With Six You Get Sleigh Dogs 7/2

aka My Enemy, My Alpo

Today’s roundup ropes and brands Peter Grant, Mike Glyer, Anonymous, John Seavey, Adam-Troy Castro, Lou Antonelli, Shaun Duke, Sarah A. Hoyt, Duncan Mitchel, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, Gef Fox, Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, and Brian Niemeier. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day James H. Burns and Kyra.)

Comments on Bayou Renaissance Man post “The State of the Tor Boycott (And SJW’s)” – July 2

Peter Grant

I’d say it’s certain that we’re on track to cost Tor a six-figure sum this year, and probably that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Mike Glyer

Could you share the calculation behind this estimate?

Anonymous

If he’s talking gross sales and not net, the calculation is simple: X people not buying Y books for an average price of Z.

Lets say that, the boycotters normally buy…. 10 Tor books each, 3 HC, 7 PB (or ebook equivalents). That’s about what, $130 in gross sales by Amazon prices? 800 people boycotting * 130 =104,000.

John Seavey

Well, first off, you’d need to cut those prices by 30% or more, because Tor sells the books wholesale to retailers who mark it up to SRP. Retailers would be taking that hit, but it’s spread among all retailers.

But more importantly, where is Peter getting a figure of 800 boycotters who spent $130 per year on Tor books pre-boycott? The number of people willing to send an email, thr absolute minumum in time and effort, topped out at 765. And many of those admitted they didn’t like or buy Tor books. I’d say you can half that number, probably even quarter it. Then take another 30% off for the wholesale discount. So it’s probably hitting Tor to the tune of $20,000 a year.

Peter Grant

@John Seavey: Those figures are not mine, but another commenters. My figures, based on actual e-mails and many conversations, plus discussions with others involved, are considerably higher in terms of the number of individuals involved. The amount they used to spend on Tor books ranges from $10-$20 per year all the way to a couple of hundred dollars.

Multiply your guesstimate of $20K by at least seven, and you’ll get close to what I consider to be the current impact of the boycott. The word is still being spread by supporters, and more people are joining it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the financial impact rather higher by the end of the year. Time will tell.

 

Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – June 25

Rabid-puppy moment of the day: John C. Wright, who is now advising readers that he really doesn’t want anybody to boycott Tor because it would hurt him, wants “Mr. {Moshe} Feder, Miss Gallo, and Mr Nielsen Hayden to get back to the their job of editing books, and cease moonlighting as…” {among other things} “Christ-hating crusaders for Sodom.”

To be sure, he represents this as something he would say if he wasn’t keeping firm control of himself in order to avoid escalation, something he (heh heh heh) Isn’t *quite* saying, at least not at this point, but something he would say if he were to offer an opinion, so please don’t misrepresent him as actually saying it.

But he does make it clear that he would say this, quite happily, in a parallel world not very far removed from this one.

No, he’s not saying any of that, not really, but you, his alleged followers, can say whatever you want, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Putting this in perspective, John C. Wright is trying to stave off a boycott of the publisher who pays him, because of a creative director there who dared to suggest that some of his movement are neo-Nazis, and he’s doing this by applying the adjective “Christ-Hating” in part to an editor named Moshe who wears a yarmulke. He’s doing this while closely allied with a small press writer/editor who thinks we might all want to thank a racially-motivated spree killer someday.

“I’m not a Nazi, but damn the Jews, and mass murder is fine with my buddy here.” ….

 

Lou Antonelli on This Way to Texas

“Spell my name right” – July 2

Since I am a fellow traveler, not a ring leader of the Sad Puppies, I’ve never felt the same emotional investment as other people. I do know that I have a temper that can be set off by punching the wrong button, and I’ve always tried to control that. Some bystanders to the ongoing controversy have noticed that, too.

When I was growing up I was called Pollyanna by my mother because I refused to punch out people who disagreed with me. My father considered any discussion that ended short of gun play as cordial. It was an atypical childhood.

