Pixel Scroll 3/16/16 Teenaged Mutant Radioactive Shapeshifting Cheesy Ninja Hedgehogs

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(1) PRINCESS ON CAMPAIGN. A set of election posters help publicize a new Star Wars novel — “Leia’s Past Haunts Her In new Star Wars: Bloodline Poster”, at IGN.

Set in-between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the upcoming novel Star Wars: Bloodline focuses on Leia Organa, and the shifting role she finds herself playing after the Rebel Alliance’s victory and key moments that will define who she is in Episode VII.

IGN has the exclusive debut of four posters for the novel, which will be given to fans at C2E2 and other upcoming conventions.

The posters are all variations on one another – starting with an in-universe campaign image of Leia and then showing how it has been defaced in different ways by some who seem none too happy with the Princess from Alderaan.

(2) DARTH BY THE HEARTH. Meanwhile, Dad’s lifestyle is no longer as glamorous: “This Ukranian man lives his life as Darth Vader – and the photos are incredible”

While many people would consider themselves serious “Star Wars” fans, one Ukrainian man is taking things to the next level.

Darth Mykolaiovych Vader legally changed his name in homage to the classic “Star Wars” villain. He spends his days dressed in a Vader costume, complete with black cloak, gloves, and of course, the iconic face mask.

Reuters caught up with Vader to see what life is like as one of the world’s most famous movie villains. Turns out, even mundane tasks, like showering and dog walking, look a lot cooler when the Sith Lord does them.

(3) CARNEGIE AND GREENAWAY SHORTLISTS. The shortlists for the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals have been announced.

The Carnegie Medal, established in 1936, is awarded annually to the writer of an outstanding book for children. The Kate Greenaway Medal has been given since 1955 for distinguished illustration in a book for children.

Locus Online identified these titles on the shortlists as being of sf/f interest.

Carnegie Medal

  • The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
  • The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Patrick Ness (Walker)
  • Five Children on the Western Front, Kate Saunders (Faber)
  • The Ghosts of Heaven, Marcus Sedgwick (Indigo)

Greenaway Medal

  • The Sleeper and the Spindle, Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell (Bloomsbury)

The winners will be announced June 20.

(4) A MONTH OF MARCH. C. Stuart Hardwick thinks a writing career is a marathon. He means it literally. See “Stay Fit” at The Fictorians.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how infirm! In action how like a potato!

…American’s should ditch the office chair and switch to a treadmill desk they said. We could loose a few pounds a week just by walking instead of sitting, and address all the other health impacts at the same time. We are not evolved to sit around, nor to stand around, but to hike.

So okay, I decided to give it a try. Treadmill desks are stupid expensive, though, so I made my own. I put a laptop and $10 worth of wire shelving on a $600 Horizon T101 treadmill. I learned to touch type while walking at 2.2 MPH on an incline—just enough to barely crack a sweat. I started loosing weight.

After two months, I was so impressed, I decided to splurge on an upgrade.

I bought a dedicated workstation and bolted it to the treadmill with a monitor arm and a theatrical clamp (I blogged about it here: https://cstuarthardwick.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/upgraded-treadmill-desk-2/). My weight kept falling. In addition to the treadmill, I also started spending time on the exercycle as well, and I used MyFitnessPal to track my net calories. In six months, I lost 45 pounds.

(5) WU ON SYFY SERIES. Brianna Wu appears in a new episode of The Internet Ruined My Life.

200 death threats later, online harassment is a new kind of normal for game developer Brianna Wu. But she refuses to let it silence her.

Wu is one of the subjects in the latest episode of the new Syfy Network series, “The Internet Ruined My Life.”

Wu is the cofounder and CEO of a gaming studio, Giant Spacekat, which make games that empower women, not objectify them.

(6) NOW WE KNOW. Pat Cadigan gives an assist to Philip K. Dick.

(7) IRISH SF. The Dublin 2019 Worldcon Bid has been given permission by author Jack Fennell to publish his bibliography of Irish Science Fiction, which describes hundreds Irish Science Fiction stories and books published from the 1850s to the present day. Download A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction [PDF file].

Jack Fennel has also written a book, Irish Science Fiction.

When I started my doctoral research into Irish SF, I thought that I had picked a nice handy topic: there couldn’t be that many Irish SF novels and short stories out there, and whatever amount there was must be very recent. Over the course of the next four years, I was proven wrong over and over again. There were hundreds of texts out there, so many that I had to abandon my plans to write a comprehensive overview. What struck me as particularly bizarre, though, was the difficulty I had in finding this stuff when there was such an abundance of it. The reasons became apparent as I continued digging.

Firstly, it was just an accepted truism that Ireland was not science-fictional. The phrase ‘Irish science fiction’ would, at best, bring forth memories of irascible Irish engineer Miles O’Brien from the Star Trek franchise (to date, the only character to shout “Bollocks!” on a Star Trek episode); at worst, it would trigger traumatic flashbacks to Leprechaun 4: In Space. The idea of Irish SF in itself was somewhat ridiculous, and more often than not played for laughs. There was a general perception, among the ‘uninitiated’ anyway, that the Irish just didn’t bother imagining such things.

(8) UNMADE INDIANAS. Simon Brew at Den of Geek knows all about “The Indiana Jones Films That Never Were”.

Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars

Following the success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas would develop an idea or two that could have seen a fourth Indy adventure in cinemas in the 1990s. One that got quite far into the writing process was Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, an idea that Lucas started working on in 1993. He originally hired Jeb Stuart to write the script for him before passing on the mantle to the late Jeffrey Boam (who had co-written The Last Crusade.)

In this one, Indy very nearly gets married at the start to a linguist by the name of Dr. Elaine McGregor. Amongst the guests at the wedding would have been Marion, Willie, Sallah, and his father, but instead of walking down the aisle, McGregor hops into a car on the big day and disappears. The search is thus on to find her.

Turns out she’s working on the discovery of alien bodies and a strange stone cylinder. Indy and McGregor crack the code on said cylinder, which turns out to be coordinates leading them to a mountain. Russian spies want in though, and as Indy tries to rescue Elaine from one of their planes, a flying saucer appears. A further alien encounter sees a truck being lifted off the ground. Meanwhile, a mysterious countdown clock ticks away, with the assumption being that it’s a bomb.

(9) EXCUSE FOR A PUNNY HEADLINE. Sometimes they have storms in Ireland, you may have heard. “Storm ‘troopers’ to inspect Star Wars site after winter weather causes safety concerns” reports the BBC.

An Irish island used as location in the latest Star Wars film is to undergo safety inspections after it felt the full force of winter storms.

Skellig Michael, off County Kerry coast, is a Unesco World Heritage Site that has played host to 8th Century monks and 21st Century film crews.

Parts of Star Wars Episode VII were filmed on the rocky landmass in 2014.

(10) STRING THEORY. Alastair Reynolds salutes Supermarionation in “Hey Joe” at Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.

After a military coup, a dictator misappropriates global aid funds to develop drone warfare technology to use against his own citizens. A stricken submarine ends up in the territorial waters of a Central American failed state, threatening to derail international peace talks. In a Middle Eastern Sultanate, a political assassination leads to a constitutional crisis, imperilling the progressive, democratic policies of the rightful successor to the throne. In the Arctic, a nuclear accident heightens an already tense East-West standoff…

Failed states. Democracies. Autonomous weapons. Middle East crises. Rising nuclear tension. The East and West at each other’s throats …

Sound familiar?

This is the world of 2013 – or rather the world of 2013 as envisaged in 1968, when Gerry Anderson began making Joe 90, the last of his series to be based exclusively around Supermarionation.

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

(12) THE FIRST TRUMP. Jeb Kinnison’s piece “Trump World: Looking Backward” is recommended as having a Canticle for Leibowitz illustratrion and flavor.

The Internet seemed to end the constraints on opinion, but a new sound of silence appeared when its two-way nature allowed crowds to join together to silence expression of ideas they found threatening. People lost their jobs because of one errant tweet, and politicians found it useful to stoke the flames of envy and resentment to gain votes. A new victim cult appeared, seeing racism and sexism in every element of US life, and command of the cult’s lexicon enabled entry to academic and government positions.

The left-behind grew angry, and simmered in disability payments and painkilling drugs while they saw their children discriminated against by the gateway institutions built by their forebears. They had supported the growth of the Federal government through costly wars and the building of a social safety net, only to be left out and denigrated by their ruling class. Federal agencies were taken over by progressives and affirmative-action hires, and wasted time and resources shuffling reports and holding grand meetings to write about working toward solving problems that barely existed while neglecting their core functions. The levels of incompetence tolerated grew and grew, until civil service employees could hold their jobs after being absent for years or being discovered spending most of their time viewing Internet porn. Major new government programs and projects failed and billions of dollars were wasted without consequence, those responsible for the failures being promoted to further damage the private economy by ruling from Washington.

And all that’s before Trump even appears.

(13) NUSSBAUM’S BALLOT. Abigail Nussbaum’s entry “The 2016 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Short Fiction Categories” makes compelling reading for her honest admission that – like who knows how many Hugo voters – she’s allergic to paying for short fiction.

Before we get started, a few comments on methodology, and observations on the state of the field.  Almost all of these stories were published in magazines that are freely available online, largely because that makes them easier to access whenever I have some free reading time.  As I did last year, I ended up skipping the print magazines completely, as well as most of the for-pay online magazines.  The one exception is the novella category, where the e-book boom continues to be extremely rewarding for both authors and readers, creating a new market for slimmer volumes and more contained stories that you can enjoy for just a few dollars apiece.

She also read the free fiction on Tor.com despite some misgivings – it was, after all, free.

Second, I should say that I debated for a long time over reading stories published on Tor.com, or in the publisher’s new novella line.  The behavior last year of Tor editor Tom Doherty, in which he all but aligned himself with the Rabid Puppies and their leader Vox Day, was to me completely beyond the pale, and the fact that Doherty has not retracted or apologized for his words is a black stain on the entire company he runs….

(14) I’M SHOCKED. Via “Barbershops, Bookshops, Histories and Bad Math” by Jared at Pornokitsch, this link to the Observer post “Amazon Best-Selling Author” is a crock of shit”.

Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved  “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.

