(1) SFWA IN A TENT. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America had a tent at this year’s Baltimore Book Festival. Here’s some highlights.
"How to Come Across As A Pro Writer" panel at #bmorebookfest #sfwa tent now! pic.twitter.com/myowfArRQV
— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) September 23, 2016
(2) OVERTIME. William Patrick Maynard tells how “Phileas Fogg Finds Immortality” at Black Gate.
When Jules Verne created gentleman adventurer Phileas Fogg in his 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, he had no way of imagining the bizarre turn his character’s chronicles would take a century later. When Philip Jose Farmer added The Other Log of Phileas Fogg to his Wold Newton Family series in 1973, he had no way of imagining that four decades later there would exist a Wold Newton specialty publisher to continue the esoteric literary exploits of some of the last two centuries’ most fantastic characters.
(3) HOW THIS YEAR’S HUGO BASES WERE MADE. Read artist Sara Felix’s Facebook post about creating the bases. And there’s an Instagram from the company that did the fabrication.
(4) HUGO LOSER DIFFERENT FROM JUST PLAIN LOSER. The Vancouver Sun ran an article on Sebastian de Castell, with a Puppyish spin on events, “The time George R.R. Martin called Vancouver writer Sebastien de Castell a loser”.
It was nothing personal, though. In fact, it had little to do with de Castell at all. De Castell was at the annual celebration of science fiction and fantasy writing/fandom because he had made the Hugo shortlist for best new writer. De Castell figured he would lose to Andy Weir of The Martian fame — he was correct in this prediction — and he assumed Martin believed the same thing.
But Martin was also reacting to the fact that de Castell had been nominated in part because of the efforts of two fan voting blocs: the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. The Puppies groups have caused chaos in the Hugo Awards and the broader sci-fi and fantasy communities lately by trying to fight what they see as the takeover of the awards by “social justice warriors” who vote for politically correct works at the expense of good writing and storytelling. Both the Sad Puppies, created by bestselling author Larry Correia, and the Rabid Puppies, launched by right-wing writer Vox Day, have put forward slates of suggested writers and works to vote for, and de Castell wound up on just such a list much to his surprise.
Sebastien de Castell elaborated in this Reddit thread: As Peter [reporter Peter Darbyshire] noted in the article, George R.R. Martin wasn’t being hurtful towards me at all–he was simply calling it as he saw it and, of course, was completely correct in his assessment. My mature, adult self understood that there was nothing ungracious on his part in our very brief encounter. My eight year-old inner self, of course, had quite reasonably been expecting his first words to me to be, “What? Sebastien de Castell? By Jove, chap, I’ve been looking all over for you in order to praise your works as the finest in a generation. Also, because I’d love your thoughts on the final books in A Song of Ice & Fire…I happen to have some early pages here if you’d like to read them?”
That’s what Peter and I were discussing in that portion of the interview–the gap for me between feeling like a “big time author” and coming face-to-face with the reality of being a guy who’s really still very much in the early stages of his career.
The most interesting thing about WorldCon (MidAmericon II) for me was how kind people were to me overall. I was very cognizant that my presence on the Campbell shortlist was controversial and likely painful to a lot of people within that community. They had every reason to suspicious and even dismissive of me, but in fact folks were generous and welcoming. David Gerrold gave me some excellent advice on completing the final book in the Greatcoats series, Alyssa Wong was terrific and fun to hang out with (we were the only two Campbell nominees in attendance so our official photos got pretty silly), and I got to spend some time chatting with the brilliant Michael Swanwick.
(5) DC EXPLORING 2024 WORLDCON BID. Their polished website suggests a group that is doing more than just thinking about it, however, they say DC in 2024 is still in the exploratory stage.
We are members of the Baltimore-Washington Area Worldcon Association, Inc. (BWAWA). In 2013, we launched DC17, a bid to host the 2017 Worldcon in Washington, DC at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel… but we lost to Worldcon 75.
We’re back to explore the possibility of hosting the 82nd Worldcon in 2024. Washington, DC is still a super location for a World Science Fiction Convention and we believe it’s time Worldcon returned to DC for the third time. The year 2024 will be the 50th anniversary of Discon II, the last DC Worldcon.
We are still very early in the planning stage. Please check back for information on supporting our bid and our future activities. Our social media links are also still under construction.
They’re exploring right now – but I expect they’ll find they’re bidding if they keeping looking.
