Pixel Scroll 8/25 Polldark

(1) David Gerrold has posted the text of his Guest of Honor speech publicly on Facebook. He says later he will have an audio link so people can hear where he went off-script.

Great science fiction is innovative. It defies expectations.

The innovative story breaks rules, demolishes definitions, redefines what’s possible, and reinvents excellence.

The innovative story is unexpected and unpredictable, not only new — but shocking as well. Innovation demands that we rethink what’s possible. Innovation expands the event horizon of the imagination. It transforms our thinking.

And I think that on some level, even though I can’t speak for any other writer but myself, I still think that this is what most of us, maybe even all of us, aspire to — writing that story that startles and amazes and finally goes off like a time-bomb shoved down the reader’s throat. Doing it once establishes that you’re capable of greatness. Doing it consistently explodes the genre. So yes, that’s the real ambition — to be innovative — to transform thinking — to make a profound difference in who we are and what we’re up to. To be a part of the redesign of who we are and what we’re up to.

(2) Nobody had to wake up Thomas Olde Heuvelt to tell him he won a Hugo.

(3) Cixin Liu’s short stories are also getting translated into English.

(4) Here’s the bandwagon for a Best Poetry Hugo category – jump on it.

(5) One of James H. Burns’ U.N.C.L.E. pieces has been posted on Comics Bulletin. This one is about Ian Fleming, and more significantly, Sam Rolfe!

Fleming named the lead “Napoleon Solo.” He wanted Solo to live in New York City, wear bow-ties, and have as his two main research associates a local, elderly, lady librarian, and a newspaper editor. Fleming also wanted Solo to flirt with the secretary of the boss of whatever organization he worked for (a la Bond and Miss Moneypenny). Fleming named her “April Dancer” (which the producers later adopted for THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E.)!

(6) Loren, son of the late Frank Deitz, has scheduled the sale of his father’s book collection on Saturday, October 3 in Tucker, GA. Pass the word. Here is the Facebook event page.

He also has a massive amount of historical SF/Con materials and would like to find people that might be interested in them for archival purposes. Drop me a line if you want to get in contact.

(7) The Hynes Convention Center mentioned in this story is where the 1989 and 2004 Worldcons were held – “Boston Police Arrest Two Pokémon Players After Apparent Gun Threat Against World Championships”.

Two men who drove from Iowa to Boston for the Pokémon World Championships were arrested Friday after seemingly threatening violence over social media against attendees of the event, according to the Boston Police Department.

Kevin Norton, 18, and James Stumbo, 27, were arrested on several firearm-related charges. The official Pokémon site lists Kevin Norton and a James Stumbo, both from the U.S., as invitees in the “masters division” of the world championships of the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Private security at the Hynes Convention Center, where the Championships were taking place, were also aware of the threats and stopped the two men when they attempted to enter on Thursday. Police detectives seized their car and upon delivery of a search warrant on Friday found within a 12 gauge shotgun, an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They then arrested Norton and Stumbo that afternoon in Saugus, Massachusetts. The pair will be arraigned in Boston on Monday. The police released the above photo of the weapons confiscated from the car.

(8) Wendy N. Wagner writes to her younger self, “Dear Me at Age 12”

Just one more thing, little Me. I want to thank you for dreaming big. I don’t think there are a lot of kids out there who know what an editor is or want to write gaming tie-in fiction or would sit down and write “I want to win a Hugo award.” You’re kind of big weirdo, and I love that about you. I’m so glad I got to make your dreams come true.

Now I have to get back to work, because I didn’t stop dreaming when I was 12, and dreams don’t keep coming true if you don’t keep fighting for them. And don’t forget: you’re destroying science fiction, and that’s pretty great.

(9) Pay attention probies!

(10) On Facebook, a 1974 photo of A Change of Hobbit, Speculative Fiction Bookstore in Los Angeles.

(11) When I guessed John Scalzi would have no trouble finding an interesting lunch companion in LA, I was right…

(12) This is the Society for Creative Anachronism’s 50th anniversary, and as part of their observances they are developing The Shield Wall.