(15) PHOTO TOUR OF LEGO HOGWARTS. From Popsugar, “A Supermom Created This 400,000-Piece Hogwarts Castle Out of LEGOs, and We Are Speechless”.

Finch’s absolutely epic 400,000 piece structure puts every single LEGO creation ever built — my tiny, school-bound Potter most of all — to shame.

The mother of two built a LEGO Hogwarts castle so full of detail, only a true fan could have lovingly pieced it together with such success. “I did quite a bit of research in the books and movies looking for the smallest of details, things like the old-fashioned slide projector in Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class, the location of the potions class, and the wood paneling in the charms classroom,” she told LEGO blog The Brother’s Brick.

(16) BITE ME. “’You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat’: ‘Jaws’ Writer Reveals Origins of Movie’s Famous Line” in The Hollywood Reporter.

The infamous line from Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” which landed at No. 3 on Hollywood’s Top 100 Movie Quotes, came about during those rewrites.

“It was an overlap of a real-life problem combined with the dilemma of the characters onscreen,” [Carl] Gottlieb says of the origins of the line. The real-life problem being a barge (named by the cast and crew S.S. Garage Sale), which carried all the lights and camera equipment and craft services, was steadied by a small support boat that was too tiny to manage the job.

Gottlieb recalls: “[Richard] Zanuck and [David] Brown were very stingy producers, so everyone kept telling them, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ It became a catchphrase for anytime anything went wrong — if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.'”

Roy Scheider, who played Brody in the movie, ad-libbed the line at different points in his performance throughout filming. But the one reading that made it in to the final cut of the movie was after the suspenseful first look at the great white shark. Says Gottlieb, “It was so appropriate and so real and it came at the right moment, thanks to Verna Field’s editing.”

Gottlieb has heard the line pop up in a lot of strange places, but he says the most memorable time it was quoted back to him was in a casino: “I was playing poker and thought I had a winning hand, ’cause I had a full house, which is referred to as a ‘full boat,’ and the guy across the table from me said, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ and he put down a larger full house.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Nigel, Will R., and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/24/16 Happy Jack Wasn’t Tall But He Was A Scroll

(1) PAID REVIEW WORTH IT? Jeb Kinnison evaluates Kirkus Reviews’ reception of sf.

So I was leery of spending my publisher’s money to get a Kirkus review done. The review was glowing, but without the coveted star that tends to get notice from other reviewers and purchasing agents. I was interested in how they had treated other genre books, so I did a quick survey.

It appears that in the past, Kirkus assigned reviewers who were less than sympathetic to the book’s genre and intended audience. This review [of GHOST by John Ringo] made me laugh: …

But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? This is Ringo. His books aren’t likely to be accidentally purchased by people like the reviewer, so the review is useless for deciding which violent testosterone-infused male fantasy adventure book to buy for people who enjoy that sort of thing.

One of the best writers of science fiction and fantasy, Lois McMasters Bujold, never got a starred review from Kirkus. Here’s the summary of their review of middle Miles Vorkosigan in Mirror Dance: “A well-conceived series, solidly plotted and organized, though heavy going in places and, finally, lacking that spark of genuine originality that would blazon it as truly special.” Kind of missing the point, no?

(2) DOCTOR WHO PUN OPPORTUNITY. We ought to be able to do something with a character who is married to River, and whose series will be hstreamed on Amazon Prime beginning in March.

Welp, it wasn’t the longest of national nightmares, but now it appears it is over. Last week, I wrote about how and where you could watch Doctor Who following its abrupt pulling from streaming services on February 1 of this year. But it wasn’t to last, it seems; Amazon announced today via their Twitter that Series 1-8 of the show will be back on their Prime streaming service beginning in March.

(3) WHEN DID YOU FIRST SUSPECT? I got a kick out of Sarah A. Hoyt’s “Ten Signs That You Might Be A Novel’s Character” at Mad Genius Club. Number 10 and the Bonus sign are especially funny.

1- Nothing is ever easy, nor simple.  Say you are walking across the street to get a gallon of milk.  A rare make of car will almost run you down.  The store that sells the milk will be out of milk. You’ll have to walk across the most dangerous area of town to get to the next store.

This means someone is making you terminally interesting….

(4) FROM REJECTION TO ANGRY ROBOT. Peter Tieryas details “My Experience Publishing With Angry Robot” at Fantasy-Faction.

My journey to being a writer almost never happened. With my new book, United States of Japan, coming out, I wanted to reflect on how I got here and what it’s been like working with the fantastic Angry Robot Books.

Perfect Edge

Back in 2009, almost seven years before I joined the robot army, I’d gotten so many short story rejections, I wondered if I was even meant to be a writer. While I’d had a series of short stories published when I was younger, there’d been a gap of about five years where I’d only gotten one piece accepted. I was devastated when I received that issue and found all sorts of typos and formatting errors in my story. What I thought would be a brief moment of victory had been ruined…..

As the decision to publish was made by the whole of Angry Robot and Watkins Media staff, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It took USJ about four months to get to “acquisitions” which is the meeting where they make their choice to “acquire” or not. I got an email from Phil the week of the acquisition meeting telling me when it was going to happen. I could not sleep the night before and kept on hitting refresh on my emails, awaiting final word. The notification came from Phil on March 5, 2015 with a simple subject line: “You’re in.” Even though it was late, I got up and started dancing in what might be better described as an awkward fumbling of my hips.

(5) HOLLYWOOD READIES SF/F MOVIES. News of three different sf/f film projects appears in Deadline’s story “Ava DuVernay Set To Direct Disney’s ‘A Wrinkle In Time’; Script By ‘Frozen’s Jennifer Lee”.

EXCLUSIVE: Selma director Ava DuVernay has just been set by Disney to direct A Wrinkle In Time, an adaptation of the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning Madeleine L’Engle fantasy classic novel that has a script by Oscar-winning Frozen writer and co-director Jennifer Lee. Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offered this film and was also in the mix at DreamWorks for Intelligent Life, a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly. DuVernay now has the offer on that film and is in negotiations on a pic that has 12 Years A Slave Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o attached to a fable about a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one. That film is produced by Frank Marshall, Trevorrow and Big Beach principals Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub.

(6) TRUST & SAFETY. Here’s Twitter’s announcement of the Trust & Safety Council in case you want more info, tweeted February 9. It lists all the members of the Council. (Somebody may have put that in a comment here already.)

As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly. In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations including:

  • Safety advocates, academics, and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet;
  • Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;
  • Community groups with an acute need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention.

We have more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions joining as inaugural members of the Council. We are thrilled to work with these organizations to ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence on Twitter.

(7) AXANAR SUIT DEVELOPMENT. Inverse discusses why “Paramount Must Explain ‘Star Trek’ in Court or Lose Ownership”.

Enter the lawyers. Obviously, they can claim to own Star Trek because they acquired the series from Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions in the late 1960s. Now they’ve been merged with CBS and that’s how we’re getting both a new TV series and a continuing film franchise. But the Axanar team has a card up its sleeve.

The Paramount lawsuit claims that this infringes upon “thousands of copyrights” and the Axanar team has asked the simple question: “Which ones?” Because Star Trek now exists over several different universes, time periods, and casts, it’s not so simple. The universe is so spread out, it is almost impossible to define what Star Trek actually is. To that end, the burden is on Paramount to explain what Star Trek is — in a legal sense.

(8) CLIFF AMOS OBIT. Louisville fan Cliff Amos passed away February 22 after a long battle with heart disease. Bob Roehm wrote a fine appreciation on Facebook:

Louisville fan Cliff Amos passed away February 22. Cliff was the founder of Louisville fandom, creating both the Falls of the Ohio Science Fiction Association (FoSFA) and RiverCon. I first met Cliff around 1970 while he was teaching a free university course in SF at the University of Louisville. We had both separately attended the St. Louis worldcon the year before, but had not met. Seeing an announcement of the Free U. meeting, I began attending the weekly gatherings. A year… or two later, the local fan club was organized and in 1975 Cliff chaired the first RiverCon (combined with DeepSouthCon that year). Cliff continued to head RiverCons for several years and was a regular at Midwestcon and Kubla Khan. He was given the Southern Fandon Confederation Rebel Award in 1979, and also chaired the second NASFiC, NorthAmeriCon, that year. His interests were certainly wide-ranging and eclectic (for example, he once appeared on Tom Snyder’s late night talk show as warlock Solomon Weir), and he will be missed by his many friends both within and without the science fiction community. There will no funeral service or visitation but a memorial wake is being arranged for the near future (probably this coming Sunday); details forthcoming.

(9) GAMBLE OBIT. Australian childrens’ book artist Kim Gamble passed away February 19 at the age of 63.

Tashi cover

The much-loved, award-winning artist is known for illustrating the best-selling Tashi books, written by mother and daughter authors Barbara and Anna Fienberg.

Gamble created the lively, elfin boy with the towering curl of hair and gypsy earrings, who looked nothing like the authors initially imagined, more than 20 years ago….

Anna Fienberg called Gamble’s imagination “a magic gift which he shared with the world”….

“Working with Kim was like learning a new way to see. It was perhaps the magical appearance of Tashi that inspired us to go deeper into the mythical land of dragons, witches, giants, ogres … the world lying beneath.”

…Gamble’s favourite book as a child was Moominsummer Madness, by Finnish writer Tove Jansson, and artists he admired included Marc Chagall and Odilon Redon.

When asked about the success of the Tashi series, Gamble said, “It’s very popular because he’s the smallest kid in the class and in every story he’s up against the odds … and he uses his head, he doesn’t fight to get out of the problem. I think kids really just enjoy how cleverness beats brawn.”

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born February 24, 1786 — Wilhelm Grimm, historian and, with his brother Jacob, compiler of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
  • Born February 24, 1947 — Edward James Olmos

(11) MORE MARK OSHIRO COMMENTARY. Mark Oshiro updated his Facebook readers about the response to his complaint about sexual harassment at ConQuesT.

3) MidAmeriCon II was the first to make a public statement, which you can find on their Twitter account. I wasn’t expecting a response from them, so I appreciated a very direct message about their commitment to safety for this year’s WorldCon. I *am* going to be at WorldCon, even if some of the people who were responsible at ConQuesT are on staff/the board. WorldCon has become a tradition for me because it was my first introduction to this community, so I will be there and be on programming. Say hello if you like!