(6) WEINBERG OBIT. SF Site News reports Robert Weinberg (1946-2016) passed away today.
Author Robert Weinberg (b.1946) died on September 25. Weinberg began publishing fiction in 1967 and from 1970 to 1981 edited the fanzine Pulp about pulp magazines. He wrote for Marvel Comics and was known for his art collection. Weinberg also ran a mail order book business until 1997. Weinberg received a special committee award at Chicon 7, the 2012 Worldcon.
Here is the citation that was read at Chicon 7 when Weinberg was presented with his Special Committee Award.
Each year, the Worldcon committee is entitled to recognize someone who has made a difference in our community. Someone who has made science fiction fandom a better place. This can be a fan, an author, a bookseller, a collector, a con-runner, or someone who fits into all those and more. This year, Chicon 7 is pleased to recognize someone who fits into all of those categories.
Robert Weinberg attended his first meeting of the Eastern SF Association in 1963, discovered the club offered something he liked, and became active, eventually becoming the club’s president in 1968. Maintaining an interest in the pulp magazines which formed so much of the basis for what we read today, Bob published fourteen issues of the fanzine, Pulp, from 1974 through 1980.
In 1968, Bob began publishing readers guides to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, eventually expanding both to book length and publishing additional guides and books about the pulp magazines and the authors who wrote for them. 1973 saw his publication of WT50, an anniversary tribute to Weird Tales, a magazine to which Bob would acquire the rights in 1979 and help revive.
Bob is a collector of science fiction and fantasy art from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, working to preserve art which otherwise might have been lost. His interest in art collection also led to him writing A Biographical Dictionary of SF & Fantasy Artists, which served as a basis for Chicon 7’s Guest of Honor Jane Frank’s own A Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.
Beginning in 1976, Bob began serving as the co-chairman of the Chicago Comicon, then the second largest comic book convention in the United States. He continued in that position for twenty years before it was sold to Wizard Entertainment. During that time, Bob also chaired the World Fantasy Convention when it came to Chicago on two different occasions and in 1978 he co-chaired the first major Doctor Who convention in the United States.
Bob has also written his own books, both non-fiction and fiction.. His first novel, The Devil’s Auction, was published in 1988 with more than a dozen novels and collections to follow. He worked with Martin H. Greenberg to edit and publish numerous anthologies beginning in the 1980s.
Not content to write his own books and monographs, run conventions, and collect art, Bob also, for several years, ran the mail-order Weinberg Books. Bob offered advice to Alice Bentley when she was setting up The Stars Our Destination, a science fiction specialty bookstore in Chicago from 1988 through 2003. In 1997, Bob sold his mail order business to Alice.
Bob’s long career as a fan, author, bookseller, collector, and con-runner has helped make science fiction the genre, and the community, it is today. Chicon 7 would like to recognize Robert Weinberg for his years of service and devotion given to advancing the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
(7) PETERSON OBIT. First Fandom member Robert C. Peterson (1921-2016) died August 15. John Coker III wrote the following appreciation:
Robert C. Peterson (May 30, 1921 – August 15, 2016)
Robert Constant Peterson passed away on August 15 after a brief illness. He is survived by his four sons, John, James, Alan, and Douglas, and his grandchildren, Katherine, Eric, Diana, and Jay.
Robert was preceded in death by his wife of over 50 years, Winifred.
Robert graduated in 1942 from the University of Wyoming and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was an avid hiker and was an active member of the Colorado Mountain Club. He led hikes for the club until just before he turned 80. He met his wife, Winifred, on a mountain club hike.
Robert was an early fan of science fiction. In 1994 he was elected to the First Fandom Hall of Fame, and in 2008 he received the Sam Moskowitz Archive Award in recognition of his SF collection.
Robert and Winifred were lifelong members of the Washington Park United Church of Christ and were strong supporters of social justice. They supported Winifred’s sister Gretchen in her work at the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Japan. Robert and Winifred travelled extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world.
In lieu of flowers contributions can be made to the American Friends of the ARI (http://www.friends-ari.org/).
(8) GARMAN OBIT. Jack Garman (1944-2016), credited with a judgment call that saved the first moon landing, died September 20 at the age of 72.
On July 20, 1969, moments after mission control in Houston had given the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, the O.K. to begin its descent to the moon, a yellow warning light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel. “Program alarm,” the commander, Neil Armstrong, radioed. “It’s a 1202.”