A project to memorialize people, households, groups and events that are not around any longer but of whom we all have fond memories

As we celebrate our Society completing its 50th year, we look around and see gaps. Dust to dust it is said, but “no one dies who lives within a heart” (Michael Longcor) and we want to share those who are lost to time but living in our hearts at this time. So, whether it is a person or some kind of entity (households, groups and events) that is no longer part of the fabric of our lives, the Shield Wall will be a highlight at the 50th Anniversary Celebration Event to share with the attendees.

Anyone who wishes to may create a standard size paper shield blank in any design that reminds THEM of the person, event, etc. It does not have to just be heraldry. It can be photos, toys, dolls, etc. We will take electronic submissions or you can mail your submission to our minions or you can get them to Indiana for the June 2016 event physically. We would appreciate you fill out the submission form so we can be sure to have room for your submission.

The shields would have a place of honor at 50 Year and be displayed for all to see.

[Thanks to Janice Gelb, John King Tarpinian and Loren Dietz for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

263 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/25 Polldark

  1. The Radchaai do recognize genders, it’s just that the default word for the third person is not gendered

    I was under the impression that Radchaai society is as close to an ungendered society as we can imagine – but the people they rule are not (and those people are looked down on by the Radch).

  2. The Raadchai recognize sex. …They don’t recognize gender.

    Are you sure that all the Raadchai don’t recognise gender? Justice of Toren doesn’t, but JofT is not a representative member of Raadchai society. For all we know there are lots of gender differences that Breq doesn’t pay any attention to when they aren’t relevant, just like Breq doesn’t pay much attention to the kind of genitalia people have when it isn’t relevant.

  3. Are you sure that all the Raadchai don’t recognise gender? Justice of Toren doesn’t, but JofT is not a representative member of Raadchai society. For all we know there are lots of gender differences that Breq doesn’t pay any attention to when they aren’t relevant, just like Breq doesn’t pay much attention to the kind of genitalia people have when it isn’t relevant.

    Pretty sure. I don’t have the books with me, but that seems to be a huge cultural point of contention between the Raadchai and the worlds they annex, as PJ points out. Raadchai society seems to have gone very far in erasing gender differences, even when it comes to reproduction. The books make a point of that, too, as well as of the reputation the Raadchai have with non-Raadchai on that front, IIRC. It’s possible Breq is an unreliable narrator, but the genderless society is pretty well-supported in the books, so far as I recall.

  4. I don’t remember why now, but I settled on Breq being female early on in Anillary Justice. What I found interesting was the sex of Lt Awn and her lover (whose name temporarily escapes me). I started off imagining them both as women, thanks to the translator’s decision to render the neutral Radchian pronoun as “she” in English 😉 , but then I decided that Awn was male, so that made them a male-female couple. And then my brain decided that they were both male, and they stayed like that.

    Until I heard a bit of the audio book, where the voice actor apparently decided that Awn was a woman and her lover was a man, from the way he played them. I hope I never find out what sex Leckie assigned them, it’s much more interesting that way.

  5. Andrew Hickey on August 26, 2015 at 3:18 am said:
    so people should just get on with stuff. Not deliberately wind them up, not deliberately try *not* to wind them up, just ignore them.

    Because “ignoring the trolls” has traditionally always worked out so well ?

    Respectfully, putting one’s head into the sand is not a solution. A public show of disapproval to their ridiculous ideas is the very least one should do when an anti-social person or group tries to interject their horrid ideals.

  6. @Mark Dennehy–

    It’s like saying a file changes its content depending on whether you copy it to a USB stick or burn it to a CD…

    This isn’t your main point, but struck me as interesting. The data doesn’t change, but the metadata sure does. The way the file is split into chunks is different, and the way these chunks are addressed is different (bear with me, I’m not just being geeky).

    It is beyond dispute that male and female brains work differently (bear with me again, I’m not trying to push gender hot buttons). So putting the same personality into different brains will result in the information being organized differently. This would lead to different associations and paths between neurons, different retrieval speeds, all sorts of stuff.

    Is the difference between male and female brains greater than the difference between individuals generally? And how have those brains have been shaped by their life experiences and social conditioning before being wiped and used for ancillaries.

    This is a pretty rich deposit Leckie has mined. I’m curious to see how and what Breq winds up. October 6 isn’t that far away!

    [deleted a section on how different sorts of delete, secure delete, and format commands actually handle data blocks and metadata. too geeky and the analogy starts to break down]

  7. @Uncanny Valley

    A public show of disapproval to their ridiculous ideas is the very least one should do when an anti-social person or group tries to interject their horrid ideals.

