(1) GO WET YOUNG MAN. “Venice Film Festival: Del Toro wins Golden Lion for The Shape of Water”: the BBC has the story.
Guillermo del Toro’s critically-acclaimed romantic fantasy The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion at the 74th Venice Film Festival.
The Mexican director, known for his Gothic horrors, said the coveted award was a testament to staying “with what you believe in – in my case, monsters”.
(2) PKD TV. Financial Times’ Gabriel Tate gives an overview of Philip K. Dick’s work as a way of promoting the anthology series “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams”, which will be shown on Channel 4 in the UK and Amazon in the US.
Dick’s influence on wider popular culture is extensive. Gary Numan’s Dick-inspired 1979 song “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack shaped the electronic soundtrack of the 1980s, and the maverick talents of Mark E Smith and Sonic Youth are long-time fans. (Dick, ever the contrarian, preferred Wagner and Beethoven.) It is on screen, however, that his mark is indelible, from the dystopias of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and 12 Monkeys to David Cronenberg’s melding of narcotics, body horror and technology in Videodrome and Existenz. The weird internal logic of Inception and The Matrix also owe much to Dick’s fictional explorations of the subconscious.While these debts have largely been implicit, Dick and his stories continue to inspire TV and cinema adaptations. A third series of Amazon’s series The Man in the High Castle (one of the early alternate histories) is on the way. The long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049 is due out in October. But first comes Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, an anthology series co-produced by Channel 4 and Amazon, that re-imagines 10 of his short stories.
(This could be behind a paywall, although I got Google to show it to me. Your mileage blah blah.)
(3) CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT. At Medium, news about “Into the Black: A Short Fiction Contest With a Big Prize”.
The future of work has never seemed so uncertain. Automation is knocking on the door and already too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, unable to meet their monthly expenses and unable to envision a different fate for themselves. The Economic Security Project is looking for new, bold ways to bring all Americans into a place of economic stability; out of the red and into the black.
To do this, we are launching a short story contest like no other?—?one that uses speculative fiction as a tool to imagine a future of economic security and rewards the winner with financial stability of their own.
What might a world look like where all of our most basic needs are met? In 5,000 words or less, we want you to explore the impacts of a basic income on individual lives and on society at large. To be clear, we are not expecting you to draft economic policy, but hope to ignite debate around new economies with stories that offer nuanced critique and evidence of impact. Writers may want to address how this economic policy could shift relationships of power, or if economic liberation is even possible without first addressing racial and gender justice. Writers may consider universality (i.e., whether this benefit applies to everyone), investigate the community impact, and even give this economic idea a new name.
The most compelling story will change hearts and minds, and ultimately the life of the author; the grand prize winner will receive a basic income of $12,000 over the next year.
(4) UNLIKELY TEAM. Norman Spinrad’s eulogy to Jerry Pournelle on Facebook focuses on when the pair held the top offices of SFWA.
When I was Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America way back in the Culture War days of the 1960s I was front and center of the New Wave speculative fiction with the then-notorious BUG JACK BARRON and Jerry Pournelle then not very well known but known to be on the other side of the divide was elected President, the general consensus was that we would be at each other’s throats….
But as it turned out, nothing could have been further from the truth. We really didn’t know each other beforehand, but “left versus right,” “New Wave versus Old Guard,” “liberal versus conservative,” whatever, we bonded almost immediately, became a tight team, and were close friends ever since.
Alas we, or at least I, will now never hear Jerry’s take on how and why. But my take on it was that we both understood and cherished the difference between ideological and even deep philosophical or religious differences and personal conflict, between public personas or avatars and true friendship. And indeed rather enjoyed the Socratic game because we both understood that was what it was.
(5) MONEY QUOTE. George R.R. Martin says professional experiences overshadowed his political differences with Pournelle, in “A Sadness”.
The Hugo voters knew what they were doing when they gave Pournelle that first Campbell; he went on to have an amazing career, both on his own and in collaboration with other writers, particularly Larry Niven. With INFERNO, LUCIFER’S HAMMER, FOOTFALL, and (especially) MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, the two of them helped transform the field in the 70s. They were among the very first SF writers ever to hit the big bestseller lists, and among the first to get six-figure advances at the time when most writers were still getting four figure advances… something that Jerry was never shy about mentioning. Though he was nominated for a number of Hugo Awards in the years that followed, he never won one… but if that bothered him, he did not show it. “Money will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no money,” he said famously.
