Pixel Scroll 8/6 Even Robots Get the Blues

The A-Train, EPH, and AI make up the alphabet soup that is today’s Scroll.

(1) An effort to get sf writers on postage stamps fizzled a couple of years ago. A new effort to might wind up putting a fanzine editor on a stamp – albeit for reasons entirely unrelated to fandom. See NPR’s report “Willis Conover, The Voice Of Jazz Behind The Iron Curtain”

Willis Conover at a 1970s Lunacon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Willis Conover at a 1970s Lunacon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Willis Conover, who died in 1996, could pack concert halls for jazz shows behind the Iron Curtain. But he wasn’t a household name in his own country because by law, the Voice of America cannot broadcast to the United States. This week, Doug Ramsey, who writes about jazz for The Wall Street Journal, reported that a campaign to persuade the Postal Services Stamp Advisory Committee to put Willis Conover on a U.S. postage stamp now has thousands of signatures. It would send the face of the voice who brought the light of hot jazz into the darkest places of the Cold War around the world again.

Andrew Porter explains the fannish connection:

Before Willis Conover was the voice of American jazz to the world behind the Iron Curtain, he was a science fiction fan and reader. Although he left the field for wider seas, he came back to SF in the 1970s, reviving his earlier fanzine Science-Fantasy Correspondent in 1975, and resumed attending science fiction conventions. He should be honored for his work with the VoA. Like Rog Ebert, who honed his writing skills in the fanzines he wrote for before he started college and eventually became a film reviewer, Conover’s heart belonged to science fiction and fantasy first.

 

And Bill Burns said,

When I worked at BBC Overseas Services (1968-71) we relayed the VoA signal, picked up on shortwave at Caversham, sent by landline to Bush  House in London, then to the BBC’s shortwave transmitters.  Music programmes such as Jazz Hour didn’t really sound very good after this  treatment, so the VoA would ship us tapes of each show which we would  insert into the outgoing stream instead of the received signal. I didn’t know it when I was at the BBC, but I saw Conover a few years  later at a Philcon and discovered that he had published a fanzine in the 1930s and was a correspondent of HP Lovecraft.

Jim Freund, whose program “Hour of the Wolf” is heard on WBAI-FM, met some of these folks through Conover.

I worked with Mr. Conover quite a few times in the early 70s. I was introduced to him by Hans Stefan Santesson, who was a frequent guest on ‘Hour of the Wolf.’ Mr. Conover would give me a call at the station and ask if I’d be free and could book a studio for a given time, and would then show up with surviving members of the Lovecraft Circle. I clearly recall his bringing along Manly Wade Wellman, and most dramatically, Sonia Greene, who was married to Lovecraft (if not living with him most of their years.) This was not long before her death in 1971.

In my wisdom, I tried to make Mr. Conover take the lead in these interviews — he was a true radio professional with a fabulous voice, and knew far more about American and early horror than I ever could. I got the impression he didn’t want to make too much of a public thing of his name on WBAI — I think the political views of the VoA and Pacifica Radio were not very compatible. So I took the lead, but usually with a briefing by him and/or Hans beforehand.

He gave me a recorded reading he’d made of ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood, recorded for an airline for passengers to listen to in-flight.  We were never sure of the rights to broadcast this, but we did so anyhow. (Safe in those days — especially at 5:00 AM.)

Nice man.

(2) If you’re not the kind of collector who insists on pristine copies of your trading cards, you might end up with a very entertaining autograph someday —

If you ever plan to approach Mark Hamill for an autograph, make sure you have a Star Wars baseball card handy. As it turns out, the man otherwise known as Luke Skywalker has made an artform out of prefacing his John Hancock with hilarious captions on vintage collectible cards.

hamill autograph

(3) Patrick May has done another set of calculations in “E Pluribus Hugo vs Slates” using historic vote data from the 1984 Hugos to show the impact of the proposed rules change.

