Canterbury Tails 5/27

Aka Mansfield Puppy Park

The wisdom of crowds is supplied by Ruth Davies, Adam-Troy Castro, Nancy Lebovitz, Gabriel McKee, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Lyda Morehouse, L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright, Alexandra Erin, Vox Day, JDZ, Lis Carey, Joe Sherry, Lisa J. Goldstein, Rebekah Golden, Joseph Brassey, John Scalzi, Katya Czaja, plus less identifiable others. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day rcade and Kary English.)

Ruth Davies on The Hippo Collective

“Taking a Literary Step Backwards: the Hugo Awards 2015” – May 24

This scandal is clearly worrying; such regressive views placed upon particular literary genres, such as science fiction and fantasy, must have implications for other genres, and the larger literary field. Literature is key in its power to evolve and combat the oppression of minority groups, by allowing a voice and platform (although being well heard often unfortunately relies on getting ‘discovered’ and subsequently published). Right-wing action is also more concerning when involved with such canonising activity as literary awards. Awards often help shape the (Western) literary canon, which contains a lot of the West’s most famous and widely read literature. Therefore right-wing attitudes, such as those of the ‘Sad Puppies’ and ‘Rabid Puppies’, merely blocks diversification of the canon – discouraging the cultural change that the West still desperately needs.

However, the question still remains: how do we overcome such regressive strategies in literature? The democratic fan vote should appear the fairest and least problematic strategy, yet as seen, it has its fundamental drawbacks.

 

Font Folly

“Tom Puppy and the Visitor from Planet Clueless” – May 27

A Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy supporter posted an op-ed on the men’s rights site Return of the Kings (he links to and heavily paraphrases one of the Sad Puppy podcasts), “How Female-Dominated Publishing Houses Are Censoring Male Authors” that is a great example of several of the issues that I believe underpin the Sad Puppy position. Never mind that the statistics show that men make up more than 65% of the annual publishing lists of most of the publishing houses, and male-authored books comprise more the 80% of books reviewed in the major publications, this guy is here to tell us that men are being censored!

 

Adam Troy-Castro on Facebook – May 27

(Sigh) No, I am not saying, nor am I ever going to say, that the organizers of the Sad Puppy nonsense need to be “boycotted” for what they have done and said, and I am most certainly not saying that the writers they advocated for need to be boycotted for the actions of those who supported them.

This is after all me, the guy who has made such a regular habit of arguing for separating the art from the artist, most of the time in more extreme circumstances. If I can distinguish between Bill Cosby and “Bill Cosby,” if I can praise the occasional film by Roman Polanski, if I can struggle in vain to discuss the filmic achievements of Woody Allen without being slammed by the same stuff that artistic discussions of Woody Allen are always slammed with, if I can further regularly wax enthusiastic about work by writers like Stephen Hunter and Dan Simmons who exist so far from me on the political spectrum that we are almost on separate rainbows, then why the hell would I tell anybody to boycott the work of {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}, to name one, just because I think it’s fun to summarize his persona as {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}? Ditto with {Hurt-Feelings Harry}, {Steely-Eyed Rage-Monster}, Beale The Galactic Zero, and the rest of that crew. I mock them with abandon, but want *none* of them subjected to organized boycott of any kind.

I have said nothing advocating otherwise, and anybody who represents me as having said anything of the kind is, in precise measurement, a goddamned liar.

 

Nancy Lebovitz in a comment on Making Light – May 27

At Balticon, someone asked Jo Walton about the Hugos at her GoH speech, and she said that ideally, the Hugos are a gesture of love and respect, and campaigning for the Hugos is like persistently asking your partner whether they love you. It just isn’t the same.

 

Doctor Science on Obsidian Wings

“Problems with the Hugo Nominations for Pro and Fan Artist” – May 28

[Doctor Science vetted the sample art in the Hugo Voters Packet and says she discovered most of the material from Nick Greenwood and Steve Stiles came from another eligibility year, and that among all artists she traced 14 items to periods before 2014.]

I’ll stop here for the moment, and go on later to talk about things like: how I’m going to vote, what I think the problems with the categories are, and start some ideas about how to fix them.

For a start, though, I urge my fellow voters to click around the 2014 Pro and 2014 Fan collections at Hugo Eligible Art, to get a sense of what your baseline should be for comparison.