4) Chris Gerrib was the first to apologize to me, and I appreciated and accepted the apology. I respect that he did so without being asked to.

5) Yesterday, Kristina Hiner sent me an apology. I am keeping it private because I see no reason to publish it. It is a *very* good apology, and I accepted it, too. I am very thankful for her response, and more so than anyone else, she was the only person I really *wanted* an apology from. I have also informed her that at this point, I actually don’t need each of the complaints followed up on at this point. It seems redundant to me. Everyone knows about the post now, and I don’t need an apology from anyone else. I just wanted someone to inform these people that their behavior was unwelcoming, rude, or hostile. I’ve now done that, so I think the board and ConQuesT can devote time and energy to future conventions instead of last year’s.

Mikki Kendall used the discussion about Oshiro to launch her post “On Bad Cons & How You Kill An Event in Advance”.

I get invited to a lot of cons that have a diversity problem. I also get a lot of requests from cons that claim to want to create anti harassment policies. Aside from my feelings on an expectation that I donate hours of work to strangers for events I have no interest in attending, there’s the sad reality that many small cons are so entrenched on reinventing the wheel they’ve missed the window to do better. Younger fans, fans of color, disabled fans…they don’t have to keep going to cons that aren’t welcoming to be able to connect with other fans. They can go to the big commercial cons, to the smaller cons that do get it & to social media for their community needs. So no, they won’t keep giving cons with bad reps chance after chance. They won’t be patient with serial offenders or the places that enable them. Why should they donate that time & energy to some place that doesn’t want them, that thinks they deserve to be hazed, deserve to be mistreated in order to prove something to bigots?

Bluntly? Most small cons will age out of existence because of bad behavior, because of a focus on the past that prioritizes the social mores of the dead over the actual experiences of the living.

(12) THE LIGHT’S BACK ON. The Wertzone says Pacific Rim 2 re-greenlit for 2018”.

It was on, off and now back on again. Universal and Legendary Pictures are moving ahead with Pacific Rim 2, probably for a 2018 release date….

This has unfortunately meant that Guillermo Del Toro will be unable to return to direct, having already moved on to other projects. However, Del Toro will still co-write (with Jon Spaihts) and produce the movie. The new director is Steven S. DeKnight, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran who went on to create Spartacus and is currently working on Netflix’s Daredevil. The film will be DeKnight’s directorial debut.

(13) THIS COULD RUIN ANDY WEIR’S SEQUEL. This video argues we can reach relativistic speeds using new technologies.

Imagine getting to Mars in just 3 days… or putting points beyond our solar system within our reach. New propulsion technologies could one day take us to these cosmic destinations making space travel truly interstellar! NASA 360 joins Professor Philip Lubin, University of California Santa Barbara, as he discusses his NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) for energy propulsion for interstellar exploration.

 

(14) ADMIT IT, YOU DO. Motherboard asks, “Why Do We Feel So Bad When Boston Dynamics’ New Robot Falls Down?”

Even though all the things the engineers do to mess with the robot are done to showcase its ability to correct itself, recover from falls, and persevere in performing tasks, the human tendency to anthropomorphize non-sentient objects is so strong as to override our common-sense knowledge that Atlas is an object incapable of feeling. Engineers commonly kick robots to demonstrate their ability to recover, and it always feels a tiny bit cruel. It’s a strange quirk of the brain—though the tendency is stronger in some people than in others.

(15) A LONG TIME AGO IN DOG YEARS. Some Sad Puppies writing on Facebook are grieved that I have not excerpted Stephanie S.’ “Opening a Moderate Conversation on Fandom with ‘Standback’” atThe Right Geek.

Let’s talk first about what I like to call the “pre-history” of the Sad Puppies. For the past fifteen years (at least), the character of fandom has shifted in a way that many Puppies find very troubling — and by the way, for the vast majority of our number, this has nothing to do with race, gender, or sexuality. A significant number of us are women who accept the precepts of first wave feminism at the very least. A number of us are “people of color.” And a number of us are gay or, at minimum, amenable to leaving gay people alone to live their lives as they see fit. No — what has disturbed the Puppies is the increasingly strident tone that many fans have adopted in support of their favored cultural and political causes. In our perception, the vague “codes of conduct,” the “shit lists,” the pilings on, the endless internet flame-wars, and the non-falsifiable accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. have all created an environment that is extraordinarily hostile to points of view that don’t hew to a particular left-wing party line. The result? We’ve felt unwelcome and stomped on for what, to our mind, should be recognized as sincere and well-meant differences of opinion.

Over the same time frame, the Puppies have also become concerned about the artistic direction of our field. The “Human Wave” movement, the “Superversive” movement, and the more generalized complaints about “message fic” and “grey goo” that started gaining steam before last year’s Sad Puppies campaign are all flailing attempts by the Puppies to describe the flatness we’ve perceived in many recent award winners — particularly in the shorter fiction categories, where the stylistic sophistication and emotional catharsis beloved by creative writing professors and MFA programs the world over appear to be crowding out more accessible stories with identifiable plots and recognizably science-fictional ideas.

(16) EDIT AND GET CREDIT. Michael J. Martinez singles out for praise and award consideration five editors who worked on his fiction in 2015.

Yes, these are editors I’ve worked with. Each one of them has contributed both to the quality of my work as well as my ever-ongoing education as a writer. They are also lovely humans, which goes a very long way with me.

(17) ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. Radio Times found a very funny site: “Someone is pretending to be the IT guy at Hogwarts and it’s hilarious”.

Let’s be honest: magic is great and everything, but if Hogwarts didn’t have WiFi, we probably wouldn’t be so interested.

A Tumblr account called The Setup Wizard took this premise and ran with it. The blog is the fictionalised account of an American muggle named Jonathan Dart working as Hogwarts’ first IT guy. The somewhat grumpy character is constantly solving problems and handling the struggles of being a Muggle in a magic world.

How is it that the first person in this school I’ve successfully been able to explain network bandwidth to is the 500 year old partially decapitated ghost?

Today I taught a centaur how to use a hands free Bluetooth headset. Apparently he really felt the need to make phone calls while wielding a bow and arrow.

[Thanks to Will R., Michael J. Walsh, Reed Andrus, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

First Look at Heinlein Bust

Robert A. Heinlein was one of four additions to the Hall of Famous Missourians in 2013. Artist E. Spencer Schubert has just finished sculpting the “artist’s proof” of the commemorative bust that will be installed in the state capitol.

Missouri’s rule is that the bust must be paid for by the public (not the state), and The Heinlein Society completed fundraising in June 2015 with the help of a generous donation by Jeb Kinnison.

Keith Kato, President of The Heinlein Society, sent this progress report about the sculpture, plans for displaying it at next year’s Worldcon, and the installation ceremony:

The clay sculpture bust of the Robert A. Heinlein Exhibit for the Missouri House of Representatives “Hall of Famous Missourians” was recently completed.  Multiple photos of Robert Heinlein circa 1971 (age 64), from various angles, were selected by The Heinlein Society’s Board of Directors and sent to the sculptor, E. Spencer Schubert, a long-time Heinlein reader and fan.

Spencer has provided the accompanying photographs of the final product, and the time-lapse movie of the sculpting process.

Three iterations of the bust were made to accommodate critiques and comments during the process.  From the movie it can be seen that Mr. Heinlein’s head is approximately 175% normal size when compared with Spencer’s head.  If you look closely, a small “I know something” smile and twinkling eyes have been incorporated into the face.

The next step in the process will creation of a mold and casting an “artist’s proof” of high density plaster to allow a final visual inspection of the casted bust, after which the bronze bust will be made.

It is the Society’s intent to unveil the Heinlein Hall of Famous Missourians Exhibit at the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City, Missouri (MidAmeriCon II) before taking it to the state capitol in Jefferson City for a post-Worldcon Induction Ceremony.

Spencer says the artist’s proof and copies of the bronze casting will be available for purchase if there are interested parties, but they cannot be delivered until after the Induction Ceremony.

 

[Thanks to Keith Kato for the story.]

Pixel Scroll 11/1 Rank Election

(1) If you are fan who drinks, the newly reopened Clifton’s Cafeteria would like to tempt you with these two science fictional libations –

drinks at Cliftons

(2) “Another Word: Chinese Science Fiction and Chinese Reality” by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu, in Clarkesworld, talks about the themes of other Chinese writers after these introductory comments about the domestic reception for his own work.

China is a society undergoing rapid development and transformation, where crises are present along with hopes, and opportunities coexist with challenges. This is a reality reflected in the science fiction produced there.

Chinese readers often interpret science fiction in unexpected ways. Take my Three Body series as an example. The alien-invasion story takes as its premise a “worst-case” scenario for relationships among members of the cosmic society of civilizations, which is called the “Dark Forest” state. In this state, different starfaring civilizations have no choice but to attempt to annihilate each other at the first opportunity.

After publication, the novels became surprisingly popular among those working in China’s Internet industry. They saw the “Dark Forest” state portrayed in the novels as an accurate reflection of the state of brutal competition among China’s Internet companies….

Authors (myself included) are often befuddled by such interpretations.

(3) From “’Star Wars’: Their First Time” in the New York Times.

Ridley Scott: I had done a film called “The Duellists” and was in Los Angeles to shoot at Paramount, and I honestly think Paramount had forgotten. I remember saying, I’m Ridley Scott, and they said who? So David Puttnam, one of the greatest producers I’ve ever worked with and the most fun, said, “Screw them, let’s go see [“Star Wars”] at the Chinese [theater].” It was the first week. I’ve never known audience participation like it, absolutely rocking. I felt my “Duellist” was this big [holds thumb and forefinger an inch apart], and George had done that [stretches arms out wide]. I was so inspired I wanted to shoot myself. My biggest compliment can be [to get] green with envy and really bad-tempered. That damn George, son of a bitch. I’m very competitive.

(4) Andrew Porter was interviewed, complete with photo, for “Longtime Brooklynites Reflect on a Changing Brooklyn” on Brownstoner.com:

Now you can put a face to me and my non SFnal opinions about recent changes in Brooklyn Heights, where I’ve lived for 47 years.

I’m sure you’ll also appreciate the comments, one of which accuses me of hating Brits!

(Daveinbedstuy accuses – “Andrew Porter sounds cranky; as he usually does on BHB. I wonder what he has against ‘Brits.’ And bringing up ‘granite countertops’ Really????????”)

