading things to possibly nominate next year

    8. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
    – putting overall significance to the genre over personal enjoyment on this one – perhaps not consistent with 1. although in that case both books are highly historically significant in a way I don’t think Lord of Light is

  2. 1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Frank Herbert: Dune

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    William Gibson: Neuromancer

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

  3. 1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    William Gibson: Neuromancer

    7. WAR IN SPACE VS. CIRCULAR METATEXTUALITY
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station
    Samuel Delaney: Dhalgren

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

  4. e.g. “Wisdom from my Internets 2: Suck it SJWs!”

    That and the presumably soon to be declared Rabid crusade to ensure that Beale’s forthcoming SJWs Always Lie makes it onto the Best Related Work ballot next year. I suppose it will at least undeniably contain genre/fandom-related content.

    Actually, I’m somewhat optimistic that even Puppydom will have second thoughts about pushing anything as obviously unworthy as WFMI next year – can they really want to hang a millstone like that around their necks again while arguing that they’re championing good stuff that would otherwise be unfairly denied Hugo consideration?

  5. Jon: Of course they can. They did it once, so now they can be defending their own past wisdom. Remember Beale’s obsession with never apologizing or capitulating.

  6. 1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
    Books! Books are on fire! Better, shorter, punchier than Wells.

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
    Frankenstein! Frankenstein is also on fire!

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)
    James Tiptree is on fire because I do not like Iain Banks.

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Empire
    Asimov! Asimov is on fire!

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    I substitute the one-two punch of The Lathe of Heaven and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and now Ursula K. Le Guin is on fire! (nothing against Left Hand, but I haven’t read it yet and wanted to vote for LeGuin.)

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
    A very tough call, but Handmaid’s Tale took only twenty pages to set me on fire!

    7. WAR IN SPACE VS. CIRCULAR METATEXTUALITY
    Abstain! Abstaining is on fire!

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light
    Lord of Light is on fire, because I still do not like Brave New World.

    Every bracket is different. No two brackets are NOT ON FIRE.

    (For the original, click here: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail84.html.)

  7. Of course they can. They did it once, so now they can be defending their own past wisdom. Remember Beale’s obsession with never apologizing or capitulating.

    There’s also the fact that BT showed up here to tepidly defend Wisdom, although from his limp defenses of the slated works it seems likely that he hasn’t actually read many of them.

  8. Please. The only consistent Puppy defence of Wisdom… is to go into Scalzi Derangement Syndrome and cite Your Hate Mail... as a precedent.

    Despite the fact that not one of them has actually read the book beyond the free Amazon sneak peek of a couple of articles.

  9. Can I have more ado next time, Kyra? I’m a little low on ado this week.

    1. Fahrenheit 451. Although I have the War of the Worlds edition with Gorey art, which is my favorite WotW edition of all time.

    2. Frankenstein.

    3. Two authors that I have never read and have always intended to.

    4. Tough one. I lean toward the Heinlein.

    8. Lord of Light. Not to be confused with Creatures of Light and Darkness, which I did when I was younger. I also conflated Flowers in the Attic with Flowers for Algernon, which lead to A LOT of confusion for pre-teen me.

  10. Not to be confused with Creatures of Light and Darkness, which I did when I was younger.

    I really love Creatures of Light and Darkness.

  11. Missed this last time:
    1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
    Pick your passion: condemning colonialism or condemning censorship (or TV culture if you’re a cranky old genius). I like the themes of Wells better, but Bradbury’s writing is just so much pleasure to read.

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End
    Only book to ever scare me so much I had to put it down. Of course, I was 11 or 12, but still. I had to go get a hug from my parents it got to me so much. I finished it a few days later. I think part of it was thinking that I had just missed the opportunity with being just a little over 10 years old.

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)
    Pass. I love Use of Weapons, but having not read any Tiptree (I know, I know) and given how people are talking about it, I feel that I can’t give this one to Banks. (And I do think that Use of Weapons is the best Culture novel. Not the most accessible, but the best.)

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Frank Herbert: Dune
    As much as I would love this to be a contest, it isn’t. I adore Asimov and have read probably over a hundred of his books (at one point in time, I wanted to read all his fiction. I never did, but not for lack of trying.), but I don’t think he ever wrote anything better than Dune. For weird religions, the religion of mars does not hold a candle to Zensuni or the Reverend Mothers.

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    I’m going against what I did for 3 up there. I haven’t read Russ, but I have trouble imagining a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness (except The Dispossessed, that one was better). So I have to chose Le Guin.