In a discussion yesterday on a web site about my blog post yesterday, one person said:

“I find Antonelli a bit more reasonable than the rest of the puppies. He has stated that the slate was a big mistake, has said that he doesn’t like the use of the word SJW and has said that it shouldn’t be a SP4 next year.

“I think he’s one that it is actually possible to have a discussion with and not just getting talking points back. Main problem is that he seems to have the temper of an irritated grizzly that missed his morning trout.”

In light that I am Italian, have diabetes and the body build of a bear, this is the most insightful thing anyone has ever said about me. Got me down, cold.

P.S. I still think any incarnation of Sad Puppies next year is a bad idea, and I will certainly not participate in any manner.

 

Shaun Duke on World in a Satin Bag

“On Unofficial Blacklists: Why I Keep a Mental List of Authors I Won’t Read” – July 1

To be clear, I don’t stick someone on my DNR list for having different political views than myself.  I DNR authors because of how they express those views.  There are a lot of authors who don’t share my worldview.  Most of those authors aren’t on my DNR list because they have never given me a good reason to put them there.  We disagree.  That’s it.  Big woop.  They’re not actively trying to have my mother’s rights stripped away, nor are they arguing that women should be assaulted for their own good or defending acid attacks or claiming that people of color are half-savages.  We just disagree with me (or other people) about things.  If we ever discuss those differences, it’s most often a discussion.  No rants and figurative rock throwing.

Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt

“Why Are You So Angry?” – July 2

….Last time I rose above peeved was reading Irene Gallo’s comments, and fortunately being on this side of the keyboard, I couldn’t reach through the monitor. When hands started shaking on keyboard, I went upstairs and perpetrated violence on waxed floors, which more or less fixed it. Or at least got rid of the strength to do anything.

But I think the trolls who as “Why are you so angry?” though it’s mostly an invalidating technique are also aware that we have reason to be angry. H*ll, they’d be angry if they were us, right?

And so… and so, I’ll give the reasons we have to be angry.

  • Anyone who goes against the Marxist line and points out that they’re lying gets persecuted and there are attempts to destroy them, ranging from professional to real destruction. Peter Grant and I should be grateful all they did was tar us with racist, sexist, homophobic and neo-nazi, particularly when those accusations are risible to anyone not deep in koolaid guzzling territory.

 

Duncan Mitchel on This Is So Gay

“An Area Which We Call The Comfort Zone” – June 22

Bradford concludes by asking the reader, “Are you up to this challenge?”  I wonder who she imagines her reader to be.  A straight white cis male could reasonably respond that he reads primarily work by straight white cis males in order to avoid writing that he actively hates, or that offends him so much that he rage-quits reading it.  (Something like this is the expressed motive of the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies who enraged a lot of science-fiction fandom by stacking the Hugo Awards ballots with work that didn’t offend their sensibilities or politics.)  The challenge she offers her readers is not the challenge — which is not the right word — she offered herself, and I’m not sure she realizes that.  My problem with Bradford’s piece is not that she focuses on race, gender, and sexuality illegitimately, as some of her white male critics accused her of doing, but that she’s not clear in her own mind about what she’s doing, or what it means.  To non-straight-cis-white-male readers, increasing the number of non-straight-cis-white-male writers they read means something quite different than the same program will mean to straight white cis male readers.  I must say, I was taken aback by her claim that she began reading only “stories by a certain type of author.”  It seems to me that she chose to read stories by several different types of authors, unless she read only stories by queer transgender women of color, and it doesn’t appear that she did….

Paradoxically, narrowing her focus in one respect broadened it another: by deciding to read more work by women, by people of color, by non-heterosexuals, and so on allowed Bradford to encounter writing and perspectives she might otherwise have missed.  There is too much to read out there, and no matter what we choose to read, there is vastly more that we can’t.  But even straight white cisgendered men aren’t all alike, and there’s as much range among their work, as much to learn and discover in it, as there is among queer trans women of color.  And if Bradford hasn’t discovered plenty of offensive, infuriating content in the work of non-white etc. writers, maybe she hasn’t been paying enough attention…..

