Pixel Scroll 7/23

Six stories, a French rant and a video adorn today’s Scroll.

(1) “Cap’n, it’s a Class M planet.”

“Any lifeform readings?”

Described in media reports as an “earthlike planet” is the Kepler space mission’s first discovery of a world smaller than Neptune in the middle of its star’s habitable zone.

Also called the Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone is the region around a star where a planet’s surface is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water—and thus life as we know it—to exist.

(2) Atlas Obscura has posted its “Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips”. I’ll bet there are some fan fund reports crying out for the same treatment.

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.

(3) Thunderbirds fans are very enthusiastic about the plan to combine old-fashioned “Supermarionation” with audio lifted from three original 21-minute mini-albums released in the 1960s (each was a 7″ single, but played at 33-1/3 rpm). The Kickstarter appeal to fund production, with a goal of $115,789, has already gathered $206,325 in pledges from over 2,000 contributors. The original goal would have paid for one – the current total should pay for all three.

[Director] Stephen La Rivière says: “We have shot new sequences with the puppets using the old-fashioned techniques. Whilst many of the methods used seem a little archaic and time-consuming by today’s standards, we thought that it would be very special to do a one-off project bringing Thunderbirds back to life 1960s style. Sadly, many of the original voice cast have passed away since 1965. However, thanks to the original audio footage we’ve rediscovered, we have new, authentic stories that have never been adapted for screen.”

 

(4) Being a critic is a higher calling for Jonathan McCalmont than most sf bloggers who spend a lot of energy churning other people’s advertising in return for pageviews. (Pay no attention to the man behind the file…) McCalmont inquires “What Price, Your Critical Agency?” on Ruthless Culture.

These days, few cultural ecosystems operate independently of commercial interests. The ability to artificially engineer an interest bubble means that commercial interests will always have some control over the agenda of an enthusiast press. Reviewers will request DVD screeners and ARCs of books they have been encouraged to look forward to and editors will always be happy to slipstream a wave of hype by providing content that satisfies the readership’s artificially-engineered interest in a particular subject. Money and effort devoted to creating buzz translates into traffic and so anyone who is interested in getting more traffic will always go out of their way to chase the hype.

While traffic is a significant carrot to offer in return for collaborating with commercial interests, review copies are another great way of controlling the agenda. At an institutional level, it is difficult to run a reviews department without review copies you can pass on to your reviewers and so the output of a reviews department will always be dependent upon the nature of the screeners and ARCs provided. At an individual level, a commitment to operate any kind of reviews platform means an open-ended commitment to media consumption and while you may very well be willing to pay for the media you choose to consume, the volume of reviews required to build an audience realistically means deep pockets, a relationship with publicists, or a willingness to obtain review materials for free by either borrowing or stealing.

One of my favourite recent discoveries has been S.C. Flynn’s Scy-Fy, a blog that features no fewer than 100 different interviews with book bloggers, magazine editors, podcasters and something he somewhat alarmingly refers to as ‘booktubers’. One thing that struck me about these interviews is that despite many of them warning about the dangers of writing only about new books and how setting your own critical agenda is the best way to stay productive and stave off burnout, most of the interviewees operate platforms that lavish their attention on new releases. In other words, they know that allowing commercial forces to influence their critical output is dangerous and yet they continue to let it happen.

(5) But at the very tip of the cultural pyramid is the blogosphere’s most highly evolved parasite, with an enviable track record of breaking stories before the studios’ own PR staffs ever hear about them. Alex Pappademas on Grantland tells how El Mayimbe creates those leaks.

El Mayimbe’s real name is Umberto Gonzalez, born 41 years ago in Queens, New York, of Dominican and Colombian descent, and as a self-proclaimed “fanboy journalist” and “ace scooper,” he lives for moments like these. If a studio’s measuring an actor for an iconic leotard or cowl or enchanted helm or loincloth, if a director signs up to reboot a trilogy based on an action figure, Gonzalez wants to be the first to know, and the first to trumpet that information on the Internet, via a fistful of social-media accounts and a new website called Heroic Hollywood, which went live in June. In an era when the movie business sometimes appears to be rebooting itself as a machine that cranks out nothing but superhero movies, Gonzalez is far from the only reporter whose beat includes stories like these, but no one follows it as closely or as aggressively. Gonzalez broke that Brandon Routh would play Superman, that Heath Ledger would play the Joker. He knew that Bradley Cooper would be supplying the voice of Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy, he says, before Cooper’s own publicist did.