(5) Jim C. Hines on Facebook:

I HAVE WRITTEN THE FIRST 22 WORDS OF MY NANOWRIMO NOVEL!

The NaNo word counter says at this rate, I’ll finish by January 20, 2022.

I suppose I should probably keep writing, eh?

(6) “Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910” is on exhibit through February 26, 2017 in the newly renovated Smithsonian Libraries Exhibition Gallery of the National Museum of American History.

Travel with us to the surface of the moon, the center of the earth, and the depths of the ocean – to the fantastic worlds of fiction inspired by 19th century discovery and invention.

New frontiers of science were emerging. We took to the air, charted remote corners of the earth, and harnessed the power of steam and electricity. We began unlocking the secrets of the natural world. The growing literate middle class gave science a new and avid public audience. Writers explored the farther reaches of the new scientific landscape to craft hoaxes, satires and fictional tales.

Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910 is accompanied by an online exhibit.

(7) Francis Hamit, a novelist and film producer who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, has published A Perfect Spy, a memoir about his first two years at the University of Iowa when he was a dual major in Drama and Business. While he narrates the ongoing dramatic social changes that were transforming society and the university in 1965 and 1966, he also covers the impact of the sexual revolution, the sudden rise of a drug culture, and the beginnings of the anti-war movement at the University of Iowa, from a first-person perspective.

“I saw the first draft card burnt,” Hamit says; “And I would see the last anti-war riot there several years later. I was also very disturbed by the rise of all kinds of drug use in and around Iowa City. Unlike almost everyone else I knew, I did not think this ‘cool’. I saw people ruining thier lives by refusing to tell the police who’d sold them the drugs: facing years in prison. I offered to help them find the dealers if they would leave my friends alone. How I did this is narrated in A Perfect Spy, which is a 118-page excerpt from my forthcoming book Out of Step: A Memoir of the Vietnam War Years.

“I was already in place,” Hamit added; “A perfect spy who made no pretenses of approving of recreational drugs. I didn’t do anything with them, but simply watched and listened so I could collect some useful intelligence for the police. At the same time, I became involved with some very interesting women who were part of the Sexual Revolution. That was part of a larger social revolt. None of what happened then can be viewed in isolation, so I’ve just tried to be as truthful as possible while changing a lot of the names of the people to prevent embarrassment.”

A Perfect Spy will be available exclusively at first from November 12, 2015 on Amazon Kindle for $5.00 and can be pre-ordered now. A print edition will be available in March, 2016 with a suggested retail price of $12.00 from most bookstores.

(8) “The artist who visited ‘Dune’ and ‘the most important science fiction art ever created’” – a gallery of Schoenherr at Dangerous Minds.

Frank Herbert said John Schoenherr was “the only man who has ever visited Dune.” Schoenherr (1935-2010) was the artist responsible for visualising and illustrating Herbert’s Dune—firstly in the pages of Analog magazine, then in the fully illustrated edition of the classic science fiction tale. But Herbert didn’t stop there, he later added:

I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr’s careful and accurate illustrations.

High praise indeed, but truly deserved, for as Jeff Love pointed out in Omni Reboot, Schoenherr’s illustrations are “the most important science fiction art ever created.”

(9) Jason Sanford posted a collection of tweets under the heading “The fossilization of science fiction and fantasy literature”. Here are some excerpts.

https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660782118356783104

https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660783781654233088

https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660789856075948034

Although I have friends that do exactly what Sanford complains about, he doesn’t hang with them, read their fanzines, or (I’d wager) even know their names, so I’m kind of curious whose comments sparked off this rant.

Personally, I’m prone to recommend Connie Willis or Lois McMaster Bujold if I’m trying to interest someone in sf – though both have been around over 25 years and aren’t spring chickens anymore either.

People recommend what they know and esteem. It’s perfectly fine to argue whether recommendations will win fans to the genre, but it seems petty to act as if pushing “classic” choices is a war crime.

(10) John Scalzi was more or less content with Sanford’s line of thought, and responded with “No, the Kids Aren’t Reading the Classics and Why Would They”.

Writer Jason Sanford kicked a small hornet’s nest earlier today when he discussed “the fossilization of science fiction,” as he called it, and noted that today’s kids who are getting into science fiction are doing it without “Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Tolkien.” This is apparently causing a moderate bit of angina in some quarters.

I think Sanford is almost entirely correct (the small quibble being that I suspect Tolkien is still common currency, thanks to recent films and video games), nor does this personally come as any particular shock. I wrote last year about the fact my daughter was notably resistant to Heinlein’s charms, not to mention the charms of other writers who I enjoyed when I was her age… thirty years ago. She has her own set of writers she loves and follows, as she should. As do all the kids her age who read.

The surprise to me is not that today’s kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this.

(11) “The kids” who don’t read the classics are one case, would-be sf writers are another, explains Fynbospress in “Slogging forward, looking back” at Mad Genius Club.

Kris Rusch has also noted how many young writers she’s run into who are completely ignorant of the many, many female authors who’ve been in science fiction and fantasy since the start. Among other reasons, many of their works have gone out of print, and the new writers coming in may not have read the old magazines, or picked up the older, dated-artwork books at the used bookstores. So they really, truly, may not know that their groundbreaking new take has been done to death thirty years before they came on the scene, or that they’re trying to reinvent a wheel that has not only been invented, it’s evolved to all-wheel drive with traction control.

(12) I can’t say that Vivienne Raper is going where no one has gone before in responding to the latest Wired article about the Hugos — “Five reasons why the ‘Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul’ isn’t about ‘white men’”.

[First three of five points.]

There are many reasons why I might be “angered” by previous Hugo winners.  And none of them are anything to do with ‘the increasingly multicultural makeup’ of the awards:

ONE

Science fiction’s most prestigious award‘ for Best Novel was decided in 2014 by fewer than 4,000 voters.

TWO

The Best Short Story for 2014 got onto the ballot with fewer than 43 nominations.

THREE

Popular blogger John Scalzi has won more Hugo Awards (inc. best fan writer) than Isaac Asimov – author of I, Robot – or Arthur C. Clarke. He also has 90K+ Twitter followers.

(13) Jeb Kinnison at Substrate Wars is more analytical and lands more punches in “The Death of ‘Wired’: Hugo Awards Edition”. Here are his closing paragraphs.

The various flavors of Puppies differ, but one thing they’re not is anti-diverse — there are women, people of various colors, gays (like me), religious, atheists, and on and on. The one thing they have in common is that they oppose elevating political correctness above quality of writing, originality, and story in science fiction. Many of the award winners in recent years have been lesser works elevated only because they satisfied a group of progressives who want their science fiction to reflect their desired future of group identity and victim-based politics. For them, it is part of their battle to tear down bad old patriarchy, to bury the old and bring themselves to the forefront of culture (and incidentally make a living being activists in fiction.) These people are often called “Social Justice Warriors” – they shore up their own fragile identities by thinking of themselves as noble warriors for social justice. Amy Wallace places herself with them by portraying the issues as a battle between racist, sexist white men and everyone else.

She then goes on to give some space to Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, and Vox Day (Ted Beale). While her reporting about them is reasonably truthful, they report that she promised to interview Sarah Hoyt (who ruins the narrative as a female Puppy) but did not do so, and left out material from other interviews that did not support her slant. Tsk!

The piece is very long, but written from a position of assumed moral superiority and elite groupthink, a long fall from classic Wired‘s iconoclastic reporting. It’s sad when a quality brand goes downhill — as a longtime subscriber, I’ve noticed the magazine has grown thinner in the last year as ad revenues declined and competition from upstarts like Fast Company ate into their market. Now they are me-tooing major controversies for clicks. Once you see this dishonesty in reporting, you should never view such sources as reliable again.

(14) Sometimes I suspect AI stands for “artificial ignorance.”

If the programmer of this tweet-generating robot was literate, they could easily discover that the words Portugal and Portuguese are not even mentioned in this U.S. Census definition of “Hispanic or Latino.”

(15) “The Original Star Wars Trilogy Gets An Awesome Force Awakens-Style Trailer” via Geek Tyrant.

I’d warn that there are too many spoilers, except you’ve already seen the original trilogy how many times?

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Mark-kitteh, Will R., JJ, Trey Palmer, Francis Hamit, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 10/31 Standlee’s Instant Summons

(1) The title of Jeb Kinnison’s review encapsulates his opinion — “’Tomorrowland’: Tragic Misfire”.

Having seen mixed reviews, I waited until Tomorrowland came out on cheaper streaming services. Directed and mostly written by Brad Bird, auteur of brilliant work like Iron Giant and The Incredibles, the previews looked promising — a story about the shiny visions of the technological future we had as kids in the 1960s, and a world where they actually happened.

(2) An old b&w photo of a scientist controlling waldos to diaper a baby doll is one of the relics in the Vault of the Atomic Space Age.

(3) William Shatner tells how his face was used for the mask that Halloween film franchise killer Michael Myers wore.

(4) “Jim Burns’ Halloween Reverie: Then and Now” from last year, at the local New York CBS station’s website.

Twenty-five years ago, youngsters at my door could see through the screen to a life-sized Superman and Batman that were just past me, in the living room.

On another night, every window of my home was adorned with special Halloween themed balloons, the merry Mylar reaching high into the October sky.

For another year, a wide assortment of latex masks of classic  Hollywood monsters (a wolfman, a mummy, Planet of the Apes’ Dr. Zaius and  creatures from The Outer Limits)–an amazing collection I had somehow acquired–peered out from those portals, gazing upon a lawn filled with a virtual galaxy of giant pumpkin lawn bags!

(5) How big did you say those pumpkin bags were, Jim? A giant inflatable pumpkin got away the other day in Arizona….

Diego Ramirez captured video of the 25-foot-tall jack o’lantern blowing around in traffic after it broke free of its straps at the Peoria Sports Complex.

“I was so shocked to see that it was like bouncing like a basketball all the way down the road,” Patrick Sparkes of Big AZ Promotions, the company that owns the decoration, told KPNX-TV.

The company said the 350-pound pumpkin broke free from its straps with the help of strong winds.

“We showed up and it wasn’t there and we spent the last 40 minutes driving around looking for it,” Sparkes said.