 

John C. Wright

“Larry Correia and his Twit Service!” – July 3

The world reeled in flabberghastizement to read this generous announcement from the International Lord of Good Sense, Larry Correia:

So the author of 50 Shades of Grey did a Twitter Q&A, and in a series of events that came as a shock to exactly nobody on the internet except for the author and her publicist, trolls showed up to mock the hell out of her. The author was unprepared and it was a public relations disaster.

Meanwhile, I am an author who loves to fight with morons on Twitter.

That is why I am excited to offer an exciting new free lance service to publicists. The next time you want to do a Q&A wi…th your author on Twitter, simply retain my services and give me temporary access to your author’s Twitter account. The author can answer all the legitimate fan questions, and I’ll respond to the trolls as if I’m the author. Trust me. Fans love it when an author takes on a whole internet and wins.

For a low fee of $1 per character I will handle all of those pesky idiots for you. Is your author too kind to tell them to shut their stupid hipster faces? I’m not! Order now, and I will throw in the F word absolutely free! That’s right, every time I use the F word in a tweet it costs you nothing. This means huge savings for you.

But wait, there’s more! Retain my services now, and I’ll give you half price on special terms like Douchebag, Goony Beard Man, Rainbow Haired She Twink, Assclown, and more!

For more information and a collection of my greatest hits, contact my spokesmanatee, Wendell, at CorreiaTech headquarters, Yard Moose Mountain, Utah.

 

Brian Niemeier on Superversive SF

“Transhuman and Subhuman Part XII: The Big Three of Science Fiction” – July 2

The twelfth essay in Transhuman and Subhuman by John C. Wright corrects the popular misconception that the third member of the Big Three Campbellian authors, alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, wasn’t Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury, but A.E. van Vogt…..

Hard science fiction, says Wright, “consists of two elements…first, a social or philosophical commentary about man’s place in the universe…second, a fascination with the nuts and bolts of legitimate speculation into the near future of technical advance…” Campbell was the first to popularize stories combining both elements.

Describing the definitive mood and spirit of Campbellian tales is difficult these days, Wright contends, because they were “an extension of the scientific optimism and classical liberalism of the time.” A further characteristic of Campbell’s stories was “…a touching childlike faith in Theory, and, for conservatives (in the brilliant words of William Briggs) ‘Love of Theory is the Root of All Evil.’”

 

Gef Fox on Wag The Fox

“Chasing Tale [July 2, 2015]: Hugo, I’ll Stay”  – July 2

I received my Hugo Voter Packet last week, and with it were the majority of nominated works which I must now attempt to read before the end of July so that I can place an informed vote on which books are most deserving in my view of receiving awards. After reading a half dozen or so thus far, it is … a mixed bag. So … yeah. I’m not reading a bad book cover to cover. No way. So, depending upon how many of these erroneously nominated works fail to hook me, it may not be such a slog to read through the entire packet after all.

 

Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog

“Hugo Reading – Novelette” – July 2

  • “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium”, Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014) I quite liked this one. It felt like it needed one or two more go-rounds with an editor to finish polishing it, but it had good ideas, a functional and nasty threat and a character I liked as the lead. It was a good length for what it was trying to do. There were some questions and plot holes, but the set-up was good enough I didn’t really worry about them until thinking about the tale in reflection. In short, a solid story. I’m not sure it’s Hugo worthy, but it was good.
  • “Championship B’tok”, Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014) This story made me very upset. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it was moderately ok and interesting… and then it just ended. No conclusions, no solutions, no answers. It just ended. I don’t know, but I kind of expected the novelettes to be self-contained, or at least be the end of a chapter and not stop before any resolution. I wouldn’t call this the best story even before the abrupt ending, but with that ending? No. Just no.
  • “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014) A charming little story with a little bit of whimsy along with some very odd science. It’s also a romance story gone bad. It’s an ok story, but I’m not sure it really deserves the Hugo.
  • “The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014) I tried to read this. I started it three times but just couldn’t get into it. The language turned me off, I guess. I just couldn’t do it. I’m seeing people referring to this as “bouncing off” a work. I suppose that’s descriptive enough. This work was not for me and will not be on my ballot.
  • “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”, Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014) This one came oh so close. It’s almost there. It was a good tale, written with a lot of sarcastic wit. It was the wit that amused me the most, but it almost went over the top multiple times (which I guess would mean for some folks it did go over the top). It almost nailed the landing, but the impact wasn’t nearly as great as I expected. I’m not sure where it stumbled, but it missed something in there that made it not quite as good as it ought to have been. Hugo worthy? No, not really.