 

Gabriel McKee on SF Gospel

“The Way the Future Never Was” – May 27

For a lot of us, SF’s ability to deal with current problems in metaphorical terms is the whole point. It’s why we got interested in the genre, and why we’ve stuck with it—because there will always be new quesitons, and new angles on them. Does Brad Torgersen really want SF to be a genre about space ships and ray guns with no resonance with current society? Does he really want SF authors to abandon the time-honored tradition of exploring social issues with SFnal metaphor? That sounds to me like an SF that’s afraid of the future.

 

Gabriel McKee on SF Gospel

“The Way the Future Never Was: A Visual Appendix” – May 27

To get a better idea of Brad Torgersen’s problem with today’s science fiction, let’s take a look at some good, old-fashioned, reliably-packaged SF….

The Space Merchants cover COMP

Hey, this one looks fun. It’s got space ships and all kinds of stuff. Wait, what? It’s about the evils of capitalism? Bait and switch!

 

 

Lyda Morehouse on Bitter Empire

“Real Talk About John Scalzi, Vox Day, And That Big Big Book Deal” – May 27

Vox Day (Theodore Beale), if you recall, is the mastermind behind the Rabid Puppies (the super-far right organizers of this year’s Hugo debacle.) Beale apparently also sees himself as Scalzi’s rival. Beale has all sorts of “hilarious” nicknames for Scalzi….

So, as you can imagine, Beale’s head is near ready to explode.

He starts off with a simple report of the deal, but then it takes a hard right into God knows what. Beale says that Scalzi’s deal can really only be expected because Tor, his publisher, really doesn’t have any big name authors in its stables beyond Scazli, except maybe one other, and, more importantly, “It’s not as if the award-winning Jo Walton or the award-winning Catharine (sic) Asaro or any of their other award-winning authors sell enough books to support all the SJW non-SF they keep trying to push on an unwilling public.”

What.

Whoa, ladies, that was almost a compliment there for being all award-win-y, but nope. According to Beale, the only reason Walton and Asaro write is push the SJW (Social Justice Warrior) “non-SF” on all of us non-willing readers.

 

JDZ on Never Yet Melted

“John Scalzi Gets $3.4 Million Publishing Deal” – May 27

Scalzi has alienated a significant portion of his readership with sanctimonious hoplophobic blog posts (example) and by lining up with the Social Justice Warriors in the fighting over the Hugo Awards. My guess is that his backlisting powers will be declining.

 

L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright conducts interview on Superversive SF

“Interview with Hugo Fan Writer Nominee: Dave Freer!” – May 27

7) How did you come up with the idea for your current nominated story?

Eating cheese late at night. It was that or my concern for the state of a genre I love. I happen think all nice boys and girls should love sf and fantasy (and find sf and fantasy to love). I think all nasty boys and girls should too. I am delighted if the rare, nasty, odd, and possibly puke purple creatures crawling out of the East River do too. I just find it worrying when the latter group seems to have become so dominant that the rest lose interest and go and pursue other forms of entertainment and escapism.

 

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“Of Dinosaurs, Legos, and Impossible Hypotheticals” – May 27

There’s another work nominated this year that has stirred similar questions in a more limited way, perhaps more limited because the Dramatic Presentation categories are seen as less serious and crucial in a literary award than the literary categories, and perhaps because as a Sad Puppy pick it is taken less seriously to begin with.

The work in question is The Lego Movie, which contains a couple of scenes near the end that make explicit the implicit framing device for a movie about Lego characters in a world made out of Lego blocks: it’s all a child, playing with toys. It is this moment, in my opinion, that elevates The Lego Movie from merely being charming and fun to actually pretty sublimely brilliant. It explained so many of the odd quirks of characterization and storytelling earlier in the film.

I mean, it changed the movie’s version of Batman from “weirdly out of character, but okay, it’s funny” to “…that’s freaking brilliant” because it wasn’t Batman as adult comic book fans understand him but Batman seen through the eyes of a child, with way more focus on the cool factor of everything and of course he has the coolest girlfriend and of course even the grimdark angst seems kind of fun…

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“Hugo Awards 2015: Best Novella” – May27

This is how I am voting in the Best Novella category. Of course, I merely offer this information regarding my individual ballot for no particular reason at all, and the fact that I have done so should not be confused in any way, shape, or form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a direct order by the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his 367 Vile Faceless Minions or anyone else.

 

  1. “One Bright Star to Guide Them”
  2. “Big Boys Don’t Cry”
  3. “The Plural of Helen of Troy”
  4. “Pale Realms of Shade”
  5. “Flow”

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“Rat Queens, by Kurtis J. Wiebe (writer), Roc Upchurch (illustrator)” – May 27

ratqueens

Booze-guzzling, death-dealing, battle maidens-for-hire.