There were no injuries from the pumpkin’s dash for freedom, but there was some damage done to streetlamps.

(6) The Addams Family: The Broadway Musical evidently has been around for years, but it’s news to me!

THE ADDAMS FAMILY features an original story, and it’s every father’s nightmare. Wednesday Addams, the ultimate princess of darkness, has grown up and fallen in love with a sweet, smart young man from a respectable family. A man her parents have never met. And if that weren’t upsetting enough, she confides in her father and begs him not to tell her mother. Now, Gomez Addams must do something he’s never done before — keep a secret from his beloved wife, Morticia. Everything will change for the whole family on the fateful night they host a dinner for Wednesday’s “normal” boyfriend and his parents.

 

(7) The SJW viewpoint strikes again! A. J. Jacobs told NPR host Scott Simon some famous monsters aren’t as horrible as you think. I think I hear “Officer Krupke” in the background…

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Misunderstood, misunderstood.

JACOBS: Misunderstood – that’s what I’m here to do is trying to salvage the reputation of some of these Halloween monsters. So yes, Frankenstein I think gets a really raw deal in the reputation department. We all think of Frankenstein’s monster as this monosyllabic idiot from the movies. But actually, in Mary Shelley’s original novel from 1818, Frankenstein’s monster was more of a sensitive intellectual type. He read Plutarch and Goethe. He was more Brooklyn hipster and less unfrozen caveman.

(8) A mysterious castle, a deserted village and things that go bump in the night are all in a day’s work for a TODAY team on the hunt for Dracula — “Take a Trip ‘Behind the Screams’ in Transylvania”

(9) Today In History

  • October 31, 1926Harry Houdini dies. Harry Houdini, the most celebrated magician and escape artist of the 20th century, dies of peritonitis in a Detroit hospital. Twelve days before, Houdini had been talking to a group of students after a lecture in Montreal when he commented on the strength of his stomach muscles and their ability to withstand hard blows. Suddenly, one of the students punched Houdini twice in the stomach. The magician hadn’t had time to prepare, and the blows ruptured his appendix. He fell ill on the train to Detroit, and, after performing one last time, was hospitalized. Doctors operated on him, but to no avail. The burst appendix poisoned his system, and on October 31 he died.
  • October 31, 2001 — Lovecraft adaptation Dagon makes its theatrical premiere in Spain.

(10) Today’s Birthday Boy

  • October 31, 1961 — Peter Jackson is born on Halloween in Wellington, New Zealand.

(11) The photo comes from “Susan Beatrice Recycles Old Watch Parts Into Intricately Detailed Steampunk Scultptures” on EarthPorm, but here full gallery is here. Amazing stuff.

recycled-watch-parts-sculptures-vintage-antique-susan-beatrice-36

Beatrice’s creations bring boring old gears and machinery to life. She has the ability to turn ratchets and other tiny technical parts into a lively mouse, seahorse or fairy. The more you look at her varied artwork the more you wonder what this woman can’t do… as it appears she can make everything out of anything.

(12) How badly do you want to be one of the first people to see the new Star Wars movie? Air France can help you out.

Lines will form at the crack of dawn on December 18 as die-hard fans set out to snag the best seats to see Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens in theaters.

But some very lucky trans-Atlantic plane passengers will get the jump on them.

In what seems like a ploy to rope super-fans into buying very expensive plane tickets, Air France will be letting passengers watch the much-anticipated flick two days before its official release, on December 16.

The French airline is teaming up with EuropaCorp CINEMAS to offer the advance screenings for passengers on four Paris-bound flights, AF083 from San Francisco to Paris, AF065 from Los Angeles, AF011 from New York and AF009 from New York.

[Thanks to James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day, Soon Lee.]

Taos Toolbox 2015

By Jeb Kinnison (The Substrate Wars): I attended this year’s Taos Toolbox novel-oriented writing workshop that wrapped up Saturday. Instructors Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams whipped us into shape (literally — a whip appeared mid-workshop), with special guest lecturers Carrie Vaughn and Emily Mah Tippetts. A marmot subbed for the usual bear appearance, and here are a few of the notable critique quotes (as collected by Nancy Kress):

  • “You really can’t be understated if you are a vampire clown.”
  • “It would probably take more than three days to eat a whole human being — although I don’t know that personally.”
  • “St. George the Dragonslayer should drive a Charger, not a Mustang.”
  • “There was a little too much pig fighting.”
  • “Your critique makes me glad I did not get a degree in literature.”
  • “It’s a gi-normous playground of awesome.”
  • “Get those characters out of that apartment!”
  • “I can see that you incorporated everyone’s critiques of your last week’s story. The problem is that you incorporated everyone’s critiques of your last week’s story.”
  • “I HATE rats and I will never ever read this story about rats again!”
  • “I know he’s the kind of person who doesn’t do his own rat killing because he can correctly use a word like ‘penultimate.'”
  • “I don’t mind them devouring Chad for lunch because he’s sort of a dork anyway.”
  • “Will the real protagonist please stand up?”
  • “This is a new subgenre: the “clomance,” a romance between a person and a clone.”
  • “I want the meaning of life to be more than an orange muffin.”
  • “I didn’t enjoy his tongue getting cut out.”
  • “It was dystopian but without the fun parts of dystopia.”
  • “I love the alien eggs, but they gotta go.”
  • “The character seems like Jane Bond.”
  • “It was nice to have a male character handed reproductive threats!”
  • “You have a missing clothing problem.”
  • “I get the impression you’ve never actually been a 20-year-old male Superpower.”
  • “You can’t start with an ‘Interlude’ because it’s not between anything — it’s just a ‘Lude’.”
  • “You have White Belgium Syndrome.”
  • “Unless this is ‘Dinner With Andre’ in space, you need more action.”
  • “She’s not neurotic enough for a high-school girl.”
  • “All female characters must keep their shirts on unless they’re actually on fire!”
  • “This story is torture across all five senses, and I thank you for that.”
  • “You’re not really suicidal if you’re having fun fondling breasts.”
  • “Everyone loves werewolves in mini-skirts.”
  • “If being grounded as a kid was all it took to trigger superpowers, I’d have godlike omniscience.”
  • “You should definitely go with the larcenous wood nymphs.”
  • “Everybody’s too sweet. I want to dip my toe in the cesspool of evil.”
  • “My favorite part was the mini-kayak armor.”
  • “I love the part where the girlfriend writes her good-bye note on the heating bill.”
  • “The harem of slave girls wasn’t enough to make him unlikable to you?”
  • “Add more goats.”
  • “If this book had any more atmosphere, you could terraform Mars.”
  • “I like that Thor is a jock-boy and talks like Drunken Hulk.”
  • “I would love to see the Fury leave her anger-management session to go kill somebody.”

Attendees to watch out for: S Marino, Terry Gene, Patrick Lundrigan, Sharon Joss, Chris Kelworth, Diana Davis Olsen, Jeb Kinnison, Anna Yeatts, Brandon McNulty, Chris Bauer, Sally McBride, Lawrence Buentello, Paul DesCombaz, Ginny Campen, Gerda Shank, Barbara Caridad Ferrer, and Sunil Patel.

2015 Taos Toolbox class picture.

2015 Taos Toolbox class picture.

A Heinlein Roundup

Stories of news and history about Robert A. Heinlein.

(1) Keith G. Kato, President of The Heinlein Society, tells the future of the Heinlein bust destined to be installed in the Hall of Famous Missourians.

I was going to send you the news that THS has met its fundraising goal on the Heinlein statuary, thanks to super-donor Jeb Kinnison and the matching grant from the Heinlein Prize Trust, when I see you have already posted the story!

Let me add a followup that THS will attempt to get the Heinlein exhibit on loan to the 2016 MidAmeriCon 2 Worldcon for display; we are examining transportation and insurance costs, and need some understanding from the concom about security arrangements.  We are also considering sequencing the timing of the sculpture etc. so that we can do the Worldcon exhibit first, then trek the 160 miles from Kansas City to Jefferson City for the official Induction Ceremony after Big Mac 2.  That would allow more Heinleiners to attend the Ceremony.

This went a lot faster than I thought, and Kinnison cited File 770 as his primary source of information.  Thanks to you for your help and support.

Jeb Kinnison adds:

Let no one say that nothing good came of the Puppy War. 🙂

Heinlein Society logo(2) The Heinlein Society has also called for help in wording the plaque that will be part of the installation.

Remembering that you have to count the spaces and punctuation marks as well, what you get from looking at [Mark] Twain’s is 965 total characters, We’ve been advised that probably 1,100 total characters is the practical limit.

So, we are hereby soliciting “Heinlein’s Children” for the suggested wording to be used on Robert’s plaque. We won’t pay you (except with “Thanks!”), we reserve the right to mix and match bits and pieces from several contributions, and to the degree we can remember we will acknowledge who we took bits and pieces from on our website once we settle on the final wording.

Which parts of Robert’s career would you choose to highlight?

…Please submit all suggested wordings (remember, 1,100 total characters tops, including all spaces and punctuation marks) to [email protected].

The deadline is August 1.

(3) Photos of Robert and Leslyn Heinlein in the early 1940s housed at GeneralSemantics.org.

(4) Photos of all three of Heinlein’s wives here, from Spider Robinson’s website.

(4) Earlier this month two bloggers defended Heinlein against accusations of misogyny.

Cedar Sanderson – “Gold Plated Misogynist”

Clearly those who are still  flinging mud have slipped dreamlessly into a delusion so deep they might never be able to get back out again. When the woman who had first made the titular accusation was questioned by multiple voices in startlement, she finally admitted that she knew it to be so, because she had read it in Asimov’s biography. Wait a minute, was my reply, you mean that man that Eric Leif Davin in his recent book Partners in Wonder wrote this about? ” Isaac Asimov is on record for stating that male fans didn’t want females invading their space.  According to the letter columns of the time, it seems that the only fan who held that opinion was… Isaac Asimov.  A number of males fans welcomed their female counterparts.  As did the editors, something Davin goes to great lengths to document.” (You can read more on the women that other women ignore here at Keith West’s blog) So this woman has taken a known misogynist’s claim that another man is a misogynist without questioning and swallowed it whole.