 

https://twitter.com/OddlyDinosaur/status/616601730466324480

549 thoughts on “With Six You Get Sleigh Dogs 7/2

  1. Picking up a comment from the last thread (Wow, am I behind) about the differences between WorldCon and the big Media cons…

    I’ve always personally divided cons into fan cons (Worldcon, literary SF cons, etc.) and dealer cons (FanExpo, Wizard’s World, etc.). Note this is not quite the same division as literary/media: it’s possible to have a fan/media con (a lot of anime cons qualify, especially the ones that started early).

    Basically, fan cons are run by the fans, for the fans. Dealer cons are run by the industry, for the dealers, with the fans being treated more as the product to run past the dealers like the old TV advertising model (where the watchers aren’t the customers, the advertisers are the customers and the watchers are the product). It’s a very different feel to it; fan cons tend to have a lot more of a ‘friends gathered together’ feel, even if some of the ‘friends’ are famous authors or actors.

    And I wonder if some of the original comments about ‘this doesn’t feel like a con, where are all the …’ weren’t at least as much a matter of a fan/dealer con difference as a literary/media con difference.

  2. IN today’s “Damn, I wonder why people call him racist” segment we have Teddy stating “And as a second-generation immigrant, she should never have been permitted a position of influence, let alone authority.” in reference to Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina.

  3. When the Puppies get to fulminating in particularly verbose tones, the response that always gets going in my head is the way Tonio K delivers the title word in the chorus to his song “Impressed”, particularly when coupled with “I am not”.

  4. All you good Christians know why you should be handling Christ’s name more gently. And everyone else, please do it anyway.

  5. Dammit, Bruce is really upping his obscure references game. Time to find a way to work Human Sexual Response or Lene Lovich into the conversation!

  6. “You know, the way JCW does these drive-by posts and runs off really makes me think of how ‘he ran up to his room and hid’ in the Fabulous Poodles’ Mirror Star.”

    *Phew!*

    #nevergiveup

  7. Jim: That was good! Honestly, not trying to be obscure – I just happen to really like Tonio K (and to think of his post-conversion work as showing what someone worth respecting as Christian is like, in struggles and successes).

  8. Bruce, I of course was just having fun. I have to check out Tonio K’s post-conversion material some time. I lost track of him after, oh, <whispers> 1979.

  9. @Stevie, indeed and it seems very sad. Life is so much more pleasant, when one can turn away from arguments that are neither entertaining nor useful.

  10. And if these threads do a little bit to restore honor to the likes of Tonio K, Ross Thomas and the Sandbaggers, that goes some way toward redeeming the whole Puppy fiasco!

  11. Ok, Morphius is slacking again so I will do something practical for the insomnia:

    Whilst I am prepared to accept the fantasy in fantasy; the tricky bit is where the background in the real world fails to ring true before the fantasy element cuts in.

    In ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’ I’m perfectly happy to accept that Tommy has a boring job in the City. And then Wright ruins things with an allegedly unwanted promotion.

    There is no such thing as an unwanted promotion in the City; nature may be red in tooth and claw but around here we regard that as a pale imitation of the real thing. It is not uncommon for people to have boring jobs; they may even, if they get lucky on the lottery, leave forever. But they don’t have unwanted promotions, because nobody would ever consider promoting someone who wasn’t interesting in doing it.