The alarm appeared to indicate a computer systems overload, raising the specter of a breakdown. With only a few minutes left before touchdown on the moon, Steve Bales, the guidance officer in mission control, had to make a decision: Let the module continue to descend, or abort the mission and send the module rocketing back to the command ship, Columbia.
By intercom, Mr. Bales quickly consulted Jack Garman, a 24-year-old engineer who was overseeing the software support group from a back-room console. Mr. Garman had painstakingly prepared himself for just this contingency — the possibility of a false alarm.
“So I said,” he remembered, “on this backup room voice loop that no one can hear, ‘As long as it doesn’t reoccur, it’s fine.’”
At 4:18 p.m., with only 30 seconds of fuel remaining for the descent, Mr. Armstrong radioed: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Mr. Garman, whose self-assurance and honed judgment effectively saved mankind’s first lunar landing, died on Tuesday outside Houston. He was 72. His wife, Susan, said the cause was complications of bone marrow cancer.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- September 25, 1959 — Hammer’s The Mummy, seen for the first time in the UK on this day.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born September 25, 1930 — Shel Silverstein
- Born September 25, 1951 – Mark Hamill
- Born September 25, 1952 — Christopher Reeve
(11) JUST BEFORE THE FINAL FRONTIER. Need an excuse to feel miserable? Read “Leonard Nimoy Died Hating William Shatner” at About Entertainment.
(12) CULTURAL APPROPRIATION DEBATE. Kaitlyn Greenidge makes some trenchant comments in “Who Gets To Write What?” for the New York Times.
…Claudia Rankine, when awarded the MacArthur genius grant this past week, noted that the prize was “the culture saying: We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you.” For some, this sounds exciting. For others, this reads as a threat — at best, a suggestion to catch up and engage with a subject, race, that for a long time has been thought of as not “universal,” not “deep” enough for fiction. The panic around all of this is driving these outbursts.
It must feel like a reversal of fate to those who have not been paying attention. The other, who has been relegated to the background character, wise outcast, dash of magic, or terror or cool or symbolism, or more simply emotional or physical whore, is expected to be the main event, and some writers suspect that they may not be up for that challenge.
A writer has the right to inhabit any character she pleases — she’s always had it and will continue to have it. The complaint seems to be less that some people ask writers to think about cultural appropriation, and more that a writer wishes her work not to be critiqued for doing so, that instead she get a gold star for trying.
Whenever I hear this complaint, I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s cool assessment of “anti-P.C. backlash” more than 20 years ago: “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”
This debate, or rather, this level of the debate, is had over and over again, primarily because of an unwillingness on one side to consider history or even entertain a long line of arguments in response. Instead, what often happens is a writer or artist acts as though she is taking some brave stand by declaring to be against political correctness. As if our entire culture is not already centered on a very particular version of whiteness that many white people don’t even inhabit anymore. And so, someone makes a comment or a statement without nuance or sense of history, only with an implicit insistence that writing and publishing magically exist outside the structures of power that dominate every other aspect of our daily lives.
Imagine the better, stronger fiction that could be produced if writers took this challenge to stretch and grow one’s imagination, to afford the same depth of humanity and interest and nuance to characters who look like them as characters who don’t, to take those stories seriously and actually think about power when writing — how much further fiction could go as an art.
(13) THE VOX DAY FASHION SHOW. Day spared no effort to fit into the theme of a 5K he ran — “The Color Run: a story of courage, endurance, and ninjas, part I”.
Spacebunny and Vox Day.
We got up very early, so early that it was pretty much a toss of the coin as to whether I’d just stay up all night or not, and made the drive to Lausanne, Switzerland, where we met our friends with whom we were doing the run. We changed in the parking lot, where it was much appreciated how my multicolored tutu nicely matched the colorful logo of the t-shirts we were provided. It was rather cold, which inspired Spacebunny to deliver an equally colorful soliloquy in appreciation for the generosity of the donors who were the reason she was wearing nothing but a bikini under her tutu.
Which, of course, was not as pretty as mine, as hers was only yellow. I pointed out that she would probably be glad to not be wearing very much in the way of clothing once we started running and the sun rose a bit higher in the sky, an intelligent observation that impressed her to such an extent that she expressed a keen wish to feel my teeth in her flesh, a sentiment that she managed to phrase in an admirably succinct manner. She was also delighted to discover that while there were people wearing everything from unicorn suits to dragon outfits, she was the only runner in a bikini.