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    Really hard one. I go with Neuromancer, but only by a hair.

    7. WAR IN SPACE VS. CIRCULAR METATEXTUALITY
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station
    Samuel Delaney: Dhalgren
    Pass. I’ve only read one Cherryh (Foreigner) and no Delaney.

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light
    Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
    Pass. Brave New World is great, but it doesn’t have unequaled preeminence like LHoD. I need to read Lord of Light.

  12. 1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
    Still don’t care for Bradbury

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Frank Herbert: Dune
    I didn’t vote for Heinlein or Asimov in the last round and the reasons still apply

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    But only just.

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    Tie because I’ve changed my mind so many times.

    7. WAR IN SPACE VS. CIRCULAR METATEXTUALITY
    Samuel Delaney: Dhalgren

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

  13. Brian’s latest dipshit strategy is to wail “But what about Sheri Tepper? Will no one think of the Teppers?!”

    Apparently, no voting system that wouldn’t shortlist Tepper is acceptable.

    This actually argues in favor of EPH, because the choice isn’t between EPH and the halcyon days of yore when assholes didn’t fuck things up. It’s between EPH and what we have now. And under the current rules, with Puppy slating, Tepper would have no chance, and neither would most if not all of the choices above her, either.

    So “Think of the Teppers!” is an argument in favor of diminishing the power of slates. Brian just didn’t think it through in his haste to preserve slating power by pretending to object on other grounds.

  14. I’ve got a post in moderation – I’m guessing it’s for salty language.

  15. abriel F. on July 21, 2015 at 4:25 am said:

    The thing that struck me most about MZW’s rant is how violently misogynistic it is. Everyone get hit with a “female” slur. Because it seems like the worst thing he can come up with is to compare someone to a nasty women. Gross.

    There is a recently released paper on PLOS ONE of mixed quality* that examined the negative comments to female players on gamers playing Halo 3 on XBox live. Notably the poorer performing players in the game were more inclined to direct negative comments at players they thought were women.

    [*I say ‘mixed’ because they wrap the study up in some very dubious evolutionary psychology blah – which I think only detracts from an otherwise interesting study]

  16. Jon on July 21, 2015 at 9:20 am said:

    Actually, I’m somewhat optimistic that even Puppydom will have second thoughts about pushing anything as obviously unworthy as WFMI next year – can they really want to hang a millstone like that around their necks again while arguing that they’re championing good stuff that would otherwise be unfairly denied Hugo consideration?

    You’d think so but given that same argument would apply this year and they manifestly DID nominate it I’m not so hopeful. Of course the Rabids don’t give a crap anyway and will nominate stuff like that just on the basis of the SJW-head-explody theory.

    Mind you Paulk isn’t Torgersen or Correia, so we will see…

  17. Mind you Paulk isn’t Torgersen or Correia, so we will see…

    Has she said: We got played this year. While we still believe that there are serious structural problems with the Hugos, we recognise that the way we were played did more damage than we could have corrected. Therefore we will not be engaging in slates next year. or at least something analogous. Because, frankly, any puppy who can’t bring themselves to say that is showing foam at the mouth.

  18. 1. Wells
    2. Shelley
    3. Banks
    4. Asimov
    5. Le Guin
    6. Atwood
    7. Cherryh
    8. Zelazny

    A number of these are very close (Neuromancer I’d have liked to keep in longer, for example).

  19. nickpheas on July 21, 2015 at 12:13 pm said:

    Mind you Paulk isn’t Torgersen or Correia, so we will see…

    Has she said: We got played this year. While we still believe that there are serious structural problems with the Hugos, we recognise that the way we were played did more damage than we could have corrected. Therefore we will not be engaging in slates next year. or at least something analogous. Because, frankly, any puppy who can’t bring themselves to say that is showing foam at the mouth.

    🙂 no and I think the Sads will never openly criticize VD unless he openly attacks them first. Short of that they’ll always play second fiddle to whatever crazy game VD has in his head.

    At MadGenius they just re-posted a 2014 post from Dave Freer. It takes a different tack from his other analysis. He claims that traditional publishing overall leans so heavily to the left that finding conservative authors to nominate apart from Larry Correia would be difficult. So maybe that will be the retreat-rationale, the odds are too stacked against them by the evil forces of capitalism (?).

  20. Oneiros at 8:16 am: *APPLAUSE*

    Thank you, I have found my form response to Brian.

    Hey Brian, are you going to reply to Oneiros’ comment or are you going to keep hand-wringing and trying to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)?

    (@Laertes: Oneiros has expended effort so I don’t have to.)