    At which point the willing suspense of disbelief disappears, and you are left with the ‘how come I’m enduring this’ option. About the only practical advice I can give is that you try No Awarding things which you think are not up to the standard. That’s the honourable way to handle it, and frankly I have very items which I consider worthy of the Hugos.

  12. @Ryan H: (tropical chicken pizza et al.)

    My go-to pizza order is a modified meat-lovers: beef, sausage, Canadian bacon (as a ham substitute), bacon, and pineapple – with BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce. I usually end up ordering garlic breadsticks along with it, eating the breadsticks first on the grounds that they don’t reheat well, and tackling the pizza itself on the next day. 🙂

    @redheadedfemme: “Or an oldie but a goodie, Greg Bear’s Moving Marx.”

    I just started the fourth Saving Marx book, Marx Burning. The series is holding up well, but I confess to being frustrated by the author’s use of en-dashes as hyphens (as in thirty–six instead of thirty-six). It’s a little thing, but it still makes me grr arrgh.

  13. We are two hours, east coast USA time, from what I predict will be the most self-righteous and overdramatic set of Puppy posts yet. Get ready to hear how finagling your cronies onto an award ballot is precisely what the Founders would have wanted.

    If we’re lucky there will be bonus ISIS-fighting references.

  14. Rev Bob, that sounds more like a designer, editor, or even a font problem, rather than that of the author; some badly-designed fonts have long hyphens in them, and some painfully uneducated designers don’t know the difference between em-dashes, en-dashes and hyphens. It would take a certain perversity of nature for an author to go sticking en-dashes in where common usage would require a hyphen. Not that that isn’t possible, but a competent layout artist or editor would surely have picked it up before publication.

  15. @ Will

    Coffee in SFF:

    Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover

    Robert Heinlein, Glory Road

    (Though I’d swear there’s something similar towards the beginning of Red Planet)

  16. Greetings from the future: Over here it’s already more than halfway through the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day to USAsians! Currently it’s overcast here with rain likely later this afternoon.

    On food: I am much more fussy/protective of the food I grew up with, so mess with my favourite Malaysian dishes at your peril. You can do what you like with other cuisines so long as the results are delicious (I haven’t tried peas in guacamole but I’d be willing to give it a go), though I find that most of the time, the traditional* recipes are best simply because those are the ones that have been perfected over time.

    *While sympathetic to purists (I’m that way for some foods), I also appreciate that if you go back far enough, most everything did not start out traditional. After all, tomato is now such an integral part of Italian cuisine is a New World fruit, and ditto chillies in Indian, Thai, Malaysian cuisine.

  17. Rev. Bob –

    My go-to pizza order is a modified meat-lovers: beef, sausage, Canadian bacon (as a ham substitute), bacon, and pineapple – with BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce.

    Ever try that with banana peppers? Because what you said plus those peppers is my go to pizza.

  18. I have considered JCW a man of low character and feeble morals for some time, and today’s bounce-and-flounce doesn’t change that. But it also offends me on behalf of our gracious host. Because every day Mike reads all the blogs and half the tweets on this stuff, and every day posts a big roundup of stuff. And several times a week, he posts whatever JCW has written that’s remotely germane, and a couple times a week he links to Adam-Troy Castro, who I assume is somebody. So all Wright had to do was post a response to Castro on Wright’s own blog and he’d be near guaranteed that Mike would pick it up. And Wright, by now, has to be aware of this. If he had any concern that Mike might skip him somehow, all Wright had to do was post a brief notice saying, “I’ve written a response and given the gravity of the charges Castro leveled I hope you’ll include it in the next roundup.” And Wright has to be aware of this too. (Wright also has to be aware that Mike links to all sorts of opinions from all angles of this controversy, some of them so frankly nonsensical that there’s no way anyone could construe his posting as an endorsement.)