E Pluribus Hugo vs Slates

With the EPH algorithm, the results in the Novel category in 1984 would have been:

  • Startide Rising: 105 ¼ points, 136 ballots
  • The Robots of Dawn: 52 ¾ points, 75 ballots
  • Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern: 41 ¾ points, 54 ballots
  • Tea with the Black Dragon: 40 1/6 points, 55 ballots
  • Millennium: 33 5/6 points, 52 ballots

This is the same result as under the existing rules.

With 43 slate ballots (10% of the number cast) added, the result would have been identical to the actual 1984 result.

With 85 slate ballots (20% of the number cast) added, one slate work would make the list, bumping off “Millennium”. This is quite different from the current rules where only “Startide Rising” would remain out of non-slate works.

With 128 slate ballots (30% of the number cast) added, two slate works would make the list, bumping off “Millennium” and “Tea with the Black Dragon”. Again this is quite different from the current rules where the only non-slate work remaining would be “Startide Rising”.

Even with 170 slate ballots (40% of the number cast) added, both “Startide Rising” and “The Robots of Dawn” would remain on the nomination list under the EPH rules. Under the current rules, slate works would sweep the category.

(4) NASA Totally Found an Alien Crab on Mars and Didn’t Tell Anybody – debunker Robbie Gonzalez has the story and close-up photos at io9!

UFO Sightings Daily reports it also spotted in this photo “another animal close to this crab, as well as a broken stone building.”

(5)The Daily Dot asked seven scholars what might happen when superintelligence bumps into religion. There are also questions like whether AI counts as being alive —

The singularity is a hypothesized time in the future, approximately 2045, when the capabilities of non-living electronic machines will supersede human capabilities. Undismissable contemporary thinkers like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Ray Kurzweil warn us that it will change everything. Hawking likens it to receiving a message from aliens announcing their arrival in “a few decades,” saying this is “more or less” what’s happening with artificial intelligence software….

How “alive” would a superintelligence be?

Mike McHargue, host of the Ask Science Mike podcast: We think nothing of wiping out bacteria by the millions when we wash our hands, and most people don’t hesitate to slap the fly buzzing around their heads. But dogs? Dolphins? Apes? We see some reflection of awareness in their eyes, and mark them as greater peers among life. What’s fascinating about machine intelligence is we are presented with some level of consciousness that is not associated with biological life. We’ve already built robots with similar intelligence and conscious awareness as an earthworm, and we’ve modeled neural network as complex as insects and possibly reptiles.

As computer technology advances, there’s a real possibility of something that is highly intelligent but not “alive” in any traditional sense.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Mark, Patrick May and John King Tarpinian for some of the stories. Title credit to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R .]

82 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/6 Even Robots Get the Blues

  1. Second! Also, in honor of the Very Worried Person who will no doubt drop by to discuss his Deeply Held Concerns about EPH, I offer:

    Every Vote is Sacred

  2. The effort to get them on postage stamps may have fizzled, but I have a booklet of designer knitting patterns named for authors, most of whom are SF: Clement, Silverberg, Shelley, Niven, Pohl, Gibson, Verne, Dickson, Delany, and Sturgeon.

  3. (5) Warren Ellis’s Supergods (a four issue limited series, though there’s probably a graphic novel collection available as well) deals in a way with man made super-intelligences that are designed to be religious-based (for the most part).

    Spoiler: It doesn’t end well for anyone involved (except maybe….)

    As is usual for Ellis, interesting ideas, with a side of insanity.

  4. Since the 1984 short fiction market was less fragmented than today’s, this simulation might not have much direct bearing on today’s award for Best Short Story. Note that felice’s 2013 simulation resulted in “Best Short Story: 4 slate works,” etc.

    Patrick, good luck continuing your analysis. I look forward hearing about multiple slates whether you have time to finish before Sasquan or not.

  5. Brian Z on August 7, 2015 at 12:25 am said:
    Since the 1984 short fiction market was less fragmented than today’s, this simulation might not have much direct bearing today’s award for Best Short Story.