Pournelle was fond of talking about all the help Robert A. Heinlein (whom he always called “Mr. Heinlein,” at least in my hearing) gave him when he was starting out, and he was a passionate advocate of RAH’s “pay it forward” philosophy, and did much to help the generations of writers who came after him. He served a term in the thankless job of SFWA President, and remained an active part of SFWA ever after, as part of the advisory board of Past Presidents and (even more crucially) on GriefCom, the Grievance Committee. Jerry could be loud and acrimonious, yes, and when you were on the opposite side of a fight from him that was not pleasant… ahh, but when you were on the SAME side, there was no one better to have in your foxhole. I had need of SFWA’s Griefcom only once in my career, in the early 80s, and when we met at worldcon with the publisher I had Jerry with me representing Griefcom. He went through the publisher’s people like a buzzsaw, and got me everything I wanted, resolving my grievance satisfactorily (and confidentially, so no, no more details).
His politics were not my politics. He was a rock-ribbed conservative/ libertarian, and I’m your classic bleeding-heart liberal… but we were both fans, and professional writers, and ardent members of SFWA, and we loved SF and fantasy and fandom, and that was enough. You don’t need to agree with someone on everything to be able to respect them.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- September 10, 1935 — Popeye was heard for the first time on NBC radio.
- September 10, 1993 – The X-Files premiered.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- September 10, 1923 — Cliff Robertson. Two TZs (A Hundred Yards over the Rim & The Dummy) plus the Flowers for Algernon story to screen, Charly.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- John King Tarpinian finds a pun with a monstrous payoff in Brevity.
- Chip Hitchcock sends this along for those who remember Labyrinth: Rhymes With Orange.
(9) ALDISS RETROSPECTIVE. In the Indian Express: “The humour and astonishing inventiveness of Brian Aldiss’s fiction”.
Later, thanks to a sale at the British Council library in Madras, I was able to amass an Aldiss collection of my own. The book that blew my mind was Aldiss’s experimental Report on Probability A. Describing the plot is pointless, it is set over the course of a single day in an English bungalow and features its occupant, a Mr Mary and his wife. Mr Mary is under surveillance from a trio of observers, each of whom, is himself under observation from the others. For a book written in 1962, it retains its astonishingly inventive verve even today.
Aldiss was also capable of a peculiar humour. His short story ‘Confluence’ features an 11-million-year old language on the planet Myrrin. Words can start with a direct meaning, for example, ‘AB WE TEL MIN’ means “the sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker”. Aldiss then introduces the wrinkle; the language is a combination of words and the posture taken up by the aliens. Meanings are altered by the way an alien sits or stands, so JILY JIP TUP could either indicate “a thinking machine that develops a stammer” or “the action of pulling up the trousers while running uphill”.
(10) IMPROVING THE DRAGON AWARDS. An anonymous critic in the Red Panda Fraction shares their “Dragon Con 2017 Survey and Feedback”. Their advice for making the Dragon Awards better is — make them as similar as possible to the Hugos….
We’re still moving into this space and I’m still learning how to format the blog, but I am about to finally fill out my Dragon Con 2017 Survey and Feedback, and I want to post my feedback about the Dragon Awards 2017 publicly.
- First and most important, the process should be completely transparent. The terms and conditions should be switched from the boilerplate sweepstakes terms and conditions that have been used for the first two years. The voting numbers for both the nominations and the awards should be made public. It’s difficult to trust if there is no way to verify.
- Voting should be limited to actual Dragon Con members so that the Awards are truly representative of Dragon Con.
(11) BEFORE AND AFTER GAMERGATE. NPR’s Latoya Peterson reviews Zoe Quinn’s autobiographical account: “In ‘Crash Override,’ Zoe Quinn Shares Her Boss Battle Against Online Harassment”.