    And what if they just want the attention?

  8. Breq / One Esk Nineteen has a female body. In the opening scene, we are told that the Nilters have sharp gender distinctions, and Breq could provoke trouble by guessing them wrong. One of the Nilters in the tavern (in the snow!) says to Breq, “Aren’t you a tough little girl?”

    And from the same scene: “I knew Seivarden was male, that one was easy.”

    While I’m here: The previous One Esk Nineteen was killed in the action on Ors, and — almost as background — we are shown Breq-to-be being thawed out and ancilliar-ized as a replacement.

    While I’m here: Rage against the Ancillary books has become a flag for someone whose judgement on book matters I don’t want to respect. I’m not against criticism — one of the Puppy sympathizers, lost to me in the sea of words written in the last six months, wrote a two or three page criticism and I wish I could find it again. But the scream “You didn’t really enjoy that book, you just voted it for the SJW checkboxes!!!” makes me see a little red — essentially, I’m being called a liar.

  9. NelC, don’t read Ken. I support your dream of eternal innocence.

    I think I had the same experience with Awn and her lover, going back and forth on the various permutations until I settled into the general feel of the world, and everyone became a (slightly female-tinged) neutral probability wave.

    Ken, thanks for the references, that was roughly what I remembered (plus a scene where the person she gets the gun off of figures out she’s Raadchai, I think because of failure of social cues, if I’m remembering right).

    I liked the way the thawing of Breq was slid into the story there. Oh, the injustice of it. And yet.

  10. Re: Best Editor:

    I still think that the best solution would be for the Hugo committee to ask editors to include in the Hugo voting packet a chapter or so of the rough draft, their comments on that draft, and the finished version of the work. It would undoubtedly require the author’s permission, as they are showing the “warts and all” version, but an author who believes that their editor really helped their finished book is usually pretty happy to do things like that. That would make the process easy, transparent, and clear for voters–which of these five chapters improved the most from rough to finished?

  11. SIW — And what if they just want the attention?

    And what if they want something else? “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” At least one, I’d say. “Don’t feed the trolls” is a simple solution that isn’t the right solution in all circumstances; how can it be? People are different and do similar things for different reasons. Some you want to ignore, some you need to eject forcibly from your presence, some you may be able to persuade, some aren’t trolls at all, just caffeine deficient. And some trolls are so malignant that you ignore them at your peril. We collectively ignored the Sad Puppies for years, and look what happened.

    If you want us to ignore a particular troll, you need to come up with a more convincing argument than “The Rule says: Thou shalt not feed the troll”.

  12. NickPheas:

    My impression was that Breq’s body was physiologically female and had worked out that other people referred to it as female. But it didn’t really know why and so assumed that was the standard form of address.

    The Radchaii language have gender-neutral pronouns. So assuming Breq is telling her story in Radchaii, there’s no gender there. Using female pronouns (and descriptors like “daughter”) is the choice of the unknown entity who have “translated” Breq’s memoirs into English.

    Breq’s body seems to be female. At least one of the persons in the tavern in the beginning of Ancillary Justice refers to her as “little girl” – and that conversation is in a language that does distinguish between gender. The description of how she pulls Seivarden onto the sledge also implies that Breq is relatively small and Seivarden is larger than her. (Seivarden is male, by the way. That’s also made clear during the conversation in the tavern.)

    Then there’s the point that Breq is essentially Justice of Toren, and not the human her body once belonged to. So she’s not necessarily cisgender.

  13. Ray:

    I think the idea of replacing Best Editor – Long Form with an additional (unvoted) editor Hugo to the Best Novel has merit. As for who would get it, the Administrator asks the publisher for the named of the editors of the books that make the ballot. If there are multiple editors, apply a modification of the precedent used for Fanzine/Webcast/etc. – limit the number of awards to two (one for the author, one for the editor) and let the winners purchase additional awards if they want to.

    Advantages:

    1. Eliminates one award category, so the ceremony moves quicker, the Hugo Packet download (assuming it continues) is easier, and the tallying of votes take less time.
    2. Eliminates the voter’s need to guess how much responsibility the editor has on the final result; could be a lot, could be none. If the latter, it covers work done on other books that didn’t make the final cut.

