Ayes Wide Mutt 7/3

Posted on by

aka The Doxxer Rebellion

In today’s roundup: Malcolm ‘f.’ Cross, Tom Knighton, Dorothy Grant, Adam-Troy Castro, David Gerrold, Mike Resnick, Lawrence Person, John C. Wright, Nicholas Whyte, and Patrick May. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Will Reichard and Kurt (not Kent) Busiek.)

Foozzzball (Malcolm ‘f.’ Cross)  on Weasyl

“My ounce of bile: Yarn is cowardly” – July 3

….Here’s the thing. These guys (and a very, very few women) are all screaming, defensively, that they’re writing good old fashioned YARNS. Entertaining STORIES. Books with rocket ships on the covers instead of that inconvenient new-fangled social commentary. And they point at luminaries like Heinlein, and Asimov, and all those golden age authors.

Heinlein who was talking about contemperaneous issues like the cold war, the morality of total warfare, free love, the impact of new and changing technology and the need for retaining simple skills (such as the much loved slide rule), and was a man who spoke very much to the issues of his time. Asimov who attacked major issues of his lifetime like eugenics and social engineering through his work (what, you think Foundation’s psychohistory has nothing to say about the pursuit of social purity?), wrapping up issues of perception and belief and creation in rip-roaring stories.

These men were not writing yarns. They were products of their time, attacking the issues of their time. That they did so skilfully, entertainingly, and thought-provokingly is testament to their genius. They were not saints, their opinions are not sacrosanct, they, like any other person, held opinions agreeable and disagreeable.

You know who else wasn’t just spinning yarns? Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game is fundamentally about the boundary between being a soldier and a human being. It’s implicitly about genocide, about hands on the big red button, about the ignorance required to perform such a terrible action and remain innocent. It was originally a short story written in 1977, in the middle of the cold war, and rewritten as a novel by 1985, just as the cold war got terrifying all over again. Attacking the issues of his day, OSC put together a masterpiece. And then, quite honestly, he started looking at his personal bugbears instead of the wider world, and never did anything so good again in his life. That’s when he started writing yarns.

Fiction isn’t about entertainment. It never has been. From the earliest stories we’ve told ourselves, the myths that grew into religions, Aesop’s fables, the fairy-tales you were told as a child, they’ve all been about communication. Discussion. Opening a dialogue. They are vehicles for exploring, and thinking about, the world. This is all fiction, not just science fiction…..

 

Tom Knighton on According To Hoyt

“On Villainy” – July 3

…Right now, the most popular villain is the turdnugget who decided to walk into a church in Charleston, SC and kill people for nothing more than the color of their skin. This is something that the vast majority of us are unable to comprehend. I mean, skin tone is as arbitrary a dividing line as hair color or eye color, so why kill people for just that factor?

We can’t grasp it, yet it happened. I refuse to actually write the turdnugget’s name anywhere, because I don’t want to give him any more press. He already got his fame, which I suspect was a factor in his attack, but I refuse to add to it. It’s a small effort to keep people from mimicking his efforts.

All too often, people think of “villains” as those who oppose them on whatever issue they hold dear. Monsanto is the villain to people like “Food Babe”. The NRA is the villain to the gun control crowd. The Sad Puppies are the villains to the Puppy Kickers. The flip side is also generally true as well.

The thing is, most of us have never truly experienced real “villainy”. We’ve never witnessed the pits of dead Albanians following the break-up of Yugoslavia. We never witnessed the Rwandan tribal slaughter. Many of us have never met a Jewish concentration camp survivor. To us, that level of villainy just doesn’t exist except as an abstract…..

And yet, there are those who are ready to ascribe such motives to us. They’re ready to link this turdnugget to us, despite the fact that most of us not only decry his actions, but we actually supported several authors who don’t fit the “white, Mormon male” narrative (to say nothing of the fact that authors were nominated that we may disagree with politically).