The Color Run happens in hundreds of town internationally in the course of a year:
The Color Run is a five-kilometer, un-timed event in which thousands of participants, or “Color Runners”, are doused from head to toe in different colors at each kilometer. With only two rules, the idea is easy to follow:
1Wear white at the starting line!
2Finish plastered in color!
After Color Runners complete the race, the fun continues with an unforgettable Finish Festival. This larger than life party is equipped with music, dancing and massive color throws, which create millions of vivid color combinations. Trust us, this is the best post-5k party on the planet!
(14) REAL NEWS AND A FAKE TRAILER. From Den of Geek, “Doctor Who Spinoff: Class – Latest News”.
Peter Capaldi will be appearing in the first episode of Class! The show announced the good news via its social media accounts.
We also know that the show’s first two episodes will premiere in the UK on October 22nd. The Twitter account also announced the titles of the first two episodes: “For Tonight We Might Die” and “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” Whoa. That first one is dark and that second one really does sound like it could be a Buffy episode….
Sadly, we don’t yet have an official trailer for Class, though we do have an amazing fanmade one that is pretty brilliant in showing a potential tone of the show and put it into context within the larger Doctor Who universe. It gives a sense of just how ingrained the Coal Hill School has been in the Doctor Who world.
[Thanks to Steven H Silver, Bartimaeus, Andrew Porter, JJ, Cat Rambo, A wee Green Man, and John King Tarpinian, for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor IanP.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Eli: That happens to me a lot. In fact, I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older that I’m not really a music lover per se — when I love music, it’s largely because of the associations it holds for me.
@Darren
Methinks thou doth protest too much.
Also, that Mary Sue article you linked? Brian Michael Bendis comes off as something of a controlling jerk in it. He fridges and kills off (some) minority female characters, or reduces them to sex objects. To quote from the article:
The superhero turned private investigator Jessica Jones is back in the spotlight thanks to the widespread acclaim for her Netflix series, and she is even getting her first solo series in ten years in October with her co-creators Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos reuniting. This is good because with the exception of a brief stint as an Avenger during the “Heroic Age,” Jessica has in recent years been relegated to sitting on the couch, caring for her daughter Dani, and snarking at Luke Cage.
Everyone asks about Jessica Jones. Here’s the deal…you have to sit down with Bendis personally, kiss his pinky ring, and ask for permission if you want to put Jessica in your story. It’s like something out of The Godfather.
The reason for her passivity was actually revealed in a joke comparing Brian Michael Bendis to Vito Corleone in The Godfather when a reader asked why she didn’t have much to do in David Walker and Sanford Greene’s Power Man and Iron Fist series. Basically, only Bendis can tell important comic book stories featuring Jessica Jones.
Again, Bendis refused to relinquish a female character that he created to other writers (certainly not to a female or LGBT creator) and killed her off for shock value. Hand appeared in Agents of SHIELD Season 1 and suffered the same fate.
The fridging of characters like Echo and Victoria Hand and the sidelining of Jessica Jones is why having diversity behind the scenes as well as on the page actually leads to better comics.
Perhaps you should actually try reading articles before you link them, hmmmm?
@Hampus:
Ah, here we go. Long-since deleted LJ post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
I probably shouldn’t have made a snarky inside-baseball remark without context. Sorry about that.
Wow. Haven’t seen that half-arsed a false equivalence since….Saturday I guess.
Oh internets. I just can’t quit you.
I can’t listen to Peter Gabriel’s second album without thinking of Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth, simply because it had just come out and I listened to it regularly while reading the novel.
@Greg
I read your article on Hugo voting at your website. You did a very precise analysis with a very strict definition of slate voting. Very well done!
Re nithing: According to Wiktionary, it is an Old English word, brought by the Norse. Not surviving to.modern times. And I’ll bet that Teresa heard it from Tolkien the medievalist. But also according to Wiktionary, some variants like niddering and niding survived slightly longer, and the latter has been resurrected as an.insult by modern adherents of Heathenry/Asatru!
I want to stop by the library and get more precise details from the OED if I get aa chance.
@6: I only knew Weinberg as a cross old man with a narrow focus; I’m astounded to read that he ran comic conventions. Sounds like he would have been interesting to know earlier.