    If you describe a scenario well enough I can simulate it in EPH for you. You would need to define some parameters:
    Total number of non-slate works nominated. Total numbers of non-slate and slate voters. The range of the number of nominations per story for non-slate and the mean number of nominations for non-slate. And then the same for the slate.
    I could then make up a dataset that fits and see what happens .

  6. I found the Daily Dot article rather interesting in general, but my official Ten Thousand moment was that not only is there a Christian Transhumanist Association, there’s a Mormon Transhumanist Association as well. Their rep in that discussion had some interesting things to say:

    Religion already isn’t benign, and any religion worthy of a superintelligence certainly would be even less so.

    I think there’s a novel in that somewhere….

  7. Felice was modelling a 30% slate in short story for 2013, in an extremely diffuse year (only 3 nominees due to the 5% rule). Even so, the result for 2013 is only 1 more slate work than Patrick May’s modelling of a 40% slate in 1984’s short story category. Slates work better in diffuse categories whether EPH is being used or not – this is not a surprise, nor a reason to drop the the best technical solution proposed. EPH produces significantly better results than doing nothing.

  8. Camestros: cool! thanks! Is it too much trouble to do something similar to what felice did and check her results? I understand the methodology at Making Light was to make a “statistically generated” set of dummy ballots that match the actual 2013 results.

    You know, the thing the ML people didn’t address is that modeling recent years raises the spectre of the “secret cabal” that “puppies” constantly bring up. The argument goes something like this:

    In 2014 (say), a disproportionate number of voters nominating “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” also chose to nominate (say) “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” and “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket.” The strong version of this theory is that a publishing house bought a bunch of memberships and those people felt loyal so they voted a straight ticket and maybe helped convince a few friends to do it too. The weak version of this theory is that they are all just fans of the same few websites and forums with a lot of interests in common who all got excited about the same stuff in those places. Either way, the “Sad Puppies” are just doing the same thing but more openly.

    I honestly don’t know how to test that one (other than publishing recent ballots, which I don’t support), but it would be a possible scenario to consider when modeling, especially if one wanted to convince the “other side.”

  9. Hmm. This seems like a good place to include this. Since Brian continues to make utterly unsubstantiated claims and accusations, I’ll drop this in (h/t Soon Lee & others):

    [RUBBER STAMP BRIAN Z RESPONSE]

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

    [/RUBBER STAMP BRIAN Z RESPONSE]

    (by the way, am happy to take on suggestions to improve the response template)

  10. Brian, I don’t think that’s quite a new low for you, but it certainly is dishonest bullshit.

  11. Brian Z: a secret cabal or even a cosmic coincidence makes no difference to the algorithm. A highly similar set of nominations will function the same way in EPH regardless of why they are highly similar.

  12. a secret cabal or even a cosmic coincidence makes no difference to the algorithm

    Right, and in modeling one might consider scenarios both with and without said cosmic coincidence, simply given that this is one of the justifications for the recent campaigning. It’s great Patrick May is modeling competing slates – just 1984 doesn’t do a good job of standing in for 2017.

    Another thing that is unconvincing, by the way, is that the simulated slates are conceived of as marching in lockstep towards our castle walls like orcs in a Peter Jackson CGI battle. To model a realistic campaign, in addition to adding a phalanx of ostensibly “unreadably bad” outsiders in each category, one could also choose one or two things that are already making the Top 15 and give them a boost.