Look, I’m going to make this clear. Bigotry is stupid. Racism is beyond stupid. All we have ever wanted is people and works to be judged based on quality, both the quality of the person and the quality of the work. Anyone who opposes a work because the author is black, or a woman, or gay, or a socialist is a moron. Anyone who dislikes a work because the author is white, or male, or straight, or a conservative/libertarian is just as much of a moron.

There are real villains in this world. How about some of the people screaming the most about villains try something different and start looking at real villains for a change.

 

Dorothy Grant in a comment on Tom Knighton’s post “On Villainy” at According To Hoyt – July 3

I suspect that people who have very little life experience and not much in the way of bedrock principles shrink their scale of villainy to fit their experience.

The best example of this is the root of the Tor boycott; Irene Gallo was upset at people voting for the Hugos in ways that did not benefit her logrolling clique, and she started calling her customers and her own authors neo-nazis and the books she had even worked on “bad to reprehensible.” In her pampered, privileged world, someone not giving a plastic statue to the clique that was certain they deserved it is the worst villainy possible.

Then there’s my husband, who has traded fire with real, actual neo-nazis and dealt with their carbombs and terror tactics. He was working on ending apartheid and giving every human being in South Africa the vote and the recognition of their human dignity. The worst villainy possible that he’s seen… let us pray fervently to all our spirits and deities that we never see its like again.

 

 

John C. Wright in a comment on File 770 – July 3

“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.”

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.

Since I am an open philosemite, active supporter of the State of Israel, an unapologetic Zionist, and married the daughter of a Jew, and since I immediately ban any holocaust deniers who dare to show their subhuman snouts on my blog, the accusation that I am an antisemite is beyond libel, beyond madness.

Why not simply accuse me of being a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater while you are at it?

The Christ-haters hate Christ because they are Social Justice Warriors, which is a religion that is jealous, and excludes the practice of Christian and Jewish faith alike.

It was the God of Abraham, the God worshiped by all practicing Jews, who destroyed the city of Sodom and outlawed the practices which made that name a curse. I am being reviled precisely because I love and fear the God of Moses.

I am against the SJWs precisely for the same reason I am for the Jews. I hate bullies and cowards, and I hate liars, and I hate antisemitism with an unquenchable burning hatred, and I love the people that God loves.

Mr Glyer, for a while, you had won my respect, as you seemed to be an honest fellow, trying to maintain some sense of fairplay. I called your blog a wretched hive of scum and villainy as a joke, which you took up.

But this is beyond the pale, that you should print such things of me, or aid and condone these libels. I trust you will reprint these remarks of mine in a prominent place.

 

Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – July 3

…I am aware that I’ve been cited in Larry Correia’s environs, though as far as I know not specifically by Larry Correia (I am careful to make that distinction), as the “stupidest man in science fiction.” Some of my friend Brad Torgersen’s pals have come here to spew rage at me and calling me a false friend for daring to tell Brad that on this subject, at least, he has his head so far up his own ass that he can’t see daylight. I had an illiterate crazy guy come here to slam me for my liberalism, and when the height of his wit was that I should put on my big boy pants, I pretty much plowed him under with a demonstration of how ploughboys should not draw on shootists. And then there’s Tom Monaghan, who has yet to discover the comma, but who has showed up at least one convention panel just to hop up and down in his audience seat and yell at me.

These are glimpses. It is possible that I have not been under any further discussion at all, by these people, because I am that much beneath their notice, and that would make me tremendously happy; it is also possible that there are extended exchanges about what a low-life idiotic liberal prick I am, and this I cannot care much about either, because aside from these manifestations I have not seen it…..

I don’t know. There may be entire threads out there, closed to me, about what a piece of shit I am.

This does not particularly please me. Making enemies can be fun, but having enemies is not.