  21. Camestros Felapton: Paulk is going to wind up the stalking horse while VD delivers the votes. The Hugo rules can’t be changed by 2016, so a repeat of this year’s scenario may be there for the taking.

    Now, the main difference is that thousands of people with Sasquan supporting memberships will be eligible to nominate next year. We don’t know at this moment what the likelihood is of them exercising that right, or which way they lean. A wild card possibility is there could be so many people casting nominating votes for whatever they like in the usual haphazard pattern they wil nevertheless keep the Puppies from monopolizing the ballot.

  22. Man that Williamson guy is giving Tank Marmot a run for his money.
    Why are they all so angry and violent?

  23. Mike Glyer on July 21, 2015 at 12:52 pm said:

    Camestros Felapton: Paulk is going to wind up the stalking horse while VD delivers the votes. The Hugo rules can’t be changed by 2016, so a repeat of this year’s scenario may be there for the taking.

    Now, the main difference is that thousands of people with Sasquan supporting memberships will be eligible to nominate next year. We don’t know at this moment what the likelihood is of them exercising that right, or which way they lean.

    You are right and currently I feel like I’m waiting for the next book in some fantasy series whose last volume ended on a cliffhanger to see how all those supporting memberships are going to play out.

  24. @Camestros

    I agree that the Sads are unlikely to properly attack the rabids beyond the careful shuffling away manoeuvres they’ve already done. A while ago I indulged in the entirely baseless speculation that if they did, VD might have a big pile of emails to release showing exactly how the slate-cake was baked.
    Also, I spotted your interesting comments over at MGC. Good luck. Do you think that Freer article originally predates the Red Balls article?

  25. Camestros: It’s true, sf/f publishing is so left-leaning that a major house like Tor wouldn’t even touch work by someone like Brandon Sanderson, or John C. Wright. Oh, wait. The level of deliberate, lying blindness it takes to write these screeds baffles me sometimes.

  26. cmm said: “Man that Williamson guy is giving Tank Marmot a run for his money.
    Why are they all so angry and violent?”

    If I was stuck being Mike Williamson, I’d be pretty upset about it too. 🙂

  27. @Soon Lee

    I’d like to be optimistic, but Paulk saying it won’t be a slate doesn’t prevent it being a slate in all but name.

    @Mike

    I’d like to be optimistic here too, but I believe that the recent hugo stars suggest it will take an absolute minimum of 5 non-slate voters nominating in the usual distribution to outweigh 1 slate voter. This is why I’m reading lots of short fiction right now, so I can be the most effective 0.2 of a puppy as I can.

  28. @Camestros: “You’d think so but given that same argument would apply this year and they manifestly DID nominate it I’m not so hopeful.”

    Reall? What did SP2 get or try to get nominated that was a bad as Wisdom from My Internet? Even VD’s story, though by many accounts not at all good, was undeniably an SFF story, wasn’t it?

    Not that I’m claiming they couldn’t possibly try to nominate something that bad again next year, I’m just hopeful that they won’t. I can imagine VD deliberately going with a push crap onto the ballot while loudly saying it’s crap just to annoy people further strategy, but Paulk’s rhetoric makes that seem an implausible tack for her to take.

  29. I think after we see the results from the Hugo voting after the ceremony we’ll have a better, if not best, idea of how many of the new supporting members are puppy inclined, outside that circle, or mostly joined due to the 4-way 2017 site selection race.

  30. Trolling is about the feeling of power you get by expending a little effort to make your playthings expend a lot. It’s sort of like using a laser pointer to play with your cat

    More like shining a laser pointer at an aircraft.

  31. Mark at 1:29 pm:
    I agree on both counts. I’m also making more of an effort to read with nominating in mind.

    The evidence so far shows that Beale & RP has been the more effective this year, the SPs being the acceptable face (hah!) of the RPs. I expect Beale will keep doing the same sort of thing next year and even increased numbers of non-bloc voters might not be enough (assuming 5 non-bloc voters is needed per bloc-voter). We’ll know more when this year’s statistics are released.

    So we need “E pluribus Hugo” which I support, but it needs to get approved by the Business Meeting this year & be ratified next year. Best case scenario: I expect we’ll have at least one more year of effective Puppy shenanigans. Worst case scenario: EPH fails to pass & after a few more years of Puppies, no-one takes the Hugos seriously anymore.