(7) You don’t need to know French to catch the drift of this Telerama article about the Puppies, titled “Hugo Awards : le plus grand prix de SF menacé par des groupes d’extrême droite.”

Fervent défenseur des armes à feu

Cette année, le débat est autre. Un groupe de fans extrêmement conservateurs, les sad puppies (« chiots tristes »), dirigés par un fervent défenseur des armes à feu, Larry Correia, s’était déjà fait attaquer pour ses choix. En 2014, il avait mis de l’eau dans son vin, proposant aussi sur ses listes des auteurs progressistes. Trop, au goût de certains de ses membres, qui ont formé un groupe dissident, les rabid puppies (« chiots enragés »), l’ont débordé sur sa droite et ont réussi, en faisant voter en masse leurs soutiens, à faire inclure dans toutes les listes de nominés la plupart de leurs candidats. Démarche parfaitement en accord avec les règles du prix. Mais les livres ainsi proposés deviennent les fers de lance d’une percée idéologique forte. Et le prix est aujourd’hui au bord de l’implosion.

[Thanks to Steve Green and John King Tarpinian for some of these links.]

213 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/23

  1. So, I think this video series I found on GamerGate might help illuminate what’s going on with the Puppies. It goes into the psychology of the two groups that make up this sort of movement, and how people become enmeshed.
    It also points out that when you debate someone from a group like that you aren’t really debating them you are debating everyone who reads the conversation. You don’t convince the Puppy, but you can present your arguments in a convincing way anyway.
    Just insulting someone is completely counterproductive.

  2. While Brian is clearly a concern troll and puppy collaborator, calling him what Cubist did is a bit harsh. Brian is disingenuous, repetitive, and misrepresents EPH at every turn, but I’m not sure that was the best way to address him.

    EPH is the only way forward, given the RP/SP aren’t going anywhere and will continue to force a bunch of crap onto the ballot at every opportunity until something is done to stop them (or any other slate monger) stuffing the nominations every year.

    Though I did find James Corey through this whole mess – I’m reading Leviathan Wakes, which is entertaining in a take your brain out way (though there is a fair bunch of continuity errors which should have been edited out). It’s this sort of stuff that the RP/SP said should be nominated, then they go ahead an nominate boring crap.

    As Worldcon owns the rights to the Hugo, can’t a rule be passed saying that, if you come below No Award, you can’t say Hugo-nominated? Or if you do, you have to say came 6th out of 5 in voting?

    Edited to add: Aaron, I think RP’s are “amused” as well as frothing and offended.

  3. Chris: Leviathan Wakes actually was nominated for a Hugo and all! Though given the positive depictions of gay characters, Holden’s family, and all the racial and cultural mixing going on in the books, the puppes may just consider it more SJW messagefic

  4. My vote in the final bracket: LeGuin.

    The last time I tried engaging in conversation on a Puppy-affiliated forum (Torgersen’s blog), I got called a troll. Unlike an actual net.troll, I chose not to continue devoting my time to a space where my presence was not welcome.

  5. @Lorcan Nagle
    I have yet to read Leviathan Wakes but I am excited about the Expanse on the SciFi channel and look forward to watching it.

    I hope to get the time to read the book ahead of time as well.

  6. @Lorcan – I must have missed that year! Thanks for the info. I’d say it deserved a nom, despite the flaws.

    But but it has spaceships and space battles and huge explosions! Can’t be SJW! Like Ancillary Just… oh.

  7. I’m going to go with Shelley, because it’s the first work to give us the classic SF concept of “You go too far!”

    I also vote for Shelly and LeGuin to engage in fusion, so we can have a giant, four-armed, four-eyed author, most likely with a magical pen as a weapon.

  8. This is a really hard choice. I’m going to go with the Le Guin, but then I’m going to lie down with a cold damp cloth over my eyes for a bit….