So why do I persist in doing stuff like pointing out that a guy who uses the phrase “Christ-Hating Crusaders for Sodom” when talking about a Jew, and counts among his allies a lunatic who cheers on spree killers, has little basis for high moral dudgeon at the suggestion that the movement of which he’s a part extends to the realm of neo-Nazidom? Why would I put myself in the cross-hairs of those among his fans who are exactly as crazy in potential as he is in rhetoric?

Simply put: because the one discussion thread I cannot escape is between my ears, and the one troll I cannot block is my conscience…..

 

David Gerrold on Facebook – July 3

Because silence equals death.

I don’t know Brad or Larry or most of the others who have spoken up on the puppy side of the kerfuffle. I only know them by what they post online.

They may be good people. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I disagree with them. I disagree with their perception of SF. I disagree with their interpretations. But I would never use that disagreement as a justification for behaving unethically.

I don’t speak for anyone else, but I think I know why so many others of merit in the field — George R.R. Martin, Eric Flint, Connie Willis, John Scalzi, Adam-Troy Castro, Mary Robinette Kowal, and many others — have spoken up. It’s why I have spoken up.

For those who missed it the first time, and who think I’m a terrible person — well, yes I might be, but I’ll say it again. I would have cheered a recommended reading list. I would have discovered books I might otherwise have missed.

But the slate-mongering was wrong. It wasn’t about the quality of the work. It wasn’t about excellence. It was about a political agenda. And the justifications that have been offered — “we’re creating diversity and inclusiveness” — are disingenuous. (That’s the polite word for pants-on-fire lying.) You don’t create diversity and inclusiveness by denying other people a fair opportunity.

And when I have asked for some discussion, for some explanation why the authors of the slates felt their nominated stories represented “best of the year,” how do these stories represent excellence in the genre, no one has stepped up to the microphone to answer that question, except the usual crickets to indicate an embarrassing silence. When we read the comments by those who are sludging their way through their Hugo packets, we do not find the joyous exhilaration of excellence. We see reactions that range from skeptical to hostile, confirming the perception that the slates were motivated by political bias.

So, yes, I have spoken my opposition to the slates. I have spoken my opposition to the name-calling (regardless of which side it’s coming from), and I have spoken my opposition to the political polarization of this community. I would call it a disastrous miscalculation — except that I wonder if perhaps this polarization is exactly what a couple of the people behind this mess intended from the beginning.

If you want to talk about what makes for a great science fiction story, I’m interested. I’m there. If it’s a conversation I can learn from, I want to be a part of it. If it pushes me in the direction of being a better writer, sign me up.

But all this other stuff — slates and name-calling, boycotts and shit-stirring? I’d say “include me out” except as I said above, silence equals death. ….

 

Mike Resnick in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine

“The End of the Worldcon As We Know It” – July 3

….Ah, but this year will be different, I hear you say. This year we’ll be voting No Award in a bunch of categories, and history will thank us.

Well, it just so happens that No Award has triumphed before. In fact, it has won Best Dramatic Presentation three different times. (Bet you didn’t know that Rod Serling’s classic “Twilight Zone” series lost to No Award, did you?)

But the most interesting and humiliating No Award came in 1959. The category was Best New Writer, and one of the losers was future Worldcon Guest of Honor and Nebula Grand Master Brian Aldiss, who actually won a Hugo in 1962, just three years later. That No Award was so embarrassing that they discontinued the category until they could find a sponsor eight years later, which is how the Campbell Award, sponsored by Analog, came into being.

Please note that I’ve limited myself to Worldcons. I haven’t mentioned the X Document or the Lem Affair or any of the other notable wars you can find in various pro and fannish histories (or probably even by just googling them). This editorial is only concerned with The End of Worldcon As We Know It.

And hopefully by now the answer should be apparent. You want to End Worldcon As We Know It? Don’t feud. Don’t boycott. Don’t be unpleasant. Don’t be unreasonable. Don’t raise your voices in mindless anger.

Do all that and none of us will recognize the Worldcon that emerges.