Quinn describes herself as Patient Zero of GamerGate, which is true in the sense that the movement represents the formalization of a phenomenon that’s been happening in gaming for far longer. (Given the nature of online interactions, many of the stories of women at the core of the dustups that occurred before the rise of GamerGate have been lost; out of concern for their own safety, they deleted their histories and stopped speaking about the incidents, in hopes that it would stop the constant stream of vitriol.)
Before I ever heard Zoe Quinn’s name, I had already watched in horror as many women who were involved with, or commented on, games saw themselves attacked for speaking up. Developer Jade Raymond was a proto-Patient Zero, targeted by online mobs for the crime of including herself in a photo of the game she produced. Sokari Erkine of the blog BlackLooks.org posted a quick reaction to the trailer of the game Resident Evil 5, calling out racist tropes, and was met with a wave of GamerGate-like action so severe she stopped blogging for months. And then there was “D**kwolves,” a controversy sparked by a rape joke in the online comic Penny Arcade, which spanned years, spawned merchandise, pitted anti-feminist and feminist gamers against each other and became such a cultural touchstone that the first rule at Kotaku-in-Action, a subreddit dedicated to GamerGate, is “don’t be a d**kwolf.”
(12) SHOCKING REVELATIONS. Can you tell the AC from the DC? “Benedict Cumberbatch is Thomas Edison in the first trailer for The Current War”.
The first trailer for Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s historical drama The Current War has arrived, and it shows off the first look at a really intriguing story. The story dives into an intense rivalry over the future of electrical power in the United States in the late 1800s.
The trailer opens with a Prestige-like shot of Cumberbatch standing in the middle of a field surrounded by light bulbs. We’re introduced to Thomas Edison (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (played by Michael Shannon) as they talk up the coming electrical revolution, how it will change the world, and how they’re each looking to outdo their rival. Nikola Tesla (played by Nicholas Hoult) also makes an appearance.
The film is about the so-called “War of Currents,” an electrical arms race that played out in the late 1880s between inventor Thomas Edison who waged a corporate war against a rival electrical company run by George Westinghouse. This period of American history was an important one, because it helped set the baseline for how electrical power (alternating current vs. direct current) was implemented across the country.
(13) DISCOVERY PREVIEW. Are we sure this isn’t footage from Dune? Star Trek: Discovery – the U.S.S. Shenzou arrives.
(14) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE. Less dirt, more dirty dancing in this loan company ad featuring a dance between He-Man and Skeletor.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster, for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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[godstalk]
first
That He-Man commercial was VERY funny!
(10) IMPROVING THE DRAGON AWARDS.
Well would you expect anything else from a Musteloid SJW?
(In all honesty, those are generally sensible suggestions that will help strengthen it. Right now, it seems like the Dragon Award doesn’t know (yet) what it wants to be or how it wants to run itself.)
Technically Money Supermarket are a comparison shopping service for insurance and other financial products. At least one well-known known UK fan works there…
I’ve just started reading “Ruin of Angels”, and realize that I have a real problem reading sf or f about alternate worlds when there is no map.
Particularly in something like the Craft Sequence, where different novels are in different places on a single world. It’s very difficult for me to remember place names and link them up to events without a map–my mind appears to be organized with a “memory palace” system, where it’s much easier to tie people to events if they’re also tied to a location.
As far as I can tell, there is no Craft Sequence map. Do any of you know otherwise? Clearly “Full Fathom Five” is set in meta-Hawa’ii, and “Two Serpents Rise” & “Last First Snow” are in meta-Valley of Mexico, while Alt Coulumb is meta-Boston (or is in meta-NYC?). But I don’t know (yet) what Agdel Lex is meta to. Manila? Or something in North America?
All this talk of maps gives me the wicked urge for NoNoWriMo. Draw a detailed town map and then write a comedy of manners from the POV of an agoraphobic who never actually leaves the house.
🙂
Doctor Science, I’m pretty sure that Dresedial Lex is Los Angeles.
@Iphinome:
Typo, Freudian slip, or just sound advice? Discuss.
(13) Lads, lads – in the shot of the ship coming out of the clouds, it is backlit by the sun! No way are the interior lights shining out of the windows going to be visible in a silhouette against the sun!