  9. Because, if the slated nominees don’t turn out to be very good, and if there is not a good selection of other competitive nominees to choose from, then there would be very little point in going through the motions.

    I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. How is it MORE PLAUSIBLE? To reduce it to binaries, if the choice is EPH or talking to them, how can you claim that it is MORE plausible to ‘talk to them’ than to enact EPH? What does ‘talk to them’ mean? What form would it take? Who would do the talking? What would they talk about? How would the talking meaningfully protect the Hugos from being gamed? By anyone? This is your supposedly viable alternative to EPH. Elucidate.

  10. I’m voting for LeGuin in the final, but they’re all winners as far as I’m concerned!

    As for talking to “them”, we’ve been there and are still doing that. It’s quite clear that the problem of nominee slates isn’t going to magically disappear, and that EPH is needed as a remedy to prevent not only another Puppies slate from sweeping the nominations but to prevent a proliferation of counter-slates, which would promote the very divisiveness that Brian Z is evidently worried about.

  11. Brian Z said : Another option – not the one I prefer – might be to list 10-15 works and invite people to at least have a look at excerpts if they don’t have time to read them all.

    Which is precisely the solution of the commenter who did the ‘analysis’ Brian Z posted yesterday. Funny about that….

  12. I am finding this discussion rather puzzling.

    There seems to be a widespread assumption that EPH is the only possible solution, given that the Puppies aren’t going away. If that’s so, the only thing we need to decide is whether EPH produces a better result than what we have now, which of course it does. But EPH isn’t the only proposed solution. Lots of possibilities were considered, and EPH was chosen as the one that would produce the best result, given the various merits and defects of each. But so far as I know, the question of what sort of results EPH, with slate voting, would produce in the short fiction categories wasn’t taken into account at that stage. If it turns out that it would still allow a slate to dominate the ballot in those categories, that looks like a reason for thinking again, and looking at the other possibilities.

    For instance: One proposal made at an early stage was simply to allow everyone only one vote per category. I didn’t like that, because I thought it would polarise the ballot too much. But it would certainly prevent a slate dominating the ballot (well, unless it had a much larger number of supporters, and they were prepared to work deviously). An organised campaign could take one place (as now); five separate organised campaigns could take every place. But as far as I can see that’s true under EPH as well. I think this deserves to be reconsidered, along with other proposed solutions.

  13. Andrew M.: One proposal made at an early stage was simply to allow everyone only one vote per category… I think this deserves to be reconsidered, along with other proposed solutions.

    I think that this is a very poor solution — one that could not even be guaranteed to overcome coordinated slate voting. Because only 20% of current nominations would be made, only 20% of the current threshold of votes needed to make the ballot would be required.

    Limiting Hugo nominators so severely is just not an acceptable solution, any more than eliminating the right of Supporting Members to nominate would be acceptable.

  14. I’m with Cally. LeGuin, and a cool, damp cloth over my eyes.

    Conversing with Brian Z is like conversing with my sister. Don’t try it if you value your connection with the real world.

  15. Brian Z.:

    Talking to them is still a more plausible solution than ending up choosing between only 1 or 2 non-slate works in most categories

    I look forward to your detailed report on your attempts to talk to them. Me, I support EPH, so I helped work on it. As far as I’m concerned, even if a small minority of lockstep nominators can partially fill a category, it’s better than the alternative: that they completely fill that category. I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t done: put your money where your mouth is and personally work on your solution.

    So I’ll be sure not to miss it, do you know yet when and where you’ll post this report?

  16. @Andrew M: The hypothetical being addressed in that list is “what if we took the nomination results for the 2013 Hugos, added 200 slate voters to the list for each category, and then used EPH to compute the totals?”

    In 2013, only 662 nomination ballots were cast in the Short Story category, and preferences were so widely spread that the third-place nominee got in with only 34 votes. (See page 20 here.) In that kind of environment, it doesn’t surprise me that two hundred slate votes added to the pot would dominate the category, and I think any voting system that could prevent slates from dominating in such a hypothetical case would have other problems.