 

Nicholas Whyte on From the Heart of Europe

“2015 Hugo fiction: How bloggers are voting” – July 3

For three of the last four years, I carried out a survey of how bloggers were planning to vote in the Hugos. Last year this proved a fairly effective methodology, calling Best Novel and Best Short Story correctly and pinging the actual winners as front-runners for Best Novella and Best Novelette. In 2013 two winners were clear and two were missed (including Best Novel). In 2011, however, my survey failed to pick a single winner of the four fiction categories. So this should be taken as a straw poll, necessarily incomplete and this year earlier than usual. There is certain to be a selection bias in that people who feel more strongly are more likely to blog about it; so we have no insight into the preferences of less articulate or invested voters.

Having said that, the results are interesting. In particular, No Award appears to be leading in all the short fiction categories (though not necessarily decisively in every case), and there is no clear single front-runner for Best Novel….

 

Patrick May

“2015 Hugo Awards Novel Category” – July 3

[Comments on all five nominees.]

My Hugo ballot for this category is:

  1. Skin Game
  2. The Goblin Emperor
  3. Ancillary Sword
  4. The Three Body Problem
  5. The Dark Between the Stars

I would really like to give “Skin Game” spots 1-3 and “The Goblin Emperor” and “Ancillary Sword” spots 4 and 5 to demonstrate my real preferences. The other two novels aren’t what I consider Hugo quality, but I’m leaving them above No Award because they’re no worse than some recent winners like “Redshirts”. (I’m not hating on Scalzi. I think all of the “Old Man’s War” series is Hugo worthy. But “Redshirts”? I’ve read better fanfic.)

If Kloos hadn’t declined his nomination, I would have ranked “Lines of Departure” just after “Ancillary Sword”.

Discover more from File 770

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

322 thoughts on “Ayes Wide Mutt 7/3”

  2. @Brian Z Just as long as we don’t get any berserkers. I do see boats out on the horizon sometimes.

  4. @Brian Z One of the fun things about living in the UK is getting to hear “fracas” pronounced the French way, which makes it sound genteel somehow. Melee, anyone? They’re fresh.

  5. Jamoche, peace be with you! It took me a very long time, and some indications from both things visible and invisible to convince me to convert. Then I went to my first Mass…and felt like I had come home. It makes my heart hurt that JCW can have such anger in his soul…it can’t be good for him or anyone around him.

    I find no conflict in being both a New Deal Democrat and Catholic, I find that one feeds the other, and I still can’t see why the Puppies consider “Social Justice Warriors” a bad thing to be — after all wasn’t Superman one? “Truth, Justice and the American way…”

  6. IIRC the Moderan stories by David R. Bunch have people turning themselves into cyborgs. I loved them back when I read them. I don’t know if they would hold up now.

  7. Matt Y on July 4, 2015 at 10:53 am said:

    alauda –

    Train wreck like this, courtesy of a Sad Puppy voter?

    That just makes me sad because if the story inside is worthwhile the cover doesn’t do it any favors. My art skills are pretty bad so I don’t think I could do any better either, luckily I know some good artists. Not everyone does though and self publishing is one of those fields where you realize the importance of a good publisher with resources and professionals that help make the book more than something that molds on the back of a shelf.

    I’m not interested in mocking Sad Puppy voters. I do find it sad when bad covers happen to good stories, which happens more often than it should.

  8. You know … there are things about this whole thing I’m finding frustrating and exhausting. But I have to admit, when John C. Wright showed up the other day demanding the right to broadcast to as widely as possible exactly why he thinks it is appropriate to call people he dislikes “Christ-hating crusaders for Sodom” …

    All I could do was smile and think, you go right ahead there, Mr. Wright. You get just what you want from it … and so will everyone who disagrees with you.

  9. Will on July 4, 2015 at 11:02 am said:

    @Brian Z One of the fun things about living in the UK is getting to hear “fracas” pronounced the French way, which makes it sound genteel somehow. Melee, anyone? They’re fresh.