(maps) I just read Uprooted by Naomi Novik (no map) and a quick google afterwards says Novik had her own map of the valley, just to keep the place-names consistent, but the publisher did not commission a pro map.
I think the lack of a detailed map upfront shows outside the valley. The country is in ways too small (they cross it rapidly in an oxcart) and in other ways too big – the Mountains behind disappear from view altogether as they go.
@Doctor Science As far as I am aware, there is no map of the Craftverse. I know there’s basically an old world and a new world, and a hawaii analogue, and that’s about it.
@JJ I’ve wondered if he was going for a cross between LA and Las Vegas.
10)) sensible suggestions. They would go a long way to making me respect the awards more.
7) Robertson also played Charlie Gordon in the (earlier) TV adaptation, and he bought the movie rights specifically so he could play him in the movie.
I generally take a long lookat maps in nookd, and then goirgdt anout them and read the book.
Godstalk!
TITLE: Werewolf here! The puns will arrive spontaneously and from context. Sorry to say though, the honey has leaked all over the bottom shelf of the corner cabinet in the kitchen.
The Werewolves Competition Paintball Team of NJ & PA tore up tournament fields across the US from 1989 thru 1992 as one of the premiere 15 player teams in the sport.
The team’s spiritual mentor was Warren Zevon; it’s theme songs Lawyers, Guns and Money and Werewolves of London, with the signature last line of the latter shouted with relish at other teams just before taking the field – “draw blood!”
Zevon even worked New Jersey into the song (“there’s only one werewolves of New Jersey”), though it wasn’t an homage to the team, it still sounded great.
Lawyers, Guns and Money was adopted because all three titled items were a necessary component of the sport (money being the key ingredient).
So, be careful what you wish for…
If you hear him howling around your kitchen door
Better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of New Jersey again!
I’d figured Dresidiel Lex was meta-Lima; one of the drier areas of an equivalent to South America.
10) Since the point of the Dragon Awards is to NOT make them like the Hugos, and to make them an award “all fans” can vote on, I don’t think limiting them to Dragon*Con attendees is in the spirit of (what I know of) the Dragon Awards. More transparency is always good, though.
Can he bake a Pixel Pie, Mikey boy, Mikey boy?
Can he bake a Pixel Pie, charming Mikey?
@12: Cumberbatch certainly has the trademark arrogance to portray someone who ended up on the wrong side of tech for reasons of money and ego; the movie might not simplify/overdramatize the story too much.
That war had strange long-lasting effects; when I was a theater geek (40+ years ago), I read in an industry magazine that Broadway theaters were still using DC-effective dimming equipment. Memory says something about a theater having to be repowered because A Chorus Line (1975) needed modern dimmers (and possibly primitive computerization), which require AC, to run complex cues; I’m not sure the repowering claim was correct, but anything could have lurked in the tangles of midtown Manhattan.
@ULTRAGOTHA
I think the point of the Dragon Awards currently is to ‘take a shot at the Hugos’ and ‘run up awards for the authors we think will make SJWs angry’. The ‘awards of all fans’ is their personal ‘ethics in gaming journalism’ cover for their real motives. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so shatteringly easy to game that people who are small time even in their own niche genres are getting nominations.
I think it would be a good thing if DragonCon moves to professionalize the award and weed out the grifters and ballot box stuffers, and it doesn’t need to adopt a Hugo structure to do so. There are numerous electronic methods that can be used to limit the ability of people to submit mass numbers of votes through hundreds of fake accounts, and to help block/remove obvious voter fraud through those methods. Creating a more transparent approach to the data is another important step.
But, the big question in the room is what people really want the Dragon Awards to be. If they want to make it an award that is taken seriously as a credible fan award, they are literally going about it in exactly the opposite way. I actually have no doubt authors like Butcher, Correia, Drake, Weber, et all could be winning non-curated fan awards for their work. But when you start seeing the fringe culture warriors like Finn or Beale in the finalist lists, who the average DragonCon fan has likely never even heard of much less read, it makes it obvious that a fix on some level is in. And as long as that’s the case, the Dragon Awards are worth about as much as a random internet poll.