  17. felice, the commenter on ML who ran the hypothetical category results for 2013, also wrote this:

    Yes, EPH is superior to the current system; that’s not in dispute. It’s a good proposal and should be passed. The problem is that it doesn’t help enough.

    My emphasis.

    If felice’s results hold up, they are disappointing. I’d like EPH to be more effective across the board, not just in the Novel category. But two things:

    1. It is better than the status quo, which is “Slates can sweep any category they care to and there is an active super-slate faction that’s proven it can persist across multiple years already.”
    2. It does not depend on securing the good will of people who may not choose to give it. (Like the nebulous injunction, “[You other people,] talk to them!” does.) It mitigates the effects of slates not yet born too. (Needless to say, “[You other people,] talk to them!” does not, since we don’t yet know whom to talk to.)
    3. By WSFS rules, passing EPH this year still provides for a further year of consideration of the rule. That gives people until 2016 to come up with a superior, actionable proposal, if there is one to be had.
    4. Meanwhile, if no better proposal arises, passing EPH this year allows it to be implemented as quickly as possible: 2017. Not passing EPH this year pushes its implementation back until at least 2018.
    5. The hypothetical better proposal one comes up with over the next year would still not go into effect until 2018 by WSFS rules. So even there, it’s probably worth having EPH live for 2017 as a stopgap.

    Summing up: there’s good reason for felice’s hypothetical – if it holds up – to dampen one’s enthusiasm for EPH, but not for it to dampen one’s resolve.

  18. Andrew M: I, at least, don’t think that EPH is the only solution so much as it’s the only piece folks have worked up this year that seems to have a really strong chance of dealing with a demonstrable problem without creating other easily foreseeable problems. All the schemes to restrict each person’s number of nominations run into the easily foreseeable problem that they call upon everyone to change (maybe drastically change) the way they nominate, without offering any particular assurance of making slates less successful. It’s possible that they could, but nobody’s yet done the math, whereas the EPH crowd fall on data with glad little cries and show it at work under their proposed changes.

    Admittedly they have an advantage here, because changing the number of allowed nominations is very likely to change voting in unpredictable ways. Kyra’s sf brackets illustrate – the bracket wins aren’t what any one individual would have picked on their own, and different match-ups would lead to significantly different outcomes. It’s not that there’s anything innately natural about picking five, but it’s what we’ve got, and at this point it seems reasonable not to want a change unless there’s a clear sign that it would improve things with regard to any actually existing problem with the system.

  19. EPH is the best solution for dampening the disproportionate impact of slate voting where 20% of the voters can effectively dominate the nomination phase. It also doesn’t affect the way that individual nominees vote currently. If two hundred slate voters are going up against 64 non-slate voters, EPH won’t prevent the slate’s nominees from dominating the results. (Not that I expect such a scenario to happen, but it could.) Passing EPH at this year’s WSFS Business meeting is just a first step, since it would also have to pass next year at MidAmericon II before taking effect, and we’ll have the benefit of being able to look at the numbers for this year’s Hugos for a year to inform the business meeting voters in 2016 about whether to implement EPH or not.

  20. @Aaron:

    (Of course, the real reason is that the Puppies are practicing naked nepotism, but that doesn’t gin up a political voting bloc)

    Dammit, this is completely untrue and completely unfair.

    The Puppies are practicing naked cronyism.

  21. Shambles on July 24, 2015 at 7:20 am said:
    @Lorcan Nagle
    I have yet to read Leviathan Wakes but I am excited about the Expanse on the SciFi channel and look forward to watching it.

    I hope to get the time to read the book ahead of time as well.

    It looks like the show is going to divert from the book to some degree. One of the characters in the trailer is introduced in Caliban’s War, and only has cameo appearances in Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn.

    Chris S on July 24, 2015 at 7:21 am said:
    @Lorcan – I must have missed that year! Thanks for the info. I’d say it deserved a nom, despite the flaws.

    But but it has spaceships and space battles and huge explosions! Can’t be SJW! Like Ancillary Just… oh.

    I don’t like to pigeonhole the Puppies, because gross generalisations are a big part of the problem with the culture war mode of thinking. You create a dichotomy and everyone on the other side is put into your definition of “bad”, and the things they like must be bad too.