    Disadvantage:

    You could end up with the same editor on multiple works nominated on the final ballot, thus limiting the potential pool of winners.

    Neutral:

    Shifts any effort from pushing the efforts of any potential nominee from their work to the work of authors associated with them (instead of “vote for me” it becomes “vote for this book”).

    On the whole, I think this might be a better way to recognize the efforts of editors in the publishing process; I remain unconvinced that anyone voting the current category really has more knowledge of why a particular editor deserves to win than that they are associated with a book they thought was Hugo-worthy, unless they are already in the industry. I’d like to see this get discussed more widely with the idea that if it garners enough support, we propose it as an amendment at the business meeting at MAC2. I think that the Short Form Hugo already has an easier time of determining what effort the editor had in the process, since at a minimum it covers anthologies.

    John Seavey:

    Your suggestion is a good one, but it doesn’t solve the problem of who gets nominated in the first place – you at least make sure that the best person in your opinion of the nominees receives the award, but not necessarily the most deserving overall. Admittedly, the idea above doesn’t quite handle that completely either, but it at least implies that the better the book, the better the editor.

  14. I’m coming around to the idea that outside of the special ‘still not a Hugo’ convention awards and the ultimate Guest of Honor label, we need something that the general fan assembly can use for the ‘Best Person we really really ought to have given a flaming Hugo to but for various reasons they were overlooked Hugo’ (name to be referred to committee) – that can be used as a catch all, once a lifetime only thing – i.e. nobody who has a Hugo can be nominated.

    Or something like that.

    Put me down as another who is really annoyed at being told that I only liked Ancillary Justice because of the liberal stuff and not because of the story, chrome and all the other stuff. It was easily the best new SF novel that year, but, hey, don’t take the Hugo voters word for it, how about it winning pretty much every single other award around too.

  15. Personally, I think every troll deserves at least one forceful, direct, brutally honest (but not simply brutal) and factual response, for the following reasons:

    1) There are other people who disagree with the troll. Silence makes them think they’re the only one who does. This is legitimately psychologically damaging–there are studies that show that we suffer profound stress and question our identities if we believe that we’re profoundly out of step with group opinions. Standing up and vocally disagreeing with trolls helps people understand they’re not alone.

    2) The troll, meanwhile, is likely to take silence as a tacit acceptance of their ideas. This will encourage them to further bad behavior, as they will come to believe that the “silent majority” backs their efforts. They will become more abusive if nobody stands up to say that their behavior is not tolerated.

    3) Even if what they really want is attention, then simply ignoring them will only spur them on to more extreme efforts to gain that attention. It’s not like dealing with a toddler, who will eventually cry themselves out and fall asleep. It’s more like dealing with a bored pet, who will chew the furniture if you don’t give them anything to do.

    Beyond that, I think there’s certainly a point of diminishing returns in dealing with trolls (what XKCD so gloriously terms, “I can’t go to bed now. Somebody is wrong on the Internet”). But there’s a middle ground between that and allowing them to be trollish unimpeded.

  16. Then there’s the point that Breq is essentially Justice of Toren, and not the human her body once belonged to. So she’s not necessarily cisgender.

    That’s really interesting to consider. I think there is huge body dysphoria in the way Breq describes no longer being a plural entity, and no longer having the sensory input and “limbs” she’s used to. Possibly in no longer having a brain that’s physically capable of being the identity she thinks she is. Gender doesn’t strike me as the most prominent source of her dysphoria, but Breq doesn’t consider herself human the way non-ancillaries are and may well not consider herself to have a human gender, despite having to go around performing human gender, the way she goes around performing a human role in everything else.

  17. So, Wright’s latest eruption complains that THE MARTIAN didn’t win anything.

    Of course, it could have won the Campbell — or rather, the author could — if you assholes hadn’t slated him off the ballot.

    But, well, oops.

  18. Oh, yes, that’s brilliant. The one thing the Hugos need is more categories for burning to the ground. I can’t wait to find out who wins #NoAward for the new recommended poetry category!

  19. Kurt, stop lying – oh wait, SJWs can’t. The Martian wasn’t eligible, and everyone knew why. The Martian was a Sad Puppy favorite.

    Doesn’t matter, of course. The SJWs will be forced to burn them all down next year, then there will be plenty of losers to go around for every category!