  13. There’s a short story germ in Willis Conover’s connection to the Lovecraft Circle.
    I’ve started it….

    “THE CONOVER TAPE
    It was when I was working with Jim Freund at WBAI-FM, that I got the tape. It was a copy of one of three readings which had been recorded by Willis Conover for an air-line for passengers to listen too in mid-flight; this was long before in-flight movies of course, or internet access.
    I wasn’t sure what the air-line had been thinking, getting a jazz musician to record horror stories, but it turned out that Willis was a big horror fan back in the day, and he’d been a correspondent of Lovecraft and a hanger on at the edge of the Lovecraft circle. Jim told me he’d even brought Manley Wade Wellman and Sonia , Lovecraft’s ex-wife to the WBAI-FM studies once, shortly before her death in 1971.
    It must have been around 1974 that I found the third tape, it was during a clean out of the cupboards. The first two were readings, damn good ones, of an Algernon Blackwood story: ‘the willows’ and ‘the novel of the black seal’ by Machen, but the third was by H.P. Lovecraft according to the label and was ‘the revelation of Azathoth’. We’d had a query about copyright in relation to the readings, I remember, so we’d only run the Blackwood story, and that at about 5pm in the morning. Jim had slung them in the back of a storage locker, in the hope we might run the other two when the dust settled, and we’d just forgotten them. I never knew what had happened to the first two, but the third was still there – on its own on an empty shelf, not even dusty.
    I wasn’t much of a horror fan in those days, but I was interested enough to take the cassette home and give it a play…. “

  14. Speaking of Brian Z and bullshit, his anti-EPH FUD came to mind while I was watching Jon Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Show a few hours ago. The video’s at the link, and of course most of the show is kind of sappy, but…

    Skip ahead to about the 33-minute mark, when Jon has something serious to say about bullshit. He describes three basic categories. First, the usual everyday stuff, what I believe Heinlein called “social lubrication.” That’s the “what a cute kid” variety. Second, the “hide bad things” type, like pretty much every EULA in existence. The third, and most relevant to this thread, starts a few seconds before the 36-minute mark:

    And finally – finally, it’s the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can’t do anything, because we don’t yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats who are gonna come for our guns. Until then, I say teach the controversy.

    Now, the good news is this. Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time, like an “I Spy” of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends: The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.

    I think that sums Brian’s FUD up pretty well. He’s ever so willing to ask questions and propose that other people – people who aren’t him, of course – do all kinds of bizarre and pointless things, but he’s not willing to lift a finger to actually solve the problem.

    It’s all bullshit, folks.

  15. Brian Z on August 7, 2015 at 1:50 am said:

    Right, and in modeling one might consider scenarios both with and without said cosmic coincidence, simply given that this is one of the justifications for the recent campaigning. It’s great Patrick May is modeling competing slates – just 1984 doesn’t do a good job of standing in for 2017.

    Surely the point is that the secret Tor cabal and the Puppy slate are both effectively the same thing?

    Another thing that is unconvincing, by the way, is that the simulated slates are conceived of as marching in lockstep towards our castle walls like orcs in a Peter Jackson CGI battle. To model a realistic campaign, in addition to adding a phalanx of ostensibly “unreadably bad” outsiders in each category, one could also choose one or two things that are already making the Top 15 and give them a boost.

    Generally I am more convinced by solutions which deal with the problem that they are intended to solve.

    What is the problem that your ‘realistic campaign’ presents?

  16. So the article was on 1984 and about novels, so Brian Z immediately raised two straw men about Short Fiction and alleged non-Puppy slates……

  17. @BrianZ

    I honestly don’t know how to test that one (other than publishing recent ballots, which I don’t support)

    I mean, you could give EPH to the 2014 administrators and ask them if they would mind running it and reporting back on whether anything would have come out differently, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea to me either.

  18. To be fair, if I squint hard, I can see the bottom of Brian’s fears about EPH. Giving him the greatest benefit of the doubt, EPH would have an effect on the nominee list. This appears to be anathema to Brian. Fine, Brian, EPH could change the nominee list from a “pure count”.

    I also personally think that it is a lot of FUD from you, Brian.

    And my own question from some days ago stands–what should we do? Just wait years and years and let slates from the Puppies dominate the Hugos until Super Genius Theodore Beale gets tired of it?

    What should we do, Brian?

  19. Thanks very much to Patrick for crunching these numbers. I crunched several others a few weeks back and came to broadly similar conclusions.

    I want to clarify that I withdraw my suggestion that one could divide by square roots rather than whole numbers in splitting votes between nominees. My intention was to raise the bar for a slate getting their first nominee onto the ballot. But in fact a) my proposal doesn’t address that adequately, and b) I was wrong in the first place to try and keep slates off entirely; in a democratic system, a sufficiently well-organised campaign should able to get representation on the ballot. We are trying to prevent unfair dominance, not to exclude groups completely from the process. EPH as proposed strikes a good balance, and no other proposal is as helpful.