This is so not my thing. The art is excellent. The writing is quite good. There’s a plot–but here’s where I run into trouble.

 

Joe Sherry on Adventures In Reading

“Thoughts on the Hugo Award Nominees: Related Work” – May 27

Letters from Gardner: Lou Antonelli’s collection is an interesting one. It’s part memoir, part short story collection, part writing advice, part I have no idea. It shows Antonelli’s development as a writer, some of the revision progress, and how influential some of those early rejections from Gardner Dozois were. It’s not necessarily my cuppa, but it’s not bad.

No Award: No Award continues to rear its ugly head. I read half of Wright’s Transhuman and Subhuman collection (approximately), and I bounced off of it. His essay on fiction writing directed at a nonfiction writing friend was fairly solid, but I had issues with the rest of what I read – mostly in that I disagree with much of what Wright has to say and his essay writing style does little to encourage me to continue reading even despite my disagreement. I can’t get into specifics here because each time I bounced off an essay, I moved onto the next. That said, he’s not wrong that Ulysses is a terrible book.

On the other hand, Wisdom from my Internet is truly a terrible book that has no place anywhere near this ballot. I can understand, more or less, why people may have enjoyed / appreciated Wright’s collection. I’m not his audience, but many people likely are. Michael Williamson’s collection of non-sequiturs and jokes is sort of organized by topic, but most are not at all entertaining and what, exactly it has to do with the field of science fiction and / or fantasy is completely beyond me. But it isn’t so much the lack of relation to SFF that gets me, it’s how bad the jokes are and how disinteresting the whole thing is. I may not think that Wright’s collection is worthy of an Award, but I don’t think Williamson’s should have been considered for nomination. I may never understand how or why it was….

 

Adult Onset Atheist

“There can be only one SNARL” – May 27

Where did such a foolish name as “Sad Puppies” come from? Larry apparently likes cutesy names; he was co-founder of a gunshop he named “Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns”. The gunshop went under, but the enduring flikr record of it shows racks of plastic-furnitured AK-47s, and glass cases with handguns lovingly laid out for display. “Sad Puppies” is a name derived from the kind of immature humor that wants to be irony when it grows up.

The idea for “Sad Puppies” pre-dates the Hugo kerfluffle. On Larry’s blog one of the first posts he tagged with “Sad Puppies” is a reactionary commentary-style rebuttal to a September 2009 POTUS speech to a joint session of congress, and the next is a similar reactionary commentary to the 2010 SOTU. So “Sad Puppies” in Larry’s mind is political in the strictest sense of the word. Yet somehow everyone else is really political people –whether they say so or not- and poor Larry is just trying to give his embattled writers the only chances available because he perceives them as having been shut out.  And the only way to get “his” writers a fair shake is to shut out any competing works that might try to leverage some unfair literati elitist advantage by not being crappy.

The reason the Sad puppies can pee all over the Hugo process is because of complacency in fandom. When I talk about complacency I am mostly talking about myself. I ask myself “How can you make good nominations when you haven’t read more than a dozen SF novellas this year?” The nice voters packet provides a guided reading list; the trufans have done the heavy lifting. So far this year there are over 9,000 voting members of worldcon, and membership is open for a few more days. For $40 you can get a vote and a nice electronic voting packet; unfortunately many of the stories in it are crap. Some of the Hugo nominations this year received less than 30 votes. There needs to be some way of bridging the complacency gap so the large numbers of fans who care enough to vote for a Hugo are presented with a couple choices worth voting for.  Perhaps that means I need to get off my rear and wade through the vast number of published SF/F stories to make recommendations and vote during the nomination process instead of waiting until after the nominations list is published.

 

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“Let Me Explain… No, There Is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.” – May 27

One of my questions when I started was why the Puppies chose these specific stories.  And after all that reading, I have to say that I still don’t know, and the statements of the Puppies themselves don’t really help.  Larry Correia wanted to nominate stories that would “make literati heads explode,” stories with right-wing themes that would anger SJWs (Super-Judgmental Werewolves?) when they appeared on the ballot.  But we’re very used to narratives of straight white men doing straight white manly things, and even seeing those stories nominated for Hugos.  It’s all just business as usual.  I don’t know about other people’s crania, but my head stayed firmly on my shoulders while I was reading — though it did slip toward the desk a few times, my eyes closing, thinking, Ho hum, another one …

Correia also rejected “boring message fiction” — but then how to explain John C. Wright’s Catholic apologia, or Tom Kratman’s push for more and more weaponry?  And his final explanation was that people were mean to him at a convention.  Okay, but why these stories?  Was putting us through all of this his idea of revenge?