  20. @Kurt: Did any of the puppies ever explain why they slated Weir off the ballot? Did anyone apologize for the oversight, or explain that he’s not really as popular with puppies as you might think?

    It’s not like they had an otherwise super-strong set of Campbell nominees. Hell, they couldn’t even be arsed to name a full five.

    On the face of it, it’s baffling. Had they nominated him, they’d have put fandom in a difficult position. Voting down the second-rate junk on their slate was easy. Could fandom have voted Andy Weir below No Award?

    Looks like a huge missed opportunity for those bumblers. They passed up their best shot at a win.

  21. xdpaul

    – Kurt, stop lying – oh wait, SJWs can’t. The Martian wasn’t eligible, and everyone knew why. The Martian was a Sad Puppy favorite.

    Er, Kurt didn’t lie. He said The Campbell Award. The book might’ve been ineligible (though for a Puppy favorite they didn’t mention it in any of their slates or suggestions and despite the slates it still garnered a lot of nominations) however the author was eligible for a Campbell. So congrats on keeping that author of a Puppy favorite book out of contention!

  22. @Matt Y: And they really DID keep him out of contention. Weir finished juuuust outside the top five, just inches behind Wesley Chu. Had he made the ballot, he’d likely have run Chu very close among the fan vote. The puppy votes could very easily provided the margin of victory.

  23. The Martian wasn’t eligible, and everyone knew why. The Martian was a Sad Puppy favorite.

    No. It wasn’t eligible because it had been published in English in the U.S. prior to 2014. It also wasn’t on either Puppy slate, so how would anyone know it was a “Sad Puppy” favorite during the nominating period?

    Finally, Kurt didn’t say The Martian could have been nominated. he said Andy Weir could have been nominated, for the Campbell. But once again, it seems that the Puppies didn’t love him much, since he appeared on neither slate. Looking at the stats, it is clear that if the Pups hadn’t pushed a bunch of less accomplished authors onto the ballot with their slates, Weir would have made the ballot.

    But those are actual facts, and as we’ve seen time and again, actual facts don’t seem to matter to Sad Puppy supporters.

  24. I think you have to salt the earth after burning a Hugo category to the ground, or it grows back. So you can apparently destroy them forever every year without any danger of not being able to burn them to the ground forever next year.

  25. Did any of the puppies ever explain why they slated Weir off the ballot?

    He wasn’t openly and democratically a buddy of Buck Turgidson’s?

  26. xdpaul said:

    “The Martian wasn’t eligible, and everyone knew why.”

    Because it was originally self-published in 2011, and the rules state that republished novels can’t win for what seem to be fairly obvious and self-evident reasons (people would just keep republishing their old novels hoping for another chance at the brass ring)?

    Oh, wait, that makes too much sense for a Puppy answer. Conspiracy SJW conspiracy Nutty Nuggets conspiracy Ancillary Justice conspiracy Tor conspiracy Scalzi. That was probably it.

    xdpaul said:

    “The Martian was a Sad Puppy favorite.”

    Odd, it wasn’t on the slate. If it was such a Sad Puppy favorite, they certainly didn’t favor it with actual nominations. Either because they understood perfectly well that it wasn’t eligible, in which case why are you insinuating that it was kept off the ballot deliberately to punish the Puppies for liking it, or because they forgot about it, which is perfectly possible because Brad’s never actually explained why things that Puppies would be expected to like (say, the Heinlein biography) were left off in favor of works that his buddies wrote.

    But Weir was eligible for a Campbell award, because The Martian was first professionally published in 2014, and hey, let’s look at the SP3 slate to see what the Puppies thought of their “Puppy favorite”–oh. Huh. Only three nominees in a field of five and Weir wasn’t among them. Guess nepotism beats favoritism every time.

    Of course, Weir might have had a chance for a nomination in a normal year, because he would have been competing for one of five open slots instead of one of two open slots plus whoever Brad Torgersen thought was a cool dude, but hey. Conspiracy Rachel Swirsky conspiracy, right?

  27. Conspiracy SJW conspiracy Nutty Nuggets conspiracy Ancillary Justice conspiracy Tor conspiracy Scalzi.


    Wait just a minute, Mr. Seavey, you forgot…

    Conspiracy Rachel Swirsky conspiracy, right?