    But despite the fact that “Mike Glyer posts a Hugo-related post by a major figure in the controversy to the daily Hugo roundup” is nearly as predictable as dogs trembling at the sound of fireworks, Wright has to barge in here and make a preening show of demanding, for the sake of his alleged honor, that Mike…do what he surely would have done anyway. And by Wright’s actions implying that Mike would not otherwise have…done what he pretty much always does.

    You want to talk about “libel” (in the ordinary language rather than the legal sense)? There’s your libel. It’s like JCW thinks he’s supposed to shove great planks into his own eye and then go clawing after the eyes of his brother.

  19. I wonder whether I’m the only one in this group who customarily orders pizza with no cheese.

  20. Oh. And in regard to

    … an editor named Moshe who wears a yarmulke.

    I’ve known Moshe Feder more than 40 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear a yarmulke.

  21. There was a place–in Portland (Oregon) I think it was–that would do pizza with no bread. They called it “pizza in a bucket.”

  22. John C Wright on July 3, 2015 at 2:55 pm said:

    What a vile and cowardly ort of feces this is. I see the method here is merely to make so many false and outrageous accusations that no one can possibly refute them.
    ….
    I am being reviled precisely because I love and fear the God of Moses.

    Nah, you’re being reviled precisely because you’re an asshole.

  23. If I’m buying pizza: olives, anchovies, mushroom, capsicum, onions, jalapenos and ground beef on a thin tomato base. If I’m making pizza, the recipe generally starts with some flammable herbs of a medicinal sort, followed by a rummage through the cupboards for whatever looks edible. This has been known to generate some highly unusual combinations, often a few inches thick…

    If we expand it to “vaguely pizza-like foods”, then it’s Turkish pide for the win. Lamb, egg, spinach and fetta, with the egg cracked on top at the end so that the heat of the other ingredients just barely solidifies it.

  24. For ancestry, I’m part English, part Irish, part Scottish, and part German. I’m Canadian. (And I argue with myself a lot.) Like some of the others who have mentioned this, I’m one of those people for whom you have to go back at least three generations before running into anybody who wasn’t born in Canada, so I’m really about as Canadian as you can get without having much First Nations ancestry.

    Of course, even that’s eliding a fair bit; the ‘German’ part weren’t so much Germans as they were German-descended Palatines, who left the area when the French took over, moved to England, then to New England, then got land grants in British North America after fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. Apparently one of my ancestors on that side was Nathan Frink, Benedict Arnold’s aide-de-camp.

    There’s a reason I generally just refer to myself as ‘Canadian’: there aren’t any other nationalities in pure enough strains to be significant.

  25. I live in the southwest side of Chicago which has a large Hispanic population. Because of this some pizzerias have created pizzas with a Hispanic flavor. I’ve had a taco pizza which was truly awful. But a pizza with jalapeno peppers and chorizo (a Mexican sausage) is very delicious.

  26. For the record, Adam-Troy Castro is a science fiction author. He’s been nominated for the Hugo twice, the Nebula eight times, and has won the Philip K. Dick award. He’s a vastly more accomplished writer than JCW.

  27. @Jim Henley:

    Adam-Troy Castro is a writer, he’s been nominated for a couple of Hugos and several times for the Nebula. I met him at a Worldcon and he’s a fairly nice guy.

    https://www.sff.net/people/adam-troy/index2.html

    You’re right, JCW should have taken this up with ATC, not here. I suspect ATC would send JCW’s candy tumbling to the floor rather quickly.

  28. I’m mostly ignoring JCW’s posts for the rantings they are (i.e. I’ll read them, then shrug & move on), and his recent comments do not suggest that I need to reassess my position.

  29. @NelC: (hyphens vs. dashes)

    The reason I blame the author is that it started happening in book three; the first two books are fine. I believe the books are also self-published – at least, the copyright data in my copies makes no mention of a publisher or imprint. In book four, the only hyphen I found in a search was in a URL – but it was there, which tells me that the en-dashes elsewhere were deliberate. (Or, possibly, that the URL list was copied from an earlier book.)

    In short, it feels like either an authorial decision or an amateur mistake, and when the book is self-published, both of those fall back to the author.