    (I also support the “4 and 6” proposal, and the proposed dropping of the 5% threshold; I am opposed to the two-year eligibility proposal, the Best Series proposal, and the proposal to restrict authors or series to no more than two places on the final ballot in any one category.)

    There is an aspect of EPH which does need to be clarified: a popular candidate with X voters, who all vote for other even more popular candidates, will be beaten to the ballot by a small but fervently supported candidate with X bullet votes. But the system is intended to be fair to voters, not to candidates. If the “wisdom of crowds” supports five nominees, but there’s a strong minority support for a sixth candidate with little crossover between the two groups, it’s actually better that one candidate is dropped from the consensus five to allow a bit more diversity and to include a different voice. The voters who voted for that candidate are still getting the other works that they supported on the ballot; four out of five ain’t bad.

    The challenge for the minority group is to find a candidate capable of getting support from the rest of the electorate in the runoff phase. The Puppies by and large failed that test this year. For all their complaints about cliques, political messages and works getting nominated which are of poor quality and are’t sfnal enough, in too many cases they did exactly what they accuse the imaginary cabal of doing. It is simply shameful.

  20. I thought Patrick May’s post was well done.

    Most Hugo voters don’t actually intend to shut everyone else out, so I expect they wouldn’t be too bent out of shape about only getting one or two of their favorites on the ballot. Supposing they had, in an extraordinary series of coincidences, nominated an “accidental slate” as an outcome of honest nominations.

  21. Also for those who are interested, E. Pluribus Hugo t-shirts are available.

    They’re being sold at cost so they’re quite reasonably priced, but the order closes on Monday so if you want one you need to order soon. Given price is for pickup at Sasquan but Jameson will make arrangements to mail t-shirts for people willing to pay the mailing costs.

    I won’t be at Sasquan but I have a friend who will, so I’m definitely getting one.

  22. “Most Hugo voters don’t actually intend to shut everyone else out”

    I’ve just started voting on the Hugos this year, but I assume one of the appeals of awards is checking out the works you have not read and did not nominate, thereby discovering interesting work that you missed. Plus, tastes vary. Why would you want your taste to be the only taste represented (even if you understandably want a work you like to win)?

    I’m speaking somewhat hypothetically–some might say hypocritically–since the slate-nominated stuff I read was awful and not just a matter of differing taste.

    Any case, something like the 4/6 proposal sounds great to me, and not just because it would hopefully hinder slates.

  23. “. Why would you want your taste to be the only taste represented (even if you understandably want a work you like to win)?”

    If you think that the SF that has been winning the awards to be illegitimate, or just “literary fiction”, or having gotten onto the ballot in years past because of secret slates, hidden cabals, or what not, keeping that stuff off of the ballot is a *duty*. “For the sake of the future of SF, Rachel Swirsky must be kept off of the Hugo ballot!”

  24. “For the sake of the future of SF, Rachel Swirsky must be kept off of the Hugo ballot!”

    The ironic thing is that Swirsky’s story is leaps and bounds better than anything the Pups have gotten onto the Hugo ballot.

  25. @Aaron. Oh, I agree completely. The Puppies of both stripes, though, don’t see it that way. I think that’s even (charitably) a reason why Puppies keep misrepresenting the story as a Hugo winner even though it didn’t actually win anything.

  26. @Shao Ping
    I assume one of the appeals of awards is checking out the works you have not read and did not nominate, thereby discovering interesting work that you missed. Plus, tastes vary. Why would you want your taste to be the only taste represented (even if you understandably want a work you like to win)?

    Extremely well put. The bit I’ve bolded has been the best part of F770 the last few months, and the Hugos ought to be an even better version of that. Instead we had to read JCW again and again.

  27. Religion already isn’t benign, and any religion worthy of a superintelligence certainly would be even less so.
    I think there’s a novel in that somewhere….