    Nevermind…

  28. My goodness, I still hear puppying going on.

    Maybe today’s title shouldn’t be “Pixel Scroll 8/25 Polldark”, but “Pixel Scroll 8/25 Pollbark“.

  29. Kurt Busiek –

    I think you have to salt the earth after burning a Hugo category to the ground, or it grows back. So you can apparently destroy them forever every year without any danger of not being able to burn them to the ground forever next year.

    What I think is a fundamental misunderstanding as well is that if No Awarding counts as burning a category to the ground, while there is a sadness to not being able to give a deserving person an award, fans will still gather around that fire to make s’mores, tell stories and have fun.

  30. I keep hearing that this category or that has been “burned to the ground.” I don’t see any evidence of this.

    I suppose the real test will come when the nominations start: If puppies nominate any candidates for category X, that’s pretty strong evidence that they’re aware it still exists. And they’re going to look awfully silly nominating candidates for a category that they claim has been “burned to the ground.”

  31. What I think is a fundamental misunderstanding as well is that if No Awarding counts as burning a category to the ground, while there is a sadness to not being able to give a deserving person an award, fans will still gather around that fire to make s’mores, tell stories and have fun.

    I think this is what enrages the Pups about the Alfies. Everyone was supposed to be super-sad that there were categories of Hugos that were No Awarded, but instead Martin and fans got together and said to the authors who had been shut out of the process “Hey, here’s a token to show how much we still love you all”. And then they had a big party.

    I’ll bet those Alfies are more meaningful to the recipients than any number of Puppy-slate provided Hugos would ever be.

    And this is why the Pups will never win. They don’t understand what the Hugos are and what they actually mean. They don’t understand that the rockets aren’t the important part. They think that if they poop on the floor in the party and everyone leaves that they “won”, when what it really means is that they are left in a room holding their own poop while the party goes somewhere else.

  32. If you look into a mirror at midnight and say “SJWs always lie” three times GRRM appears and whacks you on the back of the head with a rusty hood ornament he found in the gutter.

  33. I read Player of Games after both Ancillaries, so I was particularly struck by the “translator’s note” regarding the difference between Marain – with one pronoun for “females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either)” – and the three-gendered aliens where sex and status are strongly correlated: the “translation convention” will be to map their high-status pronoun to the one with the equivalent status in whatever benighted language you happen to be using.

    So really, you could translate any of the Marain sections the way Leckie translated Radch and be perfectly correct. Imagine the fun we’d have had if Banks had done that.

  34. I’ve never been one much to get into “book club” type analysiseses because the questions fairly easily puncture my suspension of disbelief: when asked why a character did x or said y the real answer is always because the author choose to write it that way, not because of any agency on the part of the character.

    Having said that, the setting/tech level of the Ancillary world implies a reasonably distant future with plenty of time for the various human populations to have diverged significantly from each other, either through the quick route of genetic engineering or the slow route of genetic drift/bottleneck effect/natural selection. In that case, the clues towards identifying sex based on clothed physical appearance (and the sound of the voice) may be unreliable across various human subspecies—there is no default gendered pronoun in the default, empire-wide language because you are hedging your bets rather than making a (possibly offensive) guess. The members of a given subspecies, on the other hand, would be fine tuned to the clues and would be mostly confident in identifying fellow members, so their languages have gendered pronouns.

    (Having said that, I have no illusion that Ann Leckie had to have the same (or even similar) rationale in her worldbuilding.)

    …Speaking of gender ambiguity, I’m remembering a short story I read years ago based in a genetically modified culture where the people have “double sided” penises—when the male has sex, the penis becomes detached and embeds in the female’s vagina, making her into a male and leaving the male as a female, and this switch takes place every time they have sex. Can anyone identify the title/author of this?

  35. …Speaking of gender ambiguity, I’m remembering a short story I read years ago based in a genetically modified culture where the people have “double sided” penises—when the male has sex, the penis becomes detached and embeds in the female’s vagina, making her into a male and leaving the male as a female, and this switch takes place every time they have sex. Can anyone identify the title/author of this?

    Greg Egan, Oceanic

    When I read the story, I interpreted the characters as alien, rather than genetically modified humans.

  36. I was bitterly disappointed that Weir didn’t make Campbell list. I freaking LOVED The Martian, have talked it up, given copies to people, and would have voted uberenthusiastically for Weir. Shame the Pups blocked him.