    @Matt Y: (go-to pizza)

    Not a big fan of peppers, banana or otherwise.

  30. “Sleigh Dogs”: Is this a regionalism? The phrase seems very strange to me. I would say “sled dogs”, and I agree with the first on-line dictionary that I looked at, which says that a sleigh is generally “horse-drawn”.

  31. The most important book about ethnic heritage in the US, IMHO, is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer’s thesis is that four of the largest, earliest movements of people from the British Isles to what is now the US came from four different regions in Britain, and involved people with different religions, dialects, house designs, clothing, names, food — and, especially, with different ideas about politics and liberty.

    Fischer categorizes them as: Puritans, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts Bay and New England; Anglican “Cavaliers”, who came from southern England (approximately the area of Hardy’s Wessex) to the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia; Quakers, who came from the north Midlands to Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley; and low-church Borderers, who came from the border areas between England and Scotland (and Ireland) to the backcountry and Appalachia.

    Fischer argues that these first English-speaking waves set the cultural tone for different parts of the US — and for the areas further West that were settled by people from those regions. Even after wave after wave of other immigrants arrived, we can see the traces of the core English folkways around us.

    The biggest problem with Fischer’s analysis is one he recognized, but has never directly addressed — probably because it’s technically so very difficult. Years ago, he said he was working on “The Ebony Tree: African Folkways in America”, but it’s never seen the light.

  32. Jim, you have this longstanding habit of beautifully expressing why I felt outraged about something. You’ve done it again. Thank you – being able to verbalize the nature of the complaint helps set boundaries. I keep being struck that Wright and Beale are busily and proudly making themselves into very effective anti-Christs, in a direct way. You don’t have to sacrifice babies to Satan to trample Biblical precepts by the truckload. It’s a good thing for the world that there are so many Christians, of so many varieties, who do a better job of getting in the general hemisphere of their founder.

    As for Tonio K, I’m familiar with and recommend the albums Romeo Unchained and Notes From The Lost Civilization. I’m less familiar with his albums after that. Youtube is there. 🙂

    I’m halfway through Daughter of Mystery. Thank you to everyone who recommended it; it really is all that and a bag of chips. Among other things, it’s fascinating to see a story get so deep into the details of intellectual inquiry about religious phenomena – this is a part of the world a lot of people I know live in, but that’s apparently really hard to do in fiction.

    Speaking of inquiry, Doctor Science, do you have an opinion on Henry Gee’s The Accidental Species? I’ve been wondering how someone with actual training/expertise might see it.

  33. Wanderfound

    While we’re on local delicacies, I heartily recommend trying a genuine Adelaide pie floater.

    I’m still catching up, but I just need to add: No. Just don’t.

    You’re right in that you have to be drunk to enjoy a meat pie floater, but the level of drunkenness needed is close to liver-failure levels.

    If you are in Adelaide, and want an actual late night treat, go for the AB. AFAIK, it’s only available in North Adelaide, but it’s worth trying out.

  34. I eat pizza without cheese (dairy allergy). With a variety of other flavorful toppings, it works for me.

  35. There is real Italian deep-fried pizza. Coccoli are small torn-off balls of pizza dough, deep fried and lightly sprinkled with salt, and served warm. Had them in a restaurant 20 minutes outside Florence, and have later made them myself. Delicious.

  36. Bruce:

    I haven’t read The Accidental Species yet (puts it on the list), but the summary on the publisher’s site looks reasonable.

    Is there anything in it you have a question about?

  37. Doctor Science: No, not really. I really like his overview of contingencies of different sorts, and think he draws some fascinating speculative conclusions from the variety of hominids we know about now – he has a really good ongoing emphasis on the different kinds of ignorance we necessarily have about the past. I was just wondering the general spirit of wondering. (Eventually I’ll make more use of his bibliography.)