@10: OTOH, Christopher Reeve was a gentleman. I still remember how well he dealt with a hostile crowd at the 1979 Hugos; I’d have been even more amazed had I realized he was just 26 — some people take decades of adulthood to learn that poise.
@Vasha: I’ll bet that Teresa heard it from Tolkien the medievalist. I wouldn’t. She studied prior Englishes in college(*) and could well have run across it there.
(*) IIRC, she said a few years ago that people could tell that she was really unsober (exhausted?drunk?) when she started talking in some older English.
Thank you, Dawn!
Vasha:
“Niding” is how it is spelled in swedish. Still used sometimes, but a bit old fashioned. “Nidingsdåd”, act made by nithings, is a lot more common. Typically used for massacres, terrorism, racist attacks and the like. It is crimes performed by the worst cowards.
@Cheryl S.
Question for those who admire Martha Wells’ Raksura books: I read and did not love The Cloud Roads. So much about the book was amazing, but the character interactions (because I am too lazy to rot-13) didn’t gel for me. Is that a continuing theme or does everyone attain adulthood at some point?
Without rot-13ing, there is some growth in individuals, but some of the emotional characteristics that you may dislike are intrinsic to the alien creatures and their non-human wiring/roles. Sorry you didn’t like it. One of my favorite series. Maybe I’m just immature? :^]
There will be a SFWA presence again at next year’s Baltimore Book Festival; it’s one of the more successful events we hold, thanks to the hard work of board member Sarah Pinsker. I just updated both the Storify about that with some additional pictures as well as my China notes.
Also, here’s the SFWA statement on Galaktika, which I hope explains some of the surface silence.
Today I went to a pub quiz which had two round 5s and the question “which science fiction author invented the three laws of robotics?”. Thought of you guys <3
@airboy
Glad you liked it! The reason for using such a strict definition for slate (apart from the fact that it’s actually possible to compute it) is that it sets a lower-bound on the number of slaters who everyone agrees really *are* slaters: the people who voted the slate, the whole slate, and nothing but the slate. You can argue a lot over “slate-influenced voters” (are you a slater if the only thing on the whole slate you voted for was Vox Day?) but these numbers showed that nearly all the Rabid votes in any particular category came from 100%-pure slaters.
The other thing (which I assume is what you liked best) is that it showed that almost no one voted the Sad Puppy list as a slate. The big number for Best Semiprozine was due to the fact the Sad Puppy list only recommended one nominee, and so the algorithm mindlessly counts everyone who nominated that one for best semiprozine (and nominated nothing else in the category) as a Sad Puppy slater. I think 17 is the right number overall, with the votes for the Declan Finn work showing that maybe 90 people used the list as a source of recommendations.
That’s pretty small compared to the Rabids, though, where 300 people nominated the straight slate in all categories and another 150 supported it here and there (but when they did vote in a category, they almost always voted the straight slate there; very little picking and choosing among these folks at the individual-nominee level.)
But kudos to Kate and the other Sad Puppies who, best as I can tell, really did what they said they were going to do. They not only created a recommendation list, they actually treated it as one, not as a slate.
Re. The Cloud Roads, I just finished too! Enjoyed it, want to read more, but also had some problems with characterisation. Specifically (sorry for ROT13 but mega spoiler chat necessary!) V arire npghnyyl oryvrirq gung Zbba jbhyq yrnir gur pbybal, fb nyy gur juvavat nobhg abg orybatvat naq fgnlvat nebhaq sbe whhhfg ybat rabhtu gb evfx yvsr sbe fgenatref gura tbvat bss gb yvir nf na bhgpnfg va n jnl juvpu gur svefg puncgref rfgnoyvfu nf fhcre hacyrnfnag naq hapregnva whfg svk nofbyhgryl abguvat gb envfr grafvba be ohvyq punenpgre be shegure gur cybg sbe zr orpnhfr vg jnf fb haernyvfgvp.
I also disliked the shallow feeling antagonists but can give them benefit of the doubt for a bit longer.
when she started talking in some older English.
“O dere ghod” http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007489.html
I hesitate to use the word “mob”, but there certainly seem to be a number of people (not always the same ones) who seem to thrive on attacking perceived slights long past the point where continuing an argument is productive.