Sarah A. Hoyt – “Glamor and Fairy Gold” – June 2

My friend Cedar, today, posted about one of those lies that “everybody knows” and that are absolutely not true. Not only not true, but risible on their face. The lie is that Heinlein was a misogynist, which is not only a lie but a whole construct, an artifact of lies. And one that humans, nonetheless seem to buy wholesale…..

I run into this again and again. In a panel, once, questioning accusations of misogyny directed at Heinlein I got back “Well, obviously he was. His women wear aprons.” I then got really cold and explained that in Portugal, growing up, when clothes were expensive (how expensive. People stole the wash from the line. Imagine that happening here. People stealing clothes. Just clothes. Not designers, not leather, just clothes, including much-washed-and-mended pajamas.) we always wore aprons in the kitchen. And Heinlein was writing when clothes were way more expensive, relatively. (I buy my clothes at thrift stores. So unless it’s a favorite pair of jeans or something, I don’t wear aprons.) The difference is not “putting women in their place.” The difference is the cost of clothes.

And this is why I don’t get put on the “Heinlein, threat or menace” panels any more.

But 90% of the women who make the accusation that Heinlein hated women or couldn’t write women have never read him. They’ve just heard it repeated by people with “authority.” The cool kids. And so they can’t be reasoned out of this assumption, because it’s not an assumption. It’s glamor. (The other ten percent, usually, were primed to think he was a misogynist and read the beginning of a book and didn’t “get” some inside joke. Like, you know, the getting married after a tango. Which was pure fan fodder. They wouldn’t have thought anything of it if they hadn’t been primed. But they’d been primed. They were under a glamor to see what wasn’t there.)

 

Jeb Kinnison Contribution Completes Heinlein Bust Funding

Jeb Kinnison, author of the Substrate Wars series, has generously met the Heinlein Society’s latest call for help to pay for the author’s bust that will be installed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. “I bit the bullet and funded the rest of the Heinlein bust so it would get done, maybe now in time for display at Worldcon KC,” he said.

The donation will trigger the rest of the matching funds available from the Heinlein Prize Trust and cover the costs of the bust, associated plaque, pedestal, and ceremony.

Kinnison has personal reasons for wanting to commemorate Heinlein’s influence

I noticed their fundraising update showed they were still short, and realized I should contribute the rest. I owe Robert A. Heinlein an enormous debt — I grew up fatherless in Kansas City, his hometown, and his novels for young readers taught me more about being a good person, and a good man, than any other person or author. His work (and other science fiction) aimed me toward becoming a scientist, which inspired me to work to get into MIT. I’ve retired after a series of careers (rather like Heinlein himself) to write science fiction and fact, and I want his example to continue to inspire young people.

Learn more about Kinnson and his work at The Substrate Wars blog, or pick up a copy of his latest novel Nemo’s World at Amazon.

Where No Puppy Has Gone Before 5/2

aka The Puppies Who Fell Up

Another burst of substantive, idea-filled posts highlight today’s roundup. The roll call includes Jeb Kinnison, Jaye Em Edgecliff, Brandon Kempner, Jeff Duntemann, Steve Davidson, Anthony Vicino, William Shaw and Kate Paulk. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Laura Resnick and Jack Lint.)

Jeb Kinnison on The Subtstrate Wars

“SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best”  – May 2

“Curating” means selecting for quality and audience. WorldCon has been tending to curate for a small and eccentric audience, and favor-trading, log-rolling, and political prejudice has been apparent since.. forever. WorldCon has already recognized the outreach possibility of the Internet. There is no longer a reason for what purports to be *the* award of SFF fans, not Worldcon attendees, to be closed to the fans who can’t be there, or as GRRM remarked, aren’t fannish enough to regularly read fanzines. If the award is to be chosen by small groups with a certain Fannish mindset, then it’s not *the* award of SFF readers and not a useful guide to quality for those who don’t share the mindset. And it will tend to slight publishers and authors who haven’t sucked up to the attendees and “curated” their online presence to groom their own fans. Some decry the possibility that the Hugos might become a mere popularity contest, with “Twilight”-ish popular works swamping the less-accessible quality fiction; but that ignores that the status quo prior to Puppies was a popularity contest among a small and not necessarily representative group shot through with personal conflicts of interest and logrolling.

We can honor all the work of the elders who curated and nurtured the Hugos when there was no other way for fans to get together. We can also open up the nominating and voting to committed readers who haven’t been Fannish, and the effort involved is more software and thinking about systems than sitting at tables and handing out papers while chatting with passersby. There are problems with nominating voters being unaware of what qualifies, and problems with qualifications — suggestions about more classes for long works and allowing small pub and self pub books more time to be discovered are good.

As a new author, I’d like to preserve a large market for fiction because it is inevitable that larger media productions will be unable to pioneer new ideas or truly eccentric new virtual worlds — there are just too many people involved in these larger productions to take as many risks on unique visions, and until the tools for game storytelling, for example, are easily accessible and usable by singleton game authors, games won’t be the medium to create the experience of the great novel or story. Opening up the Hugos and doing more outreach to fans of other media would help a lot in renovating fandom and bringing in more new readers. And if the field doesn’t start gaining more readers, it will die, since it is already harder to make a living writing for SFF than it used to be. If the only writers left working are supported by academia or other jobs, the field will lose its finest future works.

 

Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon

“Hugo Best Novel Nominees: Amazon and Goodreads Numbers, May 2015” – May 1

Let me emphasize again that these scores have never been predictive for the Hugo or Nebula: getting ranked higher on Amazon or Goodreads has not equated to winning the Hugo. It’s interesting that the Puppy picks are the outliers: higher and lower when it comes to Goodreads, with Leckie/Addision/Liu all within .05 points of each other. Amazon tends to be more generous with scoring, although Butcher’s 4.8 is very high.

The 2015 Hugo year is going to be largely useless when it comes to data: the unusual circumstances that led to this ballot (the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns, then various authors declining Best Novel nominations, and now the massive surge in voting number) mean that this data is going to be inconsistent with previous years. I think it’s still interesting to look at, but take all of this with four or five teaspoons of salt. Still, I’ll be checking in on these numbers every month until the awards are given, and it’ll be interesting to see what changes happen.

 

Jeff Duntemann on Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary

“Rant: Sad Puppies vs. Anti-Puppies, as the Kilostreisands Pile Up” – May 2

How in hell could a couple of mostly unknown authors turn the venerable Hugo Awards inside-out?

My answer: adverse attention. For a definition, let me quote from a textbook that I made up just now: Zoftnoggin & Wiggout’s Fundamentals of Sociometry.

Adverse attention is a rise in the attention profile of a previously obscure phenomenon caused by the actions of an entity that opposes that phenomenon. In the vast majority of cases, the triggering force is outrage, though it sometimes appears through the action of envy, pride, lust, asshattedness, butthurt, or other largely emotional psychopathologies.

This being sociometry, adverse attention may be quantified, and there is a standard unit for expressing it:

The fundamental unit of adverse attention is the streisand, defined as one previously uninterested person achieving a degree of interest in a phenomenon sufficient to compel them to email, share, or retweet information about that phenomenon to one other person in a social network. As the information propagates across a social network, the connectedness of the network influences the total amount of adverse attention that arises. For example, if each of ten previously uninterested persons receiving the information passes it on to only one previously uninterested person, eleven streisands of adverse attention have been created. If one of those previously uninterested persons has 200 followers on Twitter or 1000 Facebook friends, the number of streisands increases rapidly. In a sufficiently dense network, the rate of increase can become close to exponential until the number of previously uninterested persons asymptotically approaches zero.

I’ve seen evidence for this in the comment sections of many blogs that have criticized or condemned the Sad Puppies. A common comment goes something like this: “Wow! I never knew that you could vote for the Hugos without going to Worldcon! And I just downloaded the free preview of Monster Hunter International. This is way cool!” Zing! The world gets another Puppy.

The emotional tenor of the criticism matters too. I’ve seen a few comments that go something like this: “I’d never heard of the Sad Puppies before. I’ve been trying to figure out which side is right, but the sheer nastiness of the Sad Puppies’ critics makes me think they’re just sore losers. I’m more or less with the Puppies now.” ….

And those streisands just keep piling up.

It’s something like a sociological law: Commotion attracts attention. Attention is unpredictable, because it reaches friend and foe alike. It can go your way, or it can go the other way. There’s no way to control the polarity of adverse attention. The only way to limit adverse attention is to stop the commotion.

In other words, just shut up.

I know, this is difficult. For some psychologies, hate is delicious to the point of being psychological crack, so it’s hard to just lecture them on the fact that hate has consequences, including but hardly limited to adverse attention.

My conclusion is this: The opponents of Sad Puppies 3 put them on the map, and probably took them from a fluke to a viable long-term institution. I don’t think this is what the APs intended. In the wake of the April 4 announcement of the final Hugo ballot, I’d guess the opposition has generated several hundred kilostreisands of adverse attention, and the numbers will continue to increase. Sad Puppies 4 has been announced. Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen have lots of new fans who’d never heard of them before. (I just bought the whole Monster Hunter International series and will review it in a future entry.)

To adapt a quote from…well, you know damned well whose quote I’m adapting: “Attack me, and I will become more popular than you could possibly imagine.”

 

Steve Davidson on Amazing Stories

“No Award is Not the Nuclear Option” – May 1

One final note.  Some are arguing that rejecting all slated items punishes those who were not willing participants/had no knowledge they were being included.  The solution there is simple.  If you have an eligible work in any given year, clearly state somewhere that you do not participate in campaigning for the awards, reject any involuntary inclusion in such and do not give permission for your name and works to be included.  Most everyone who would be in such a position in years to come have already pretty much taken a position:  they’re either happy to take advantage of whatever benefit may be derived from being included on a slate, or they do not want to have anything to do with it.  I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of voters will take you at your word – whether you are ultimately included on a slate or not.

 

Steve Davidson on Amazing Stories

“Thoughts on the Hugo Voters Packet” – May 2

Participation by authors and publishers was always presented as being voluntary on their part.  Largely unspoken was the implied strong-arming:  if you didn’t provide copies of a nominated work, you were likely insuring that the work in question would not win.

Last year, commentary regarding the publishers that chose not to participate in the packet pretty much follow those lines – not to mention edging over into public castigation of the publishing house itself.  (Bad, bad publisher for not giving us free stuff.)