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Short Story: Reviewing J C Wright” – May 26

This is a parable told in the style of Kipling or of old Buddhist tales. It takes a mythology well known to the author and extends it into a second mirroring mythology like Zeno’s Paradox applied to christianity. It was clever and written well, if in a pre-Hemingway style, but overall not a story for me.

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Fan Artist: Reviewing N Aalto” – May 27

Ninni had two pieces included in the Hugo Voters packet. Both were very well drawn and nicely colored. Based on her online portfolio I like her style and find her work pleasing to the eye. I suspect there are some in jokes I don’t get but that’s the nature of being the best fan at something. In short, nicely done.

 

Katya Czaja

“Hugo Award: Professional Artist” – May 27

Ranking Julie Dillon stood out as the clear winner in this category.

1) Julie Dillon
2) Nick Greenwood
3) Allan Pollack
4) No Award
5) Carter Reid
6) Kirk DouPonce

 

 

 

520 thoughts on “Canterbury Tails 5/27

  1. @Kyra Wow. Just…Wow. That poem’s a favorite in the original and you really did it justice.

    Also, have now requested both Gone-Away World and Tigerman from my library network, since I’ve read everything else on that short list and if Harkaway’s work is anything close I’ve really got something to look forward to here.

  2. “The puppy cannot hear the puppeteer;”

    Chillingly insightful.

  3. I am as lapsed a Catholic as it is possible to be without being actively excommunicated, but I’d set aside my mixed feelings for the faith and rattle off a few Our Fathers if that was the only way to keep Wright from being Catholicism’s primary SF poster-boy.

    Fortunately there’s a lot of other Catholics in the field. I recommend MCA Hogarth if we’re talking military SF. Heck, the Nielsen Haydens are also Catholic as I recall, so I am spared from having to examine my conflicted feelings about the Blesed Virgin in SF’s defense.

  4. Applause for @Kyra at 6:04 pm!!!

    I hope the best of these filk-works can be collected together. Digging them out of what will eventually be tens of thousands of responses will be tough.

    Also: “File 770: The Sercon Years.” 🙂

  5. He edited out several anachronisms of James H. Schmitz’s stories—not necessarily smoking as there is still plenty in the tales—and not because of social conscience, but because he feels they make the otherwise futuristic books feel extremely outdated and that this hurts sales.

    In fairness to Hoyt as it were she also said that in some ways smoking can be good for you and if there’s a way to make it less dangerous more people will probably do it.

    By the way one of the zillion things that blew me away about MY Hugo contender The Peripheral was the way Gibson slipped smoking in.

  6. @Brian Z Peripheral is good? I haven’t been hugely enamored of his stuff in recent years but I Want to Believe.

  7. @snowcrash “@Peace: “Wait … Is pomo still a thing?”

    It’s always a thing.

    Wait. Clearly that 4 letter word is easily mistaken for a 5 letter one.Damn fonts.”

    Clearly I need to go get a new pair of glasses.

  8. Will,

    Peripheral is good? I haven’t been hugely enamored of his stuff in recent years but I Want to Believe.

    The best way to reply to that might be to cite paragraph one:

    They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.

  9. Here’s the smoking reference I was referring to earlier:

    “Where is he?” she asked.
    “Homes,” he said, “protective custody.”
    “Arrested?”
    “No. Locked up.”
    “What did he do?”
    “Acted out. Homes were all grinning and shit, after. They’d liked it. Gave him a Chinese tailor-made cigarette.”
    “He doesn’t smoke.”
    “He can swap it for something.”
    “Took his phone?”
    “Homes take everybody’s phone.”

  10. I thought my eye caught the word “haptics.” Now there’s a word that should be used in casual conversation more often.

  11. @Kyra – At the risk of sounding repetitive, that was masterful! (Mistressful?) Loved it!

    Now I need to go find something to write of fell-handed Torgerson, who knows the minds of his enemies, sly Wright of the impenetrable prose, and the cunning VD.

  12. RedWombat – I don’t think the Nielsen Haydens are Catholic, no. I do know that Theresa is an ex-Mormon.

    Incidentally, could someone who’s actually read Wisdom from My Internet tell me how it differs from Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded?

  13. Danny: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is a collection of Scalzi’s own writing. Much or most of Wisdom From My Internet is random junk that circulated around.

  14. Incidentally, could someone who’s actually read Wisdom from My Internet tell me how it differs from Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded?

    One of them is by a talented writer. The other is by Michael Z. Williamson.

  15. That sort of fairness you offer Hoyt, Brian, is