(Like that recent VOYA thing over a poorly worded couple of sentences. The folks at VOYA have made, what?, five increasingly submissive apologies, but there are still people saying the apologies aren’t sincere enough [*koff*, tone policing, *koff*], aren’t comprehensive enough, aren’t humiliating enough.) (No, I haven’t gone back to sources for chapter & verse; this is the general sense of what I took away from the whole thing. What I did read when the brouhaha was fresh moved me from a “Yeah, the criticism of VOYA has a point” position to “What the everloving fuck…?”)
One of the stories I wrote last year had three teenage protagonists: an overweight socially-ostracized girl, a Cambodian exchange student with something like Asperger’s, and a black teenage hacker. Writing this was a stretch, and a challenge, but stretching my skills and challenging myself is one of the things I try to do with my fiction.
How good a job do I do in writing way outside my straight white male middle-class experience? Hard to tell from inside that SWM-ness. But when I try to write outside my own personal experience, I try to do it with an awareness that I might end up faceplanting in the attempt.
So the story may not be as good as I’d like to think. If it ever gets published* (it still needs some polish and revision; too much of the story’s “science” is still handwavium for me to be happy with it, so it hasn’t been submitted anywhere yet), and someone says my non-SWM characters are “poorly written”, I’d listen, consider, take what I agreed with, and try to do better in future work.
But if someone told me “You’re a SWM, so you shouldn’t write about women, PoC, or foreign cultures at all,” they’d get a side-eye in (very polite) response.
*”if it ever gets published“: The next time you talk to an editor, rather than complaining about a story you didn’t like, try thanking them for protecting you from the Slushpile At The Threshhold.
I’m sure I’ve seen “nithing” before, but can’t quite place where. It might have been one of those translations of Norse sagas that goes in for the really Ye Olde Englishe look… really, if the translation is going to be that archaic, it’s almost not worth bothering.
As regards Sebastian de Castell: I reckon he’s OK, on the whole. I voted him above Noah but below Wong and Weir, and I’d stick by that choice. All right, he was a slate beneficiary… but it seems clear that this was, as it were, an honour unlooked-for, and he’s a good enough writer that it’s not unreasonable to see him on the ballot. (It seems to me that nominations for the Campbell are, more than in some other categories, subject to random chance – it’s, if you like, the award for writers who are going to be respected in a few years’ time, and unless you are psychic, you’re going to find it hard to pick the right ones.)
Bruce, are you counting the response with the sentence
as an apology? Cause I can see how the first couple of responses from VOYA would cause scepticism of future apologies.
Another ebook sale! 😀 A.K.A. “Meredith Moment”:
The Younger Gods by by Michael R. Underwood (Pocket Star; uses DRM) is on sale for 99 cents at iTunes USA and Amazon.com. Kobo has a weird $12.99 price (weird because the previous price I’d seen in iTunes was $4.99, so the Kobo price looks like a mistake – not least because it’s an ebook only novel). This sounded like a fun twist on the “Elder Gods” concept. I’ve snapped it up (it’s been in my “to buy” list for a while).
Enjoy, ebookers!
Dawn, I think that sentence is an excellent example of someone clicking [POST] way too soon.
Bruce, given that people reported going back through VOYA’s reviews and finding that the only ones marked for mature content featured queer girls I don’t think it’s accurate to describe the problem as a couple poorly worded sentences. Though, certainly, that was the starting point.
The “nithing” discussion leads me to recommend two delightful books by Jeffrey Kacirk: FORGOTTEN ENGLISH and THE WORD MUSEUM. Both the sort of books where I’d look for that word. Except that those books are in the book basket in my powder room. And I am lying beneath a dozing cat pile on the couch. Which clearly precludes my budging for hours.
@Arifel
Tonight’s episode of University Challenge asked:
Who was the leader of the dwarves who came to the unexpected party?
As well as Orcrist and Sting, which other notable blade was recovered from the trolls in chapter two of the Hobbit?
Where did they stay for a fortnight in chapter three?
The students knew all three. Glad to see students still read the foundational works.
I’ve got a feeling that Garth Nix used ‘nithing’ as the name for some of the antagonist creatures in his Keys to the Kingdom series.
Bruce, the first couple of “apologies” read as someone being extremely defensive, writing in high (or at least middling) dudgeon, and then sending right away. Which generally doesn’t make for a real apology, but rather comes off as “you are wrong and/or stupid for being offended”. At least they did to me.