    Where I live in the US it’s pronounced “frah- KAH”. How is it pronounced over there?

  10. He can’t have it both ways

    He’s John C. Wright. Who’re you to tell him he can’t have it both ways!

  11. I think one of the things I liked about Madeleine L’Engle’s “Wrinkle in Time” books, in retrospect, was how they addressed issues of their day.

    Okay, one of the issues was a giant brain in a jar, but it was satisfyingly terrifying when I was a child and an interesting examination of 1950s issues — burgeoning suburbia, conformity, thought control — as an adult.

  12. @Peace: I pronounce it the same way (from the north of England) – people who pronounce the ‘s’ are weird. As are people who pronounce melee as “mealy”. (I know some unfortunate souls who make that mistake.)

  13. Everything I’ve heard about the making of it paints that as truth.

    Which means Gurren Lagann must have been the studio’s speed.

    What does that make Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt?

    Or, as I described it when I first saw the intro, “My god, Gainax is channelling Jhonen Vasquez.”

  15. JCW is not a figure as a Catholic that I have any difficult identifying because I’ve seen him before, so many times. The Catholic Church stresses humility a great deal; so much so that it’s a pop culture trope. That can be an excellent doctrine in a prideful world that’s continually telling you to be #1.

    It can also be a tool to sacralize ones own self loathing. It allows people to avoid confronting their own self hatred and take it as a sign of grace. It’s a poisonous false humility that turns conspicuous self-flagellation into over-weaning pride. Sound like anyone we all know?

  16. All we have ever wanted is people and works to be judged based on quality, both the quality of the person and the quality of the work.

    I do not like the books the Puppies like. I like the books the Puppies don’t like. What is so hard about this concept?

    PS – I made a mistake of clicking through to that On Villainy post and reading the comments underneath it. When you’re attracting people like that, you should really be worried.

  17. @TheYoungPretender:

    It can also be a tool to sacralize ones own self loathing. It allows people to avoid confronting their own self hatred and take it as a sign of grace. It’s a poisonous false humility that turns conspicuous self-flagellation into over-weaning pride. Sound like anyone we all know?

    Not really, no.

  18. I’m sorry, but I’ve never bought a piece of fiction based on what I judge “the quality of the person” to be.

    I select a book or anthology at the library or bookstore because I am hoping to enjoy the story. Now, I do avoid authors whose works I’ve sampled and found not to my taste — and I will try a new story by an author whose name I recognize, or one who has been recommended by other readers I know who have similar taste in fiction, faster than one I don’t.

    Crazy thing, I never had an absolute “do not buy/read” list until this Spring. I’ve finally found a group of authors that I have no desire to enrich in any way.

  19. Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag said:

    Wright tends to use loaded terms and acts like he doesn’t know they are loaded. I don’t believe he’s that ignorant.

    I hope he handles guns better than words then.

  20. @Peace

    Most of my close friends are atheists. One of them is an evangelical atheist. While he is my friend, he is definitely an a-hole. He used to rope our friends into discussions about how delusional and/or stupid believers are. Those of us who are believers ignored these conversations as best we could. The funniest part was that he thought he wasn’t being offensive. I think one of the other atheists clued him in.

    This is the problem when you only hang out with your own kind. It’s easy to cross a line when everyone you talk with agrees with you.

  21. All this discussion of brains in jars/boxes, and no one has mentioned Odin’s boxed buddy Mimir?

  22. It’s a poisonous false humility that turns conspicuous self-flagellation into over-weaning pride. Sound like anyone we all know?

    The last temptation is the greatest treason
    To do the right deed for the wrong reason

  25. @nickpheas: I read all of Zombie Nation through the end of 2014. It doesn’t get significantly better.