“I think the point of the Dragon Awards currently is to ‘take a shot at the Hugos’ and ‘run up awards for the authors we think will make SJWs angry’.”
If the administrator for the Dragon Awards is Bill Fawcett as others have said, I doubt any of that is true.
idontknow: If the administrator for the Dragon Awards is Bill Fawcett as others have said, I doubt any of that is true.
He may be the administrator now, but either he was not the administrator to start, or there were other chefs with spoons in the pot, at least at the beginning — because Bill Fawcett is way too smart to have chosen the bizarre eligibility dates from the original rules (which still plague the awards today).
@Niall McAuley
I fanwank that because the oxcart in question was a very special, never-tiring oxcart, it covered more ground than an ordinary oxcart would. Also remember the beginning of that journey was by speed-rowboat.
Taking a shot at the Hugos was certainly a part of it, since the publicity echoes a number of well-known anti-Hugo talking points. (Not necessarily canine talking points; people who are quite un-puppy-like in their general outlook have been criticising the Hugos for ‘exclusivity’, failure to reflect the market, etc., for years.) I agree that restricting it to members of Dragoncon would spoil the point.
That it’s a conspiracy to benefit a particular group of authors, though, seems unlikely to me. One should never put down to malice what can be explained through incompetence, and I think the Dragon results can be. Although puppy-affiliated writers managed to get on the shortlist, the final ballot this year did not reward them, as it presumably would have done had it been set up in their favour. The administrator said before the final vote that he was aware of interventions by Rabid Puppies and ‘Justice Warriors’ (the latter, in retrospect, probably a reference to the Red Panda Fraction), and that steps were being taken to deal with these. It may well be that slated votes were thrown out – the administrator’s dictatorial powers allow him to do this, accomplishing what Mike proposed should be done in the Hugos, but without any suspicion that this is a breach of the rules. It would be good if this could be done for nominations as well, but perhaps next year it will be, since they seem to be making more of an effort towards legitimacy.
PS. It has struck me that the bizarre eligibility dates make more sense when we remember that the awards were meant to work by authors getting out the vote – they presumably know when their works were published.
Andrew M: It has struck me that the bizarre eligibility dates make more sense when we remember that the awards were meant to work by authors getting out the vote – they presumably know when their works were published.
I’m not buying that. It makes no sense to have the eligibility period be anything other than the calendar year, because otherwise it’s too hard for anyone to keep track of release dates.
And even if that was the thinking, there would have been no reason to make the eligibility period longer than a year — unless the intent was to ensure that one or more specific works were grandfathered in. The original eligibility period, when the awards were first announced, was April 1, 2015 – July 25, 2016.
I’m convinced that those dates were chosen so that specific books would be eligible. For instance, this one, which was released on April 25, 2015; this one, which was released on February 9, 2016.
It was only later that the eligibility period was changed to July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016, because someone realized how effing stupid the original dates were, and stepped in to fix it.
@Andrew M
I think the final ballot (if not the results) were pretty favourable considering they successfully elevated several aligned writers who have pretty much zero mass market recognition. And Correia got his award, which was the whole point of the Puppies in the first place.
All that being said, it doesn’t need a shadowy cabal to tilt the scales, and their failure to show any addressing of the nomination flaws of 2016 is telling. They may not be directly favouring a specific author, but they’re not taking any verifiable measures to counter a tactic that one side of the spectrum has spent the last 5 years using with abandon. Sure, it could be just sheer incompetence, but there are an awful lot of hints, from the awards launch being crouched in Puppy language to the nod and wink to ‘both sides do it’ on ballot stuffing to suggest that someone with a level of control has no problem with the awards being gamed if these are the results.
Again, doesn’t even necessarily need to be strictly ideological. Simply someone who thinks there’s a market to be tapped via the Dragon Awards and thinks they are more likely to monetize a group so long as they think they can hit the ballot, regardless of the methods used to achieve them.
@Andrew M
I agree. I had assumed the awards were just a sham to let Beale put “Dragon Award Nominee/Winner” on his books, but the way he was wiped out in the final vote strongly argues that that’s not the case.