    In Gilliland’s Rosinante novels, Corporate Skashskash gets the bright idea of creating a religion suitable for space. V1 is unreadably verbose and dense. V2 is much more reader friendly, at which it becomes clear Skashskash never read MacLean’s “The Snowball Effect”.

  28. Quick movie recommendation: Wyrmwood: Road of The Dead.

    Low budget aussie zombie horror/ comedy road movie, made over a 3 year period by two brothers, it’s actually rather good and even though the genre has been flogged to death it manages to come up with some original and rather nifty ideas. A bit gory though.

  29. The “Mars crab” relates to something I was remembering just last night. Thinking about all the delusions of grandeur and persecution the self-published Puppies (especially Hoyt saying that SF publishers rejected her books claiming poor world-building, but the real reason is that her books weren’t PC enough) have reminded me of a self-published dude I ran into on a mailing list. He spent thousands of hours pouring over Mars Viking photos and finding examples of “artificial structures.” Then he wrote an incredibly awful (judging by the excerpts that are—sadly—mostly gone) fiction novel to wrap around his research. (There was a scene mid-book where the Martians stuck a memory-implanting device on the protagonist’s head to dump locations of all buildings on Mars—the book then had a pages-long infodump list of all the sites the author had “discovered”, including map coordinates and his vaguely descriptive names for the “objects.” The Martians were describing their own buildings as if seen from far above by people who had no idea what they were—as if humans were listing the pyramids and the Great Wall of China as “row of three squares” and “weird squiggly line.”)

    He then printed up an unknown number of paperbacks, set up a website to sell them for $19.99 each, and waited for the customers to pour in. When nobody bought a copy, he decided that there was a giant government conspiracy to silence the secrets that he had uncovered, manipulating search engines to keep them from showing his site. He was under the impression that this was the only thing stopping the book from selling like hotcakes.

    Here’s one link that still works:

    http://www.greatdreams.com/ufos/adventures-of-diana.htm

    And the whole sad thread, if it amuses you:

    https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=meteorite-list%40meteoritecentral.com&q=Mars+Odyssey+THEMIS+images+et&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

  30. Nicholas Whyte,

    There is an aspect of EPH which does need to be clarified: a popular candidate with X voters, who all vote for other even more popular candidates, will be beaten to the ballot by a small but fervently supported candidate with X bullet votes. But the system is intended to be fair to voters, not to candidates. If the “wisdom of crowds” supports five nominees, but there’s a strong minority support for a sixth candidate with little crossover between the two groups, it’s actually better that one candidate is dropped from the consensus five to allow a bit more diversity and to include a different voice. The voters who voted for that candidate are still getting the other works that they supported on the ballot; four out of five ain’t bad.

    This is an important point that needs to be emphasized whenever EPH is discussed. Compared with “first past the post”, EPH encourages diversity and tends to ensure that more voters see one or more of their nominees on the final ballot.

    (I’m glad to see someone else geeking out on the algorithm. Having multiple implementations is a great sanity check.)

  31. Yep, nobody, seeing five nomination slots, should expect to have all five of their nominees on the final ballot.

  32. Religion already isn’t benign, and any religion worthy of a superintelligence certainly would be even less so.

    I doubt any nonhuman intelligence would have something we would recognize as a religion, unless it’s a human-built AI and we use our own thought patterns as a model. Religion isn’t about gods or spirits per se — it’s about imposing a perception of structure and purpose on an essentially chaotic universe.

    Our traditional methods of doing that have the fingerprints of human cognitive and emotional biases all over them, and there’s no reason to think an alien intelligence would approach the problem in a similar fashion, if at all.

  33. Arthur C. Clarke loaned Willis Conover his correspondence with C. S. Lewis. Conover intended, presumably before his gafiation, to publish the Clarke-Lewis letters, but instead sat on them for decades.

    I always wondered what these letters had to say. As I wrote in 1996 when Conover died:

    Presumably these documents were still in Conover’s possession at the end. I wonder what will become of them?