What follows on those coattails is pretty obvious:  a growing sense of entitlement on the part of voters – a trap I myself fell into this year.  I’d fully intended to read Cixin Lius’ The Three Body Problem (having been assured by no one less than its translator that it was worth the read) but the buzz made it so obvious that the novel would be on the final ballot that I chose to wait to get my free copy.  And then of course the puppies shit the bed, and the first uncensored thought that popped into my head was “dammit, now I’m going to have to buy that novel!”.

Of course things have shifted again and Three Body is back on the ballot, so I will be getting a free copy (presumably), but in order to punish myself for those uncensored thoughts, I’m going to be buying a copy today.  (I sure hope I like it….spending good money on a flyer like that….when I coulda gotten it for free….)

I find it odd that I do not have the same sense of entitlement regarding review copies that are or are not supplied to me for free by publishers looking to get a marketing push.  Sometimes stuff just arrives in the mail (hey!  yay!  Free Book!) and sometimes I write to the author or editor or publicist or publisher and request a copy.  Sometimes I get one (hey!  yay!  Free Book!) and sometimes I don’t even get a courtesy brush off, but I don’t even think about booing.

Maybe I feel entitled to the Hugo Packet because I spent forty or fifty bucks on a Supporting Membership (or more for an attending membership)?  But there ought to be a disconnect there because a Supporting Membership is not a discount book program.  It’s supporting the convention, of which the Hugo Awards are but one part.  It’s for supporting the people who have been working on the convention for probably the past three or four YEARS.  It’s supposed to be my way of saying:  I can’t be there in person this year, but I believe in what you folks are doing and want to see it continue, so here’s some money.

I am positive beyond any shred of doubt that I am not the only Hugo Voter who has had this creeping sense of entitlement grow upon them over the past several years.

 

Jaye Em Edgecliff

“Puppies…” – May 2

Do not, instead, decide that it’s about bringing back the good ol’ adventure yarn in places of “message fic” (also do not knock “message fic” while it is possible to witness your orgasmic pleasure you derive by merely typing the name Robert A Heinlen, it REALLY spoils your point), but then start bitching that things don’t qualify when numerous items are pointed out, but those items just happen to have females who play a role other than damsel in distress (Uh, one word for you, buddies, little thing you probably never heard of from the early 20th century Triplanetary … she wasn’t a damsel in distress), characters who incidentally are gay or trans or black or fuchsia or vegetarian or ¼ amphibian … If you’re trying to claim you aren’t over-privileged, white-supremacist, homophobic, transphobic, etc it’d help if you didn’t call things that are exactly the old-fashioned classic adventure yarn you claim to want “message fic about gay issues [for example]” just because a character is gay.  Trust me, there’s a difference between a character being gay and a story dealing with gay issues.  My stories touch on gay issues, they aren’t strictly about them, and in SF/F there frequently is the conceit that the society has no gay issues in the first place….

 

Anthony Vicino on One Lazy Robot

“Why Ratings and Reviews Don’t Matter Anymore (sort of)” – May 2

[A lot of interesting statistical analysis in here. Can’t even begin to scratch the surface with an excerpt.]

In particular, the books with the most lopsided ratings tend to be from self-published authors. What do I mean by this? Well, self-published authors, whether they be fairly popular, or not, tend to have significantly higher ratings than their traditionally published brethren.

Before we get into the why and the how, I want to substantiate this claim with some examples. I spent a little bit of time this morning compiling some datas that I now want to throw in your face. Incoming!

First, I googled top 100 science fiction books of all time. What pops up reads as a who’s who of sci-fi literary mastery. So I just went down the list, took the top 12 titles and searched their Amazon rating to get a baseline. Here we go:

 

William Shaw in Oxford Student

“Censorship and the Hugo awards” – May 2

You see, Beale and his supporters mounted this campaign because they believed that the awards were being dominated by broadly left-wing fiction because of the censorship of a shadowy group of left-wing authors, rather than because the books they wanted to see nominated just weren’t any good. And so they decided to stuff the ballot. They reacted to an unfounded conspiracy of censorship by actively engaging in censorship themselves. What happens to the Hugos as a result of this still ongoing controversy remains to be seen, but we can learn a crucial lesson from it. Which is that the would-be censor can all too easily turn anti-censorship rhetoric to their advantage. We must be mindful of that, and remain vigilant if we want to see truly free and open artistic expression.

 

 

Kate Paulk on Mad Genius Club

“A Mad Genius Goes to RavenCon (Part the Second)” – May 2

Much joyous conversation was had upon the nature of weaponry, the importance of ending the Sadness of the Canines of Youth, and the prospect of selling buttons with the arcane cantrip “Barfly Central is my Safe Space”. And lo! The Convention of Raven has not descended to the madness of the Safe Space, for among the Secret Masters of Fandom in the shining city of Richmond there are those who know the never-to-be-spoken truth: that the Safe Space so celebrated by the Glittery Warriors of Social Justice is merely the demon of Apartheid masquerading under a pretty name and suit of demonic glitter….

Upon completion of the panel, the warrior maiden did retreat to her “safe space” (Barfly Central) wherein she did converse with many of the Flies of Bar and did meet in person the redoubtable warriors John C Wright and L Jagi Lamplighter (for as with many in these modern times the warrior maiden had conversed with both through the Internet of Tubes). ‘Twas here that Kate the Impaler did learn of the attempt of the GOH of Wrongness to have a person ejected from the Convention of Raven and that the GOH of Wrongness did have no copanelists. Speculation there was that the GOH of Wrongness was of such wrongness that no other wished to join for any panel.

 

I Sing the Puppy Electric 4/29

George R.R. Martin, John Ringo, Vox Day, John Scalzi, Aaron Pound, Jeb Kinnison, Jamie Ford, Glenn Hauman and lots of other cool cats and hot dogs sound off in today’s roundup. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.)

George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog

“No On NO AWARD” – April 29

No, I am not saying don’t use NO AWARD at all when you vote for this year’s Hugo Awards.

NO AWARD has been, and remains, a viable and legitimate option for the Hugo voter. I’ve been voting on the Hugos since the 1970s, and I use NO AWARD every year, usually in about a third of the categories. However, I have seldom (not NEVER, just seldom) placed it first. I rank the finalists that I think worthy of the rocket above NO AWARD, and the ones I think unworthy below it. That’s the way I intend to use the option this year as well, in spite of the slatemaking campaigns that buggered the nomination process to the seven hells and back.

NO AWARD is a scalpel, not a bludgeon. Voting NO AWARD on everything down the line… or even (the lesser option) on everything that appeared on either Puppy slate… well, I don’t think it is smart, I don’t think it is fair, and I know damned well that a NO AWARD sweep will kill the Hugos.

I think I have made my disagreements with Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and the rest of the Sad Puppies abundantly clear in the many blog posts that preceded this one, and in my debates with Correia both here and on his MONSTER HUNTER NATION. And I think I have made my disgust with Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies clear as well. No one should be in any doubt as to where I stand on all this.

As much as I am opposed to what the Puppies did, and what they are trying to do, I am also opposed to Guilt by Association. Like it or not, the ballot is the ballot, and it is before it now, for each of us to deal with as he or she thinks best. For my part, that means it is now about the stories, the books, the work itself. Reading, thinking, weighing my choices… voting.

 

 

John Ringo on Facebook – April 28

[Originally a public post, it is now restricted, but a screencap of “Understanding SJW Logic” is hosted at Solarbird.net.]

So let’s drill this down to Science Fiction. Science Fiction has, historically, been something that looked to the future of technology and societies and tried to glean what might be possible. It has also, often, been an avenue for proposing change. Many of the most ‘misogynistic’ and ‘racists’ authors of the early SF years were, in fact, far FAR ahead of their time in proposing racial and gender equity or near equity.

To the Social Justice Warriors (their term and not one of derogation in their eyes) of SF fandom, the TRUE PURPOSE of Science Fiction is solely and ONLY such promotion. Let me repeat that as an axiom:

To the Social Justice Warriors of Science Fiction publishing and fandom, the true and only purpose of science fiction is to promote increased equity in the arena of social justice.

The purpose of science fiction is not to tell a good story. Most of what people call ‘good stories’ are not stories that promote social justice. So ‘good story’ or not good story, (and there we get to matters of taste) they are not good science fiction. Good science fiction is only that science fiction which promotes social justice.

If there is a choice between two good social justice stories, the choice is not based on which is the better story or which is better written. At that point you look at which promotes social justice better. So if Author A is a person of color or a transgenderist and Author B is a cis-male, even if he is a social justice warrior, the BETTER STORY is that which is written by the person of color or transgenderist UNLESS such person writes a story which does NOT promote social justice in which case they are a traitor and shall be treated as such.

The sole an only point is to view every work in a lens of ‘how does this promote social justice?

 

Font Folly

“It bothers some people that we exist, part 2” – April 29

Being reminded that queer people exist at all drives some people to crazy lengths. For instance, as noted at the Crime and the Forces of Evil blog, the Sad Puppies are angry that books containing queer characters aren’t clearly marked. For those not in the know, the Sad Puppies (and an allied group, the Rabid Puppies) are a bunch of arch-conservative sci fi writers and fans who organized a bloc-voting scheme to game the selection process for the Hugo Awards and put a specific slate of anti-progressive authors, editors, and fans in every major category. Their rhetoric leading up to their success was full of blatant misogynist and homophobic language (and threats), and only slightly-less-blatant racist language. It’s worth noting that they’ve been trying this for a few years without success. It appears that their success this year is primarily due to the fact that they managed to enlist a bunch of GamerGate trolls into the process…

Since succeeding in hijacking most of the Hugo Ballot, the Sad Puppies (that’s their own name for their movement, by the way) have started deleting or heavily editing their existing blog posts and such to downplay the bigotry. Though most of their revisions have been to obscure the racist language, to try to pretend that the most blatant bigot wasn’t considered an ally, and to make some of their threatening language appear to be aimed at individuals rather than whole groups of people. They have removed some of the comments and paragraphs in which they appear to be calling for the extermination of gay people, for instance, though they remain absolutely clear that they object to homos and women being portrayed positively (or at all) in science fiction, fantasy, or any other cultural product.