    With that in mind, I do think there’s a significant chunk of the people who follow the Puppy ringleaders – especially Beale who do think that way. We like Ancilary Justice and Leviathan Wakes so they must be bad. Because Ancilary Justice does the gendered pronoun thing it has to be to make a feminist point, and that’s double bad. (There’s even evidence of that here, in aeou’s recent trolling run through the last puppy roundup thread).

    And it does make me think there’s some truth to the idea that a lot of the Puppies aren’t well-read in SF. And I say this as someone who is admittedly not brilliantly read in the SF canon. But I can look back at the Hugo nominees and I’ve read at least one novel that was nominated in pretty much every year since 1974, so at the very least I can see the trends in terms of social elements in SF and I can see that the core puppy argument is bull.

    I do think the videos that Penn posted upthread are shockingly accurate. There’s a couple of people who efended Gamergate/attacked Anita Sarkeesian on a board I help to run, and I can see their behaviour patterns in the analysis there.

  22. If two hundred slate voters are going up against 64 non-slate voters, EPH won’t prevent the slate’s nominees from dominating the results.

    And it shouldn’t. If there are two hundred people voting for something as opposed to sixty-four people voting for something else, whether we like the choice of the 200 or not, the votes of the 200 should have some impact. EPH allows for that while also serving to prevent a dedicated minority from dominating the ballot.

  23. Felice’s results are the predictable consequence of the drop off in nominations between categories, plus elements such as level of diffusion in people’s choices. A 20% slate in Novel becomes a 40% slate in a category with half the noms, and so has (and “deserves”) a higher impact.
    This is why encouraging greater participation in the less popular categories is a useful addition to EPH.

    On that topic, whoever recommended I try Uncanny for shorts to my taste was a genius. I don’t think I’ve found any more dead certs yet, but a couple are pretty close.

  24. @Aaron

    Agreed. I think that felice seems to be arguing that another stage should be implemented to eliminate SP/RP nominations entirely, which would be essentially fulfilling the crazed conspiracy theories that they already have of works being deemed acceptable or not for nomination.

    If Torgersen’s predictably written drek gets nominated and wins under the same rules as everyone else, other than a revising of the taste of Worldcon voters, I have no problem with that. If the sad puppy readers get out the vote for their choices without operating a slate and sweep the nominations, I have no problem with that either. The point is to remove the ability of leveraged voting like slating to disproportionately dominate and thus exclude the good faith votes of the individual voter. That’s it. For all of the whining and piddling on the carpet, the outrage wasn’t about the crap being on the list in the first. It was about how the crap got on the list first and foremost.

  25. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    I’m a firm believer in reading something in the context of it’s time, but the Le Guin still seems more world bending.

  26. @Johan P

    Are there any significant works that make a point of allowing same-gender biological parents?

    While this is not explicitly mentioned in Ancillary Justice, it would seem to me that it’s strongly implied that gender of the parents is irrelevant:

    “I used to wonder how Radchaai reproduced, if they were all the same gender.”
    “They’re not. And they reproduce like anyone else.” Strigan raised one skeptical eyebrow. “They go to the medic,” I continued, “and have their contraceptive implants deactivated. Or they use a tank. Or they have surgery so they can carry a pregnancy. Or they hire someone to carry it.”

  27. For all of the whining and piddling on the carpet, the outrage wasn’t about the crap being on the list in the first. It was about how the crap got on the list first and foremost.

    That is exactly right. The issue is that a handful of voters – making up a fairly small minority – dominated the entire Hugo ballot. The nominating rules have been vulnerable to this sort of bloc voting for decades, but until the past couple years no one has been crappy enough to exploit this weakness the way that the Puppies did. Everyone knew about the weakness, but no one was a shitty enough person to jump in and leverage it for their own personal gain until Correia, Torgersen, Beale, Wright, and their fellow Pups decided to be the craptastic people they are.

    The proposed solution is to prevent a minority of voters from dominating the ballot by working as a bloc. That’s it. If the Pups were to somehow get a majority of voters to vote their way, there are no really worthwhile voting systems that would prevent them from dominating the ballot. And EPH isn’t intended to prevent an actual majority of voters from dominating the ballot. If the Pups see EPH as a threat to them, that’s an admission on their part that they are not actually the majority some of their proponents claim they are, and are in fact just a disproportionately loud and angry minority.