  32. @Soon Lee

    Agreed, EPH is vital long term. The numbers from this year will be interesting but difficult to analyse – there are obviously a great number of people who came into the process after nomination, and predicting how many might be voting slate or slate-free next year will be difficult. Actually, VD may have mistepped here – his precise voting instructions include works even the SP wouldn’t stoop to ranking first, so an accurate count of the RP might be possible from the rounds of voting data.

  33. 1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Asimov: Foundation and Empire

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    Margaret Atwood: Handmaid’s Tale

  34. Jon on July 21, 2015 at 1:32 pm said:

    Reall? What did SP2 get or try to get nominated that was a bad as Wisdom from My Internet?

    Fair point. So based on SP2 & SP3 I’ll say it is 50-50 🙂

  35. Bruce Baugh on July 21, 2015 at 1:07 pm said:
    Camestros: It’s true, sf/f publishing is so left-leaning that a major house like Tor wouldn’t even touch work by someone like Brandon Sanderson, or John C. Wright. Oh, wait. The level of deliberate, lying blindness it takes to write these screeds baffles me sometimes.

    The degree of self-deception involved is extraordinary.

  36. Best case scenario: I expect we’ll have at least one more year of effective Puppy shenanigans.

    I don’t think I’m a congenital optimist but surely the best case scenario is that there will be enough non-slaters nominating next year to make shenanigans of any origin largely ineffective. Maybe that’s out of reach under the current rules but let’s not assume it is.

  37. Also, I spotted your interesting comments over at MGC. Good luck. Do you think that Freer article originally predates the Red Balls article?

    No replies yet but presumably Dave Freer’s computer is still down. I haven’t checked the date on the Red Ball article. The re-post one there now was from September 2014 – so in the wake of SP2 I guess.

  38. Just FYI, I’m planning on declaring voting closed on this round of the Bracket in about an hour.

    At Kevin Hogan’s request, I will attempt to do so with much ado.

  39. @Jon

    Optimism is a good thing, but I just checked the 2014 nominating stats and my memory had been far too optimistic: the first placed short got 9.1% and the fifth placed under 5% (therefore not making the ballot). Assuming the same distribution from non-slate voters (including assuming that they nominate in that category) means you need over 10 to 1 just to keep a single non-slate work in contention, and 20 to 1 to block the slate. It’s not as bad in other categories, but even Novel only had 23.1% for first place.
    The numbers play differently if the slate is less disciplined of course.
    The other factor is the participation in the less popular categories, which are more liable to fall to slates.

  40. I think it would be interesting to try this contest using only books from the last 20 years…Just to see what comes out of the era of “evil SJW domination”, AKA contemporary SF&F. :’)

    1. FOR SOME REASON EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
    Call it the Founder Effect.

    2. MEN CREATE MONSTERS, MONSTERS CHANGE MEN
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
    I don’t think the Clark has aged well- Shelley has given us not only a novel, but terminology.

    3. … AND ALL FANDOM WAS PLUNGED INTO WAR
    James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (collection of stories)

    4. GIANT-SIZED THREE-WAY INTERPLANETARY BATTLE!
    Frank Herbert: Dune
    Heinlein’s and Asimov’s writing hasn’t aged well, IMO.

    5. THE FEMALE MAN VS. THE FEMALE/MAN
    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    6. PICK YOUR DYSTOPIA
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    I’d rather give it to Atwood, but Gibson defined a genre.

    7. WAR IN SPACE VS. CIRCULAR METATEXTUALITY
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station
    Because I could finish the Cherryh.

    8. ENLIGHTENMENT AND ENDARKENMENT
    Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
    I liked the Zelazney more, but I’m sure there’s people in Silicon Valley right now reading Brave New World and saying “Hey! We can do that!”

  41. To begin the ado, before closing the voting, here are some special awards for some works which have already been eliminated, or never were in the bracket in the first place:

    “The Alley Man” Awards, given to works judged most likely to have progressed significantly further if not for the luck of the early draw (“The Alley Man” being, of course, the work that came in second the year “Flowers for Algernon” took the Hugo Award for short story):
    Kindred by Octavia Butler
    A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
    1984 by George Orwell

    The Pulvapies Write-In Awards, given to works which received a high number of votes in brackets they weren’t even in (Pulvapies is a kind of foot powder that won a mayoral election in Ecuador):
    The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
    Web of Angels by John M. Ford

  42. Trolling is about the feeling of power you get by expending a little effort to make your playthings expend a lot. It’s sort of like using a laser pointer to play with your cat

    Man, I remember in my earlier days trolling one right-wing blog, and getting them to the point of being able to provoke two page rants in the comment threads from one carefully chosen word. Good times, good times.

Comments are closed.