Argh, gloomy and rain and headache make Dawn something something. (Curl up in bed with book and kitties? Maybe after errands.) Sharing a wee comic that made me giggle:
Reading Ancillary Justice
Dawn Incognito: Thanks for sharing that funny comic.
Greg:
But kudos to Kate and the other Sad Puppies who, best as I can tell, really did what they said they were going to do. They not only created a recommendation list, they actually treated it as one, not as a slate.
I think that is in part because of how the list ended up; no agenda would actually have been furthered by using it as a slate. I am sure they did intend from the start that people could use it as a recommendation list – indeed, I believe some people used SP3 as a recommendation list – but they did also include advice on how to use it as a slate if you wanted to.
On the subject of apologies, incidentally, this is a very excellent discussion of what makes an effective apology that I’ve learned a lot from even if I don’t always (or often) measure up to the standard it sets.
MaxL, again in a general sense, because I really don’t want to go back and re-read all the VOYA interactions again, I felt that VOYA recognized they had a problem, apologized for it, and promised to try and do better. This didn’t seem to satisfy everyone.
I’m not sure what else VOYA could have done at that point. People really need to wait and see where they go from here.
Some people said VOYA was in a hole and continuing to dig. I felt VOYA had gotten itself into a hole and was trying to climb out of it. The best way to help someone do that is to lower a ladder or throw them a rope. Sometimes that means accepting an apology that doesn’t fully satisfy you.
If someone feels VOYA’s apologies were half-hearted or insincere… well, in my time I’ve both given and accepted half-hearted apologies. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for; sometimes it’s the best way to defuse hot tempers and harsh words, and to keep them from becoming even hotter and harsher.
(As always, ymmv.)
I thought this was an interesting piece on cultural appropriation and the responsibilities of a writer.
TICKY CRISIS SOLVED? The Jetpack folks emailed me a link to download a beta version of an update. I installed that, and as instructed, disconnected from Jetpack and reconnected. That’s supposed to fix things.
I have experimented with comment notification on the Sidewise post, and I got notified when I put up my latest comment.
Now’s the time for the acid test — is it working for the rest of you?
Well, somebody say something already! Did I break the whole site?
I don’t see that much of a need to throw VOYA a rope- they are the ones who need the readers, not the other way around.
And honestly, if one is going to make a half-assed insincere and defensive apology, honestly I’d say it’s better not to apologize in the first place. Especially don’t do a meltdown on Facebook. The whole thing was very unprofessional.
Attempted ticky?
Ticky subscription email received, Mike. That’s better than I’ve been getting the last few days.
Someone say something and I’ll see if I get a notification!
Godstalk!
I believe we have a Ticky Crisis resolved, good sir! :cheer:
@Dawn, here is a test-post!
I have subscribed to the Sideways award thread, could you do a test-post there?
And here’s a bonus Godstalk for Nancy.
Bruce, I thought it was clear VOYA recognized they had a problem. But it was also clear they thought the problem was how people were perceiving their words (and, it turns out, actions) and not the words and actions themselves. It’s pretty hard to correct defects in one’s behavior when one doesn’t perceive them, and it’s not clear the folks at VOYA understand their problems (I would say it’s clear they don’t).
And so I know exactly what VOYA could have done to defuse the situation: correctly identified how they fucked up, why it was a problem, and promised to do better in the future. Well, and to go back and fix the queer-content-gets-a-warning reviews. Until they do that, they’ll keep getting flak, and it will be deserved.
Because the thing is, a survey of school librarians in 2016? Found that ~50% of elementary, 40% of junior high, and 30% of high school librarians had passed on purchasing books because of quiltbag content. And those people? Are VOYA’s audience. It matters that VOYA is fucking it up, and it matters that they get it right going forward.
As a side note, one of the VOYA people created a twitter account today and started threatening libel suits. So that’s promising.
Regardless of the problem, I feel that using Twitter to threaten legal action is almost never the correct response.
Nancy, I like the “almost never” phrasing. Now I’m trying to imagine a situation where threatening legal action on Twitter would be the correct response.
(in my best announcer voice) Imagine a universe where Twitter controls our destiny….
What’s this now? A criticism of a certain mono-chrome ness in Sci-fi is now the equivalent of gamergate?
Greg Hullender:
When VD was trying to run for SFWA president, or possibly when he was talkign about doing so in near future, he did say he would, if elected, make it a law that female SF writers could only write about wereleopards and wereseals or something of that sort (I’m not bothering to google the exact quote).