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“THEY are in retreat” – April 29

The main reason SJWs were successful in infiltrating the science fiction establishment and imposing their ideology on it was due to their Fabian strategy of denying any conflict was taking place. Their entryism depended entirely upon stealth and plausible deniability. That’s why the single most important aspect of both #GamerGate and #SadPuppies was the way in which it was made perfectly clear to everyone that there are, in fact, two sides.

There are those who want to be able to define what is permissible to read, write, design, develop, play, think, and say, (SJWs) and those who wish to read, write, design, develop, play, think, and say whatever the hell they happen to please. (Everybody else)

Jim Hines isn’t “so damn tired” of “an artificial Us vs. Them framework”. He is simply alarmed that their most effective tactic has been exposed and rendered impotent.

 

John Ringo on Facebook – April 29

Because as a conservative, that’s what you are to all the hardcore liberals. Purest evil. ISIS has nothing on being an American conservative. There is nothing worse than being a conservative white male. We are the ultimate super-villain and nothing can be anything like our equal. (Thus the humorously entitled ‘League of Evil Evil’ started by Sarah Hoyt of which I am a card-carrying member.)

Which is why there have arisen conventions that really avoid letting the CHORFs in at all. So the conservative SF fans can get together and let their hair down and talk about stuff they want to talk about (like books with actual plots and dialogue) and not be continuously insulted by the CHORFs. And even large cons that are ‘balanced’ tend to toss the SJW contingent the minute it starts to be a problem. Because nobody CARES about their issues. Not in the broad sense of what is marketable. (Just as at ‘balanced’ conventions conservatives who insist on being buttheads are tossed. I’ve seen both and I’m all for it. When it’s balanced.)

By the way, I prefer SJBs to CHORFs as a term. SJWs, social justice warriors, is not an insult as many articles have indicated. It’s the preferred term of the SJWs. And there are SJWs who are not SJBs. An SJB is a ‘Social Justice Bully.’ Because they are bullies. They are not even about social justice. They’re about being bullies.

So, yes, there are two different fandoms. And it’s very much a Political divide. And it’s not going away any time soon.

 

John Scalzi on Whatever

“Drinking Poison and Expecting the Other Person to Die” – April 29

This whole Puppy mess is because some of them weren’t happy, and were searching externally for that happiness, either by seeking a validation in outside rewards, or by punishing people they saw (erroneously and/or conspiratorially) blocking the path to that validation. Envy and revenge, basically. They’re drinking poison and hoping others die, or at the very least, suffer. It’s why they called themselves “Sad Puppies” in the first place: it was about what they thought their Hugo nominations would make people they decided they didn’t like feel.

Which is their karma. It doesn’t have to be mine (or yours).

So, no. I wish the Puppies success in their publishing endeavors, and I wish them happiness — genuine happiness, not contingent on comparison to, or the suffering of, others. I also wish for them the capacity to recognize success, and to be happy. It doesn’t seem they’re there yet. I hope they get there, and will cheer them if and when they do.

 

Jeb Kinnison on According To Hoyt

“’Selective Outrage’ – Jeb Kinnison” – April 29

Hatred and prejudice harm real people, but the harm echoes on through the generations as the original victims teach and promote an us-vs-them worldview that harms everyone. The people who are less wrong learn to understand where the hateful emotions come from, and start to cut off the sources of funds and fury that feed the continuing conflicts. Understanding the backgrounds of the partisans and arguing toward acceptance of others’ right to be wrong is the beginning of reconciliation and cooperation. I think we can get most reasonable people to agree that an award that supposedly recognizes the best SFF should be more broadly representative of the readers, including the vast majority who can’t take time out from busy lives or afford to go to conventions. Having a tiny in-group select award winners from their friends and people they know leaves out most of the writers, and almost all of the readers.

 

Aaron Pound on Dreaming About Other Worlds

“2015 Prometheus Award Nominees” – April 29

The interesting thing about the 2015 list of nominees for the Prometheus Award is not who is on it, but rather who is not. Even though the set of authors that make up the core proponents of the “Sad Puppies” very clearly view themselves as being on the libertarian side of the spectrum (and in some cases they have inserted segments into their books that are clearly pandering to Prometheus Award voters), and yet, there is zero overlap between the set of books they promoted for the 2015 Hugo Award and the set of books that were chosen as finalists for the 2015 Prometheus Award. In short, despite sharing an ideological bent with many of the authors promoted by the Puppies, the Libertarian Futurist Society didn’t see fit to even consider honoring any of the novels that were pushed for the Hugo ballot with a Prometheus Award nomination. If the Puppy slate is in fact about recognizing good books that the Hugo Awards have overlooked because they are supposedly ideologically biased, why is it that the works on the Puppy slates have been, with some rare exceptions, pretty much ignored by all of the other genre related awards? In fact, no one making decisions regarding other awards has seemed to think the stories promoted by any iteration of the Puppy slates have been worth nominating. It would be one thing if the works favored by the Puppies were getting nominated for many other awards while being snubbed solely by the Hugo voters. But they haven’t. They have been ignored by all the major awards because they simply aren’t good enough.

 

John C. Wright

“After Inaction Report from Ravencon” – April 29

A read[er] with the unexpectedly commonplace yet giant-killing name of Jack writes and asks:

Mr Wright: no word on Ravencon? maybe I missed it. Were you barbequed on sight, or just smugly ignored? Or, was it really civilized? At this point I would imagine many of the detractors on the left are wary of confrontation with those of the Puppy and Ilk fame. If so, good. They need a nice dose of apprehension to temper their attack dog tendencies of attack, attack, then worry about truth and accuracy.

I am pleased to report that there were no incidents of which I was aware at Ravencon. Everything went swimmingly.

No, that is not quite true: I heard from one of the organizers, a friend of mine, that Brianna Wu sat on a panel on Gamergate on Friday (before I arrived), and asked for there to be no photographs. As far as I know, this is a perfectly reasonable request, and, as a matter of professional courtesy, it is usually honored. One fellow — I did not catch his name — took photos nonetheless, Brianna Wu raised an objection (whether reasonable or hysterical I cannot say, hearing of this only third hand) and the photographer was asked to step out of the room. He was not kicked out of the Con. He left a snarky comment on his social media page.

That makes a grand total of one almost-rude incident and one perhaps-illtempered comment. And it was not related to Sad Puppies as far as I know, merely the psychodrama of a seriously disturbed person.

Aside from that, the topic came up only once, at the Trollhunter 101 panel, where the moderator merely described that the controversy existed, but his description of the controversy was fair and free from libel, so he was on our side (whether he knows it or not).

 

 

Jamie Ford

“A bystander’s view of the Hugo Awards” – April 29

I joined the World Science Fiction Society so I could officially vote in the Hugo Awards. Not for myself (I don’t even pretend to that kind of greatness) but I had hoped to vote for The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

Much to my chagrin, this amazing book didn’t make the ballot because a disgruntled group of conservative writers who felt slighted by the Hugos decided to emotionally vomit all over the voting process.

It’s much more nuanced I’m sure, but to an outsider, that’s what it looks like.

*Tantrum. Barf. Point fingers of blame.*

And I get it. I love Orson Scott Card’s work and have always found him incredibly supportive of struggling writers. But I disagree with his political views, which have begun to obfuscate his stories. And I’ve participated in online writing communities where people were banned for unpopular opinions, which never sat well with me.

 

Doctor Science on Obsidian Wings

“The Varieties of Fictional Pleasure” – April 28

One much-discussed Puppy statement is by Brad Torgersen, from January:

In other words, while the big consumer world is at the theater gobbling up the latest Avengers movie, “fandom” is giving “science fiction’s most prestigious award” to stories and books that bore the crap out of the people at the theater: books and stories long on “literary” elements (for all definitions of “literary” that entail: what college hairshirts are fawning over this decade) while being entirely too short on the very elements that made Science Fiction and Fantasy exciting and fun in the first place!

Among the many problems with this statement is that Worldcon members (that Hugo-voting “fandom” of which Torgersen speaks so sneeringly) did in fact give a Hugo to The Avengers, in the same year they gave the Best Novel Hugo to John Scalzi’s Redshirts — a work which, Scalzi admits, can only be called “long on literary elements” if you’re making a joke.

 

Glenn Hauman on Comic Mix

“Hugo Awards, No Awards and Network Effects” – April 29

[The] question has come up about voting for “No Award” over various nominees, whether it should be done, and whether it would be an unprecedented event.

The answer to the last part is: No, it’s not unprecedented. “No Award” has won categories before, most recently in 1977 when no award was given for Best Dramatic Presentation.

And ironically, that’s really a shame. Because it turns out there was a really great science fiction movie that year that showed us where we were heading. I’m not talking about any of that year’s actual Hugo nominees– Carrie, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth, or Futureworld.

No, I’m talking about Network.

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“They also serve” – April 29

It was suggested that they also serve, who inadvertently and unknowingly do the bidding of the Evil Legion of Evil through their ludicrously predictable reactions. And lo, a badge for this brigade of Unwitting Minions was created. Evil Legion of Evil minions are free to award it to those whose behavior is so egregiously stupid or shortsighted or self-destructive that they could not possibly serve your Supreme Dark Lord better if they were consciously doing His Evil Bidding. Given that they are, without exception, unique and special snowflakes, they naturally all bear the title “Minion #1”.

Unwitting-Minion_512x512

Stilicho in a comment on Vox Popoli April 29

Shouldn’t there be some more formal methodology to award Unwitting Minion badges?

No. I am Vile Faceless Minion and so can you.

 

Fiona L. Woods on Cats and Crime

“Hugo Awards and Puppygate” – April 28

Puppygate is a term George R.R. Martin came up with. There are two groups, one called the Sad Puppies and the other the Rabid Puppies. Each group encouraged their followers to buy memberships for Worldcon so they could vote for stories and novels they wanted to get nominated for the Hugo Awards. Apparently, some of those nominated feel the two groups succeeded in loading the nominations with their picks. Hugo Award nominees Mark Kloos and Annie Bellet have withdrawn their work from the competition.

Panzer says, “What do you expect? They’re not the smartest potato on the truck. They’re puppies. You want smart? Get a kitten.  No kitten would have anything to do with this kind of litter box game.”

 

William Reichard

“My God, it’s full of puppies” – April 29

Even the roundups of news about the Hugo Awards fracas are getting too long to read all of every day. One thing you have to admit: this topic is clearly a deep nerve.