  26. Brain in a Jar, cont. (if transferring minds to computers is okay).
    – Heechee Rendezvous, Frederik Pohl (no spoilers, there’s multiple characters)
    – The Silicon Man, Charles Platt, the premise is a computer environment created to save minds

  27. I’ve bought fiction based on the quality of the person lots of times!

    Mind you, I usually call it “Oh, my friend has a new book out, let me buy that to support them.”

    (If they weren’t a quality individual, I like to think we wouldn’t be friends, although I’ll allow that some of them have questionable taste if they’re agreeing to hang out with me!)

    I believe I’ve also done “Oh, they were super nice and had some very interesting stuff to say on that panel/encounter/discussion/interview–let me pick up a book and see what it’s like.”*

    We live in a world where authors who engage with the public are, for good or ill, gonna affect their sales thereby. Personality–or the lack–sells or doesn’t sell books. Even if there’s thousands of sales to people who never know the author as more than a name on a cover, there’s still dozens or hundreds who do.

    This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t think, it’s just a thing.

    *And of course, the dreaded corollary “I like you enormously as a human being so I am now terrified to read your work because if it’s awful, it will be enormously awkward.”

  28. Re: Brain in a jar
    Hell boy comics – lots of evil scientists in a jar; possibly mounted on gorillas, Julian May: Jack the Bodiless, Anne McCafferty: The Ship Who Sang, Richard Morgan’s SciFi Noir Altered Carbon – more of transference and clones I think

  29. Also re: brains in jars: The Peripheral has some great brain-in-jar elements and has the added quality of being Gibson’s best since Neuromancer IMHO. It seems very wrong that it’s not on the ballot this year, especially since it seems able to tick anybody’s boxes.

  30. RedWombat –

    *And of course, the dreaded corollary “I like you enormously as a human being so I am now terrified to read your work because if it’s awful, it will be enormously awkward.”

    Heh, yep. That’s even tougher.

  33. I will admit, I will quite often decide that a bad cover on a self-published work is indicative of bad prose inside. Far more so than a bad cover on a traditionally published work.
    My train of logic is this: the self-publisher made the decision to go with that cover. (The trad published author often has little-to-no say). So that decision of, “Yes! This image is an excellent representation of my work” says something specific about their skill in appraising the aesthetic value of something. They think the terrible cover is worth publishing. They also think the text inside is worth publishing, but we’ve seen hard evidence of their ability to judge that.

  34. I think that much of Wright’s problem is that he’s a failure. Granted, he’s got books published but as someone who has read voraciously in multiple genres since the time I could read, I had never heard of him until this nonsense happens.

    Sure the field is vastly bigger than it was but we still know who’s selling mega numbers of books, who’s getting awards, who’s being recommended as really great by people we trust.

    And then someone you have never heard of gets vast numbers of Hugo nominations for stories published by a publisher you’ve never heard of either, which is ludicrous. And the prose is, as Eric Flint put it, Saudi School, which has nothing to do with Red Sea Pedestrians, for those who may be wondering.

    Now it may be that Saudi School prose is exactly what some readers want but I very much doubt that those readers actually read very much, because by the time you’ve worked out what the hell a sentence is supposed to mean the heat death of the Universe has come appreciably closer, and who has time for that?

    Not many, is the answer. I’m rereading Richard Morgan’s ‘Thirteen’ at the moment; OK, it may not be cheery reading but it has substance. Wright doesn’t do substance; the floridly overblown style is there to try and disguise the fact that when you strip it all away there’s nothing left. That is why he’s a failure; the lights may be on but nobody’s home…

  35. The problem I find with Tom Knighton’s post, on “villainy” and on claiming that the white Christian right-wing terrorist (who, remember, most media and white people in this country refuse to call a terrorist, like all the other right-wing Christian terrorists, because they’re white men who get to be individuals and not “judged” as a member of a group–just a lone madman/villain/monster/mentally ill INDUHVIDUAL) is somehow unique/different from “the vast majority of us” who “are unable to comprehend” is that it is based on this stupendously false set of assumptions that have followed the successes of the Civil Rights movement.