  38. On pizza: Zachary’s in Berkeley does Chicago-style, including stuffed pizza, and it’s certainly edible.

    Ethnicity: Mine is mostly British Isles, although the majority is actually English; I have a hefty slug of German, a little Delaware Valley Swedish, and a teeny bit of Huguenot. (Genealogy has been a floating research project for most of the last 40 years. The in-laws, outlaws, and cousins make life interesting; they’ve added color and ethnicities that a century back would have been unthinkable. Or not. Look up Mozingos in the US some time.)

  39. On “One Bright Star”—I thought it worked. Wright’s sentences can go off-the-rails, but in this story in particular, for this sort of pastiche, they were reasonable and made sense. He captured the essence of exhausted, semi-defeated, aging heroes. Also, his usual themes of Christianity and Christ figures also fit the CS Lewisish setting and characters (as opposed to where it is horrifically out of place, such as in his short story “The Scepter of Nowhere” in the latest Dark Discoveries). I also had some residual affection for the original (and superior) 2009 version which appeared in F&SF.

    I have no problem with anyone who No Awards all slate nominees, though I note that most people aren’t actually purists on the subject and give themselves leave when it comes to, say, Best Dramatic Presentation: Long. I also object to Puppies whining about how anti-slate no-awarding is dishonorable. It’s just as dishonorable as slating, except that it is a defensive move and thus ethically allowable. But I’m not an Automatic No-Awarder at heart. I read fiction and enjoy the fiction and essays of many people far more terrible and stupid than John C. Wright, and make a point of not excluding work based on violent political disagreements or bad personality traits.

    Honestly, if I were grading the Hugos on personality or political disagreement, I’d No Award every category every year except for China Mieville novels and my personal friends.

  40. @NickMamatas,

    Reposted from your LJ:
    I really struggled to get through it, first the Americanisms in a British setting, then the muddled story which was more ‘tell’ than ‘show’. It felt like a novel with the action edited out.

    ETA: Like an inverse Princess Bride.

  41. The Americanisms didn’t bother me; they seem to be becoming more common among people in their 40s anyway, and tell-don’t-show isn’t a universal rule. In this case, I believed it worked because of the sort of stories being riffed upon, which were often a bit long on expository dialogue themselves.

    What I should say is that I have a two-step system for Hugo voting:

    1. In nominating, the bar is “Do I love this?”—very few of my nominations ever see the light of day.

    2. On voting for the ballot the bar is “Is this about as good as Hugo winners I recall from previous years?” “One Bright Star” struck me as such, even though I didn’t nominate any of the recent novella winners.

  42. “Why don’t Americans of English descent call themselves Anglo-Americans? Privilege, pure and simple”
    Or, like my family on both sides, it just never comes up. Farm people for the most part, there are other things to do than worry about where some great great came from. It wasn’t until I and some other cousins finally started doing some genealogy that we even knew where our ancestors were from. Now, if asked, we tend to say our ‘background is English/Irish” as far as we know. After all, we don’t know who Grandpa McKinney’s father in Missouri was.
    I’d always assumed we were English–mostly because of the surnames. The big surprise was discovering Mormons on one side only three generations back and Quakers from Ireland on the other side. We’re Methodists, after all.
    So, for some of us it’s more a matter of “It just never came up” than a sense of privilege.

  43. Favorite pizza: Pepperoni, mushroom, black olives on a thin crust. Slightly overcooked.

    Oddest “niche” pizza (I routinely order): Green olives & anchovies. I don’t know how this works, but it does.

    Best\worst pizza ever consumed: Coney* pizza from Hungry Howies. Regular crust with coney dog chili and sliced hot dogs standing in for sauce and pepperoni, respectively. Liberally topped with diced onions and mustard. Once the box is opened, this pizza has a 5 minute window of pure ambrosia – any longer and the chili has cooled, placing serving this pie to others firmly on the wrong side of Geneva conventions.

    *Detroit coney island. All-beef dog, natural casing, cooked on a griddle, placed in a steamed bun, topped with beef heart chili, diced onions, and yellow mustard.
    There will be no argument about this definition. Wars have been fought for less.

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