    Lewis and Clarke (heh, heh) had a cordial feud going over the question of space travel. Clarke, of course, was a goshwowohboyohboy promoter of spaceflight, a past president of the British Interplanetary Society, and a co-designer of the 1939 BIS Moonship.

    Lewis was much less sure of the virtues of technological progress, and felt that spaceships would only spread the evils of materialistic, atheistic, technophilic culture across the Solar System. This is embodied in the villains of *Out of the Silent Planet* but you can find it in his essays, too.

    In 1948 Clarke challenged Prof. Lewis to a debate on the morality of spaceflight, which took place one evening in a pub, assisted by rocket guy P.E. Cleator and Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien. Nothing was finally settled but a good time was had by all.

    I don’t know how Conover got involved in this. But I’d really like to read those letters someday. (And if I ever get a time machine, I’m heading for that pub.)

    Somehow, after Conover’s death, the letters were rescued, and published in From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis, edited by Ryder W. Miller. Here’s a review.

    When I finally got my hands on this book, I found that the correspondence was not nearly as interesting as I had hoped. Oh, well.

    Maybe I should get working on my own years-delayed projects.

  34. Bill Higgins: WOW, thank you for the review on the Lewis and Clarke (HEE) debate. Must…get….

    FASCINATING!

  35. I’m not convinced Ray Kurzweil counts as someone whose thinking cannot be dismissed.

    Musk as well, as the hyperloop the remains the funniest thing ever.

  36. Funny stuff from Hines:

    Vox Day and John C. Wright had the most dramatic losses, but they weren’t alone in scoring behind No Award. Michael Williamson’s related work also took a drubbing from No Award. (On a related note, I believe John C. Wright is now the first person ever to be nominated for six Hugo awards, as well as the first person to lose or be disqualified in all six.)

    Even funnier stuff from someone called UrsulaV (I wonder who that could be) in the comments:

    and that pricelessly awkward moment when it turns out a Puppy supporter/beloved work would have actually made the ballot honestly but got bumped by Wright.*

  37. “and in modeling one might consider scenarios both with and without said cosmic coincidence, simply given that this is one of the justifications for the recent campaigning. “

    Correction – It is one of the rationalizations for the unhouse-trained movement. There is no sensible justification to be found anywhere.

  38. I wouldn’t trust that UrsulaV person. I hear she wanders around the internet disguised as a marsupial.

  39. @Brian Z
    You know, the thing the ML people didn’t address is that modeling recent years raises the spectre of the “secret cabal” that “puppies” constantly bring up. The argument goes something like this:

    In 2014 (say), a disproportionate number of voters nominating “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” also chose to nominate (say) “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” and “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket.”

    Brian, why do you even want to spout utter bullshit like this?

    There’s a 36-vote spread between the top and bottom vote-getters on that list. I see hardly any grounds for citing “a disproportionate number” of voters selecting the same stories, short of you having examined their ballots. Especially considering the top vote-getter, with 79 supporters, was out of 865 ballots cast.

    You also fail to explain how The-Powerful-SJW-Cabal-That-Decides-The-Hugo-Ballot couldn’t even muster enough votes to get five short stories onto the ballot, just as the year before they couldn’t raise the 31 votes that would have been required to get more than three finalists on the ballot.

    If you’re seriously going to argue for the existence of the “secret cabal,” it’s clear there’s simply no chance of an honest discussion with you. (As if!)

    There is no “spectre” to be raised, just the usual Puppy self-justifying bullshit. If your response is that these aren’t your own opinions, you’re just showing the Puppy point of view, my response is…For the love of God, why?

  40. @Brian Z
    There’s an 11-vote range between the rest of the top 15 that didn’t make the Short Story ballot in 2014. Exercise for the reader: Tell me which one was the SJW pick.

  41. @RedWombat

    Clearly suspicious behaviour!

    But yes, the discovery of, say, the Heinlein biography or a good honest MilSF work lying 6th-10th in their category would be bitter-sweet.

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