The fact that Survey Monkey does the polling at least means that state-of-the-art anti-fraud measures are in place. I know that some people reported that they voted multiple times from the same PC with different e-mail addresses, but what they don’t know is whether any of their votes were actually counted. SOP in such things is not to notify the fraudster that he/she was detected.
At this point, I think the biggest thing the Dragon Awards organizers need to do is to promote the awards more widely. If the final vote was any indication, it shows that the more involvement by ordinary fans, the less influence the alt-right has on the results.
Roland the Headless Pixel Scroller
I’ll Scroll When I’m Fifth
Bad Luck Scroll in Pixel School
Scroll Somebody! (The Pixel Song)
Things to File in Los Angeles When You’re Mike
You’re right, Dresedial Lex has overlap with LA, as well as Mexico City/Tenochtitlan. I’ve also seen it pointed out that it has many similarities to Guaymas, on the Gulf of California.
Those of you who’ve finished ahead of me, what’s your feeling about our-world equivalents of Agdel Lex? My brain would appreciate the help.
Things to file and scroll in the fifth dimension.
(8) see also http://2i6kb72qca2z2iuxn42vec1h-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Confused-Travolta_Escher.gif
I’m reading Ruin of Angels as well. I don’t have the map issue (yet, but as a gamer I never hesitated to break out the graph or hex paper), but to me Dresediel Lex was LA+Mexico City with dashes of Las Vegas and prohibition era Hollywood and the movie Chinatown. The only place it could be is on the southern portion of the east coast of a Pacific equivalent.
As to Alt Coulomb, it’s a cross between Paris and New York. The geography is kind of weird (ha!), but it seems to be in a wetter and lusher. Maybe the equivalent to the Pacific Northwest?
Anyway, I kind of don’t want an official map – part of the fun is playing around like this.
Eight Scrolls High
One scroll makes you larger and
one scroll makes you small,
and the pixels mother gives you
don’t do anything at all
Go ask Filers
What the godstalk said
Feed your head!
RIP Jerry Pournelle:
I continued to read Chaos Manor right up until the end, because although I didn’t agree with Dr. Pournelle’s politics, he often had commenters bring up interesting items from sources I wouldn’t ordinarily see.
His friendship with Newt Gingrich was often commented on, and although I’m not fond of Mr. Gingrich, he supports reviving the space program, which was a cause Jerry believed in strongly.
There are lots of political opinions Jerry held that I shake my head and go, “How could any intelligent person believe that?” and then I look at my FB feed and the current administration in Washington, DC and realize that … well, Jerry wasn’t as far out as the people currently running the USA.
He was still a good author of enjoyable SF (and I don’t think the suck fairy has hit “Footfall” or “Mote” or even a lot of Falkenberg’s Legion) and a staunch supporter of the field and other authors. I feel very bad for his wife Roberta and his children and the rest of his family.
Greg Hullender on September 11, 2017 at 8:58 am said:
Given the state of the art, I’m not sure that’s all that reassuring. 🙂
But actually, state-of-the-art anti-fraud measures have requirements on the user side which clearly aren’t present. At best, it would be state-of-the-art for such an informal and inherently vulnerable voting mechanism.
@Andrew M,
IIRC (and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong), there was no public post by Red Panda Faction until well after the quoted comment. Many of us were scratching our heads trying to figure out who these ‘Justice Warriors’ were.
Dragons & Hugos:
1. to me, it represents the further encroachment of commercialization into fannish pursuits. First it was media based cons, then those became commercialized (offering a faux “fannish experience”), then Dragoncon pushed Worldcon off of its traditional labor day weekend (after finding out what they needed to do with their NASFiC, further extending tentacles into fandom, now, an award, derived from whaever motives, intending to compete with/replace/whatever the Hugos and the Nebulas.
(and of course commercial efforts will beat traditional ones – all the time – because commercial efforts make money and grow, or don’t and go away; they deliberately promote themselves (duh) and suck up the available population before it even has a chance to learn that there is something else and different out there.