    TK says: “skin tone is as arbitrary a dividing line as hair color or eye color, so why kill people for just that factor?” as if there isn’t a long and well documented history of people arbitrarily designated as “white” using violence (legal, economic, educational, personal) to maintain their status as the superior “civilized” race. And that history is not all that historic: burning/destroying Black churches is still going on, and has been a major part of white terrorism since African Americans were able to create Black churches after Emancipation.

    And trying to set “racists” off as monsters excuses all the nice white people who NEVER kill anybody (well, why do they need to–they have the police and the extremists and terrorist who do it for them), but would in fact (at times unconsciously) work to keep segregation alive.

    In other words, it’s complete and total bullshit as usual.

  37. Re: JCW: We just saw a Seinfeld re-run where George had gotten something in his eye and ended up going around all day winking without realizing it so that he ended up baffled at the end of the day as to why everyone thought he’d been saying the opposite of what he had. That’s how I feel when I read his posts: there always seems to be a wink in there somewhere, but it’s very hard to figure out whether it’s intentional.

  38. rrede:

    all the nice white people who NEVER kill anybody (well, why do they need to–they have the police and the extremists and terrorist who do it for them)

    I’m sure Tom Knighton thanks you for overselling your case.

  39. You know what I quite like in terms of book covers? The 50th anniversary Gollancz covers in the UK. They were just purple type over yellow. I gather it was a callback to the original eye-catching pulp covers they used to put out. I also like Penguin’s oldschool covers that are just bands of colour.

  40. The Peripheral was the one novel I was hoping to be on the Hugo ballot and my pick fro best SF novel last year. It really annoyed me while I was reading the Dark Between The Stars that it was seen fit as a Hugo finalist while The Peripheral wasn’t.

  42. I just find it hard to believe that anyone could ignore the dullness, the lame plotting and the laughably bad writing of Skin Game to put it as a first choice for the Hugo, even if you were a fan of the previous novels in the series.

  43. Mike: I’m sure Tom Knighton thanks you for overselling your case.

    Eh, I tend to react hyperbolically to hyperbole. And if there are nice white people who understand the systemic racism and how its upheld, then they aren’t in the group I’m talking about!

  44. One of the fun things about living in the UK is getting to hear “fracas” pronounced the French way

    Also a certain xenophobic anti-EU party leader’s name…

  45. I’m sorry, but I’ve never bought a piece of fiction based on what I judge “the quality of the person” to be.

    I have tried out quite a few writers because they were behaving well and writing smart things on the interwebs, like Aliette de Bodard, S. L, Huang, RedWombat, various people James Nicoll linked to. If I notice you on Twitter, you’re a fantasy or sf author and you behave even moderately sensibly, there’s a good chance I will seek out your books.

  46. I also like Penguin’s oldschool covers that are just bands of colour.

    Me too! I love the way a colour sorted shelf of orange penguins looks.

    And Gollancz yellow was how I learned to find the English language sf at my local library, to the point where I still reach for those first in a secondhand bookstore.

    Not to mention the old school DAWs, which had a similar colour scheme.

  47. Happy Independence Day to all USAians here, from my secret location on the original Jersey shore.

  48. Gollancz Yellow was how I learned to find SF, back when I acquired an adult library ticket at the age of 12 or so…

  49. I have to admit, when folks buy McJulie’s book because they like her, it makes me happy. But I always hope they also like the book.

    She and I have started buying books by friends, because, in a “too-much-to-read” queue, it makes good content.

  50. @DoctorScience–referring to JCW
    “However, I also think that he’s just not very good at reading, because he’s so emotional. His OUTRAGE!!! over one phrase or another blinds him to what people are actually talking about. But that may all be coming from talk radio/Fox News OUTRAGE!!!!11! culture, he may think this is how you’re *supposed* to talk to people with whom you disagree.”

    Or he could just be an asshole.

Comments are closed.