  37. All that the Nilters’ assessment really counts for is confirmation that Breq was exhibiting gender cues *relevant to Nilters* in such a way that they thought “girl”. Whether Nilters base their gender readings on dress, posture, demeanor, speech, hairstyle, height, number of freckles, eye shape, nose width, or arm-to-torso ratio, we don’t know. As for sex as an anatomical distinction, that is just as much influenced by the societal as anything else!

  38. The typical Hugo nominator nominates works they love (or at very least, is positive about), whereas the Puppy activities are fueled by hate (or similar negative motivations).

    A useful distinction for me that readily explains Puppy actions and words.

  39. The whole gender trick is a minor part of Ancillary Justice. I dont know why people on either side get their panties in a bunch over it. If you take it out and replace it with he or she, the plot elements are the same.

    The cool part of the book are the justice of toren with many bodies vs. the one body left view points. That was fascinating. someone will respond back stating then will it be male or female. Vernor vinge handled this 20 years ago in a deepness in the sky. Minor plot point in his book.

    I dont find gender discussion interesting. I also can like this book for other reasons.

  40. The gender trick, if that’s what we’re calling it, is useful in the novel as a simple but visible and constant reminder that Breq doesn’t see the world the same way that we do.
    In Sword there are places where it foregrounds gender expectations, but in Justice it was all about the effect on our understanding of the narrator

  41. I dont find gender discussion interesting. I also can like this book for other reasons.

    I also liked the book for other reasons … but the gender discussions provide a lot of insight into the world-building Leckie does … so in that sense I find it compelling. YMMV of course.

  42. I’ve mentioned it before, but I found the “gender trick” fascinating because I had a lot of trouble picturing any characters as male, even the ones who had been definitively established as such. I’ve never experienced that before while reading a book.

    I was also really interested in the ancillary/corpse soldier concept, and the clash that is occurring in Radchaai society as traditions are changing. The fact that Breq/One Esk Nineteen was chosen because she had a poor singing voice broke my heart a little. I love to sing and usually have a song stuck in my head and I don’t always notice when I’m singing aloud. So having that trait deliberately used as an annoyance really struck me.

    Damn, I should reread Ancillary Justice. I struggled to get into it at first so I’m sure it would be really rewarding.

  43. Oh, but of course I couldn’t find it rewarding, I just like it because of SJW checklists.

    (Forgot to click for e-mail followups.)

  44. The gender trick, if that’s what we’re calling it, is useful in the novel as a simple but visible and constant reminder that Breq doesn’t see the world the same way that we do.

    And that that world (or rather multi-world empire), howevermuch Breq may have difficulty navigating it, differs from ours substantially. So you have a character that would likely struggle in a society exactly like ours (due to being a piece of an AI stuck in an ancillary when the ship was destroyed), struggling in a society quite unlike ours.

    There’s a lot going on. Breq/Justice of Toren, the various aspects of the Tyrant, the seemingly omnipotent aliens… I’m excited to find out what happens.

  45. There’s a lot going on. Breq/Justice of Toren, the various aspects of the Tyrant, the seemingly omnipotent aliens… I’m excited to find out what happens.

    no no not possible. You couldn’t possibly enjoy it. It’s just a checklist of social justice issues …

    yawn

    edited to add … I too am rereading both novels in anticipation of the conclusion. And expect to enjoy them even more the second time around.

  46. Thank you, Guess. There’s a lot of cool stuff beyond the gender thing in Ancillary (people forget that Breq is non-human, so it also serves as a cool way to make the voice “alien.” A much better way than, say, putting the words of your sentences in backwards order and forcing the reader to read right-to-left. Not that I did that in my workshopped story, mind you…)

    Re: Best Editor: I think 1-2 page statements from the editors talking about their process, what they did, and some specific ways they championed the work or how they helped the writer would go a long way towards solving this problem. Just putting up lists of stuff published doesn’t help, but a discussion of the process would actually give voters something to evaluate.

    I don’t think it’s a good idea to link long-form editor to novel. If the author wants to give the editor a shoutout in his/her speech, that’s excellent, but there’s no way to distinguish between great editing, mediocre editing, and actively harmful editing that the book somehow survived. It’d be like linking up the Best Screenplay and Best Director Oscars, despite their very different skill sets.

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