  28. Dex, Aaron

    I entirely agree that this is vitally important; the voting system should reflect the views of all those participating. Excluding slates is highly desirable; excluding individuals from consideration because they are idiots, or nominated by idiots, is unacceptable.

    Jim

    That’s wonderful, but I’m not sure that cronyism is the right word for setting up a vanity press so that you can churn out garbage to pack the Hugo ballots, and nominate yourself as both short and long form editor for the Hugos. Perhaps we need to make one up…

  29. Thanks to Penn for the videos — they seem really well thought out, and make the gamergate/sad-rabid connection make sense, where before I just found it bizarrely inexplicable.

    As for the final choice, Frankenstein. Wait, that’s not right. Left Hand of Darkness. No, wait, it has to be Frankenstein. Darkness! Frankenstein! Darkenstein! Frankenhand!

    Ahhhhh! I won’t pick! You can’t make me!!!!!

    (Comes crawling back a little bit later.)

    Um. Okay. Probably Frankenstein after all. Mostly because it’s also a horror story, and has inspired some amazing derivative works.

  30. @Mark on July 24, 2015 at 10:13 am

    I just read that. Excellent little story. Raises some interesting points about the possibility of helpful A.I.s being very confused by humanity.

    ETA: I’ve been very entertained by the bracket, although it feels like comparing apples to oranges to tuna to me… I have not tried to add my opinion due to the mental whiplash the pairings has given me.

  31. @Aaron

    Yeah, that’s why the Puppies have been so focused on claiming that the outrage is because they nominated the ‘wrong types of books’ because that makes it part of a larger cultural war. Really the outrage went in three stages, in my opinion.

    1. Incredulous – The Puppies were assholish and low class enough to actually be proud of hijacking the work and effort of the Worldcon volunteers while taking advantage of the knowledge they’d vote in good faith to try and push them out of their own awards using a long disgraced tactic.

    2. Angry – The Puppies then attempted to justify their actions as being ‘everyone else’s fault they had to do it’ by spinning their massive derpload of conspiracy theories, perceived persecution, victimization, and insults up to eleven.

    3. Disgusted – All that ugliness and all that effort, in order to nominate the absolute steaming piles of puppy mistakes they forced on to the ballot. Special consideration going to their constant screeds about Swirky’s nomination last year not being sci-fi while happily nominating the non-sci-fi ultra-right wing insults of a delusional racist gun nut and all around joke of a human being.

  32. the Angry Jack videos go into my arsenal for communicating with reasonable people … they are useless against the “angry” people. So thanks!!

  33. LeGuin.

    And for all the excitement about the new planet, it has probably already lost all its oceans and water. So I see it more as a proof of concept, rather than a candidate. Still very cool, but not quite as exciting as people seem to be making it out. (Out of the pixel scroll, I think this is the most interesting of the articles.)

  34. Brian Z, you mentioned upthread (I think it was in this thread; it might have been in another one) that there were two Puppy nominees that you were voting above No Award. Which ones were they, and what about them did you like?

    (In the interests of full disclosure, and because I won’t ask you to do something I’m not willing to do, I thought “Totalled” was a serviceable short story, but not award-worthy. I thought Skin Game was a fun read, but not stand-alone enough to warrant a Hugo nominination. (If Butcher were to start a new series, I’d absolutely consider him for a nomination, quality permitting; he’s a good, solid writer. But the Dresden series is too tightly integrated for any individual novel to be a single thing, in my opinion. Your mileage, obviously, may vary.) I’m not voting on movies; I saw virtually none last year. All the other puppy nominees (yes, I’ve read all of them) ranged from mediocre to unreadable.)

  35. 1. “WILL YOU TELL US ABOUT THE OTHER WORLDS OUT AMONG THE STARS — THE OTHER KINDS OF MEN, AND OTHER LIVES?” … HE WAS SOON BORNE AWAY BY THE WAVES AND LOST IN DARKNESS AND DISTANCE.

    Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    Frankenstein took ideas that might be about to be real and told of the effects on contemporary people. Big ideas; how do you treat being who may not have a soul?; what does that mean?
    The Left Hand of Darkness is a whole new world with big differences where the story, the action, is less important than its setting. So that wins for me.

  36. If Butcher were to start a new series, I’d absolutely consider him for a nomination, quality permitting…

    Butcher hasn’t, from where I’m standing, covered himself in glory during this kerfuffle but neither has he, as far as I know, done anything to offend me particularly. The Aeronaut’s Windlass is therefore on my recently assembled list of not quite 20 more novels to attempt to read by year’s end in order to feel like I’ve done my due diligence for that category for next year (I figure I can plow through a lot of well-reviewed/much recommended short fiction in December and January but novels take time). Heck, if it’s good enough, I might even take on the second through fourth Dresden Files books and see what I think of the great leap in quality series fans claim occurs somewhere in that stretch of books.

  37. @Mark Naomi Kritzer is a solid writer. I have enjoyed all the short fiction that I have come across from her.

  38. @Dex

    Narcissistic is certainly a good description of VD; as the numbers of Worldcon members inch upwards it will be interesting to see how many votes he’s bought. After all, if someone is prepared to spend money setting up a vanity press to feed his/her ego, it’s unlikely that the very obvious step of buying votes will be overlooked…

  39. Butcher hasn’t, from where I’m standing, covered himself in glory during this kerfuffle but neither has he, as far as I know, done anything to offend me particularly.

    I’m in the middle of Skin Game right now, and the closest Butcher has come to offending me is with how pedestrian and uninteresting the book is.

  40. I haven’t read Butcher prior to his Hugo nominated novel. I realized this was the 18th book of a series so there was quite a bit of baggage attached which didn’t help but it was a pretty flat read. Anyway it was far from being as bad as The Dark Beyond the Stars but it certainly did not make me want to pick up any of his other novels. Still a bit miffed we had this on the ballot instead of the The Peripheral.

  41. Unless he buys more than Kowal and Co. bought, is that really an issue?

    EPH isn’t a bad proposal. It and every other vote counting proposal I’ve seen put forth ignores the primary reason why the SP/RP efforts were so successful this year. I think it’s ultimate fate is going to depend on how many people nominate next year, the success of failure of SP4, and the attendance at MidAmeriCon next year.

  42. The Dresden Files are a point in favor of the Best Saga category. Few, if any, of the individual books are among the 5 best SFF novels in their year (maybe Changes or Ghost Story, but that may just be recency bias). But Butcher has maintained a consistent and integrated narrative over many novels. The whole series still feels like it’s heading somewhere. Harry is growing, and so are the people around him. When he introduces something new it feels organic and not like it’s pulled out of his ventral orifice. Characters come in and out of the story much like they do in real life. Writing well over the long term is its own special skill set and few do it well.

    Someone on file770 commented a long time ago that piling mediocrity on top of mediocrity doesn’t lead to “good”. I disagree with the loaded language and would counter that sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is true of many multi-movement classical music compositions, or the “Firefly” series.

    Nonetheless, I agree that Skin Game wasn’t the book to nominate for a Hugo.

  43. Unless he buys more than Kowal and Co. bought, is that really an issue?

    It has become an article of faith among the Pups that what Kowal did was “buy” voters. They seem to ignore facts that are inconvenient – like one of the authors who contributed to the effort was Sad Puppy Williamson. If Kowal is “buying voters” she’s doing it with the help of Puppies.

  44. Someone on file770 commented a long time ago that piling mediocrity on top of mediocrity doesn’t lead to “good”.

    That was me. And if Dresden is your counterexample, then you’re not convincing me. There’s no number of other books similar to this one that could make this series rise from “mediocre” to “good”.

  45. piling mediocrity on top of mediocrity doesn’t lead to “good”.

    After Nokia and Microsoft cut a deal to collaborate in the cellphone business (this was a few years before Microsoft just bought the business entirely), a Google VP tweeted “Two turkeys do not make an Eagle.”

    (As someone who worked for Nokia at the time—my pet name for the company is “The Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic”—I consider this comparison unkind to turkeys, but I digress.)

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