This made me laugh, and not just because the SFWA president has zero power to enforce such an edict.
One of the novels I’ve written (one I am choosing to hold off on attempting to publish until after a couple of others as it’s too long to be an easy sell for a first-time novel — yes, Susanna Clarke aside, this is a Thing. I think it’s publishable, just not as a first shot.) is all about selkies (Or, er, were-seals) and thus could get past his claimed filter … and is everything VD would hate in a book. PoC, Women with Agency, lots and lots of queerness. oh, and heavy on non-Christian religion, but that’s not VD’s particular Bete Noire.
_____________
Darren Garrison continues to be incapable of distinguishing between “There are a few people who will never be satisfied, period (and a fraction of those are actively malicious)” and “virtually everyone agrees this case is an egregious bit of racist BS.” ANYONE offering the opinion that a piece is inappropriate and wrong means everyone does. Every thoughtful examination of a racist appropriation is a RequiresHate level bullying diatribe. There is no middle ground, ever, no careful consideration of what is and is not appropriate, nobody with colour or nuance. It’s “Write it all, no matter how vile” or “sell out to the most extreme of left wing extremists.”
_______________
Bruce Arthurs: I’m in general agreement with your points (yes, there IS a handful of people who seem to prefer to attack everything, and yes, the assertion **nobody**, or even nobody of mainstream culture, should write outside their own culture is deserving of side-eye at best), but the first two VOYA “apologies” were anything but. The first one was a personal attack vaguely dressed up in the language of apology, and the second was less assaultive, but still included zero recognition of actual wrongdoing. The third and fourth were clumsy and clueless but aiming in the right direction, but were undermined by the wholesale deletion of every related thread and all complaints from their facebook account. The fifth, finally, was actually what an apology should look like; specific in what was wrong, specific in what could be done to fix it; she did tail off by praising and pointing out why she loves VOYA, which is both understandable, if overly defensive, and close enough to the previous tone-deaf replies that it doesn’t surprise me that some peoples’ response was “oh, FFS, you’ve made five tries and still don’t get it?” In short, if it had been their first attempt, it would have been good, and the clumsy bits attributed to overly quick response. But this was not “five apologies”. It was somewhere between one and three depending how generous you are in accepting grudging half-assery, all delivered belatedly after several loads of gasoline were thrown on the fire by VOYA while VOYA said, “Look at all this fire! Your complaints are making it worse!”
Nithling is also used by Garth Nix in his “Keys to the Kingdom” series.
>excuse to ticky–YEAH<
🙂
Bruce Arthurs: Like that recent VOYA thing over a poorly worded couple of sentences. The folks at VOYA have made, what?, five increasingly submissive apologies, but there are still people saying the apologies aren’t sincere enough [*koff*, tone policing, *koff*], aren’t comprehensive enough, aren’t humiliating enough.
Yeah, you know, I went and read that whole thing, and frankly VOYA’s “apologies” amounted to “We’re sorry you were offended”, “the reviewer may be prejudiced against bisexuals, but we as a magazine are not”, “bisexuality is a lifestyle and/or a belief” [as opposed to a part of someone’s identity], “we mark any sexual content as for mature readers” [when, very demonstrably, they do not], yet another “We’re sorry you were offended”, and “I apologize, but I want the chance to defend myself and my words”, and finally, “okay we screwed up and we’re sorry, but we do all these good things, so therefore, the criticism is unfair”.
Ain’t none of that a genuine apology.
It is however, a very good demonstration of the First Law of Holes.
Bruce Arthurs: If someone feels VOYA’s apologies were half-hearted or insincere… well, in my time I’ve both given and accepted half-hearted apologies. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for
No, actually, the best people can hope for is a genuine apology. VOYA would have been better off not responding at all than to respond as they did, with a string of faux apologies, excuses, insults, and tantrums.
The only way things change is by people speaking up. Even if VOYA didn’t learn anything from their experience, one can hope that some other entities who were observing did actually learn something.
You see the response here as disproportionate. That’s because you’re looking at it as an isolated incident (which it is not). People have gotten to the point where they are very, very tired of continually being told, for years and even decades — as you are suggesting — to cut the offenders some slack and just accept whatever lameass, insincere apology they get.
What you’re seeing is the result of a lifetime of people having to put up with this crap and finally not being willing to just roll over and accept it anymore.
Thank Godstalk!