Second: Beale et al don’t need to worry about “winning”; Beale can now proclaim “nominated for both the Hugo and Dragon Awards” – meaning his work must (obviously) be respected by both ends of the spectrum. (This is why I want WSFS to find a way to retroactively remove those problem names from the short list record – or at least accompany them with a statement that explains why there’s a turd sitting in the middle of the list.)
I think that part of the issue with analyzing these things is owing to the fact that most of us view this through a fannish lens. By way of example: a fan, aware of the history (and fans would be) can easily dismiss Beale because they know the whole story. Someone new to the field, awards and conventions will not; if their introduction is through a commercial experience, they will likely never get told the facts accurately and their reception of “multiple award nominee” will be completely different. Further, it’s clear from the rhetoric that Beale and puppies measure and weigh things differently: numbers sold, dollars earned are important measures (as they are for many among the uninitiated), while fans dismiss that almost out of hand. And with those dollars, they are busy spreading their gospel in ways and in a sustained manner that is not typical for fans. Unfortunately, their crap gets read more frequently than “our” crap, which suggest that eventually, their history could supplant the real history.
(and I think its funny/ironic that, about five/six years or so ago, I was engaged in lengthy discussions about the Hugos with Kevin Standlee, and much of what I was writing was warnings that Dragoncon will introduce their own “Hugo awards” as the next logical step in their commercialization of fandom.
@Soon Lee
True, but the admins could have seen a pattern in nominations, or learned of the group via its members talking about it, etc.
As one of the head-scratchers I’m now reasonably sure the Pandas were the source of that accusation.
@Mark,
Was there any public posts by Red Panda Faction prior to the twitter recommendation thread just before voting ended? Prior to the Dragon ‘Justice Warriors’ announcement? I don’t recall any.
Without those, how could Dragon award admins connect nomination patterns to specifically Red Panda Faction ? The dots don’t join up for me.
They didn’t connect nomination patterns specifically to Red Panda Fraction. They connected them to ‘Justice Warriors’. If there was a pattern of nomination which seemed to be following a slate, and they were all for liberal-leaning works, they could infer that some such intervention was happening, though obviously they didn’t know the name of the group. (No one thinks it called itself ‘Justice Warriors’.)
(Stephen King) Clowns to the left of me, (Heath Ledger) Jokers to the right,
Here I am,
Scrolled in the Pixel with you
“Their advice for making the Dragon Awards better is…”
Don’t we already have an award that resembles their advice, someplace or other?
Today’s scroll title reminds me of Andy Williams singing “Marmalade, Molasses and Honey” in the middle of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Something I hadn’t thought of for a while.
Is there any evidence that Dragon Award administrators detected anti-Puppy or liberal “nomination patterns”, other than the reference to “justice warriors” in an email to an author who had withdrawn her work? I admit that I haven’t been following this closely.
@ Chip Hitchcock
I would believe almost anything involving obsolete and archaic tech in Broadway theaters after some of the horror stories I’ve heard from my girlfriend (who just last week retired from being a house manager–you know, the person who had to make things work in spite of the obsolete and archaic tech).
Is there any evidence that Dragon Award administrators detected anti-Puppy or liberal “nomination patterns”, other than the reference to “justice warriors” in an email to an author who had withdrawn her work?
Nope. Like most other things about the Dragon Awards, there is no way to confirm one way or another whether anything that its secret cabal of masters say is actually true.
Well, here is the reference to “justice warriors” as quoted in a File 770 report on August 9. It’s pretty vague.
“We are aware of the rabid puppies and justice warriors efforts to effect the voting and we go through a number of steps to avoid ballot stuffing or other vote rigging behaviors. “
steve davidson on September 11, 2017 at 12:57 pm said:
Not going to happen until and unless the WSFS Constitution is amended to require it — and I don’t see that happening.
The order of finish on the Hugo Awards web site lists No Award when necessary to show that any finalists finished below it in the final voting.
So, I found a copy of Godstalk to check out. I believe this means that I’ll now be able to advance one level…er, pardon me, I’ll be able to not-advance one not-level in the not-secret not-cabal that doesn’t control science fiction. 😀
Xtifr: So, I found a copy of Godstalk to check out.
Your Super Sekrit SJW Kabal membership card is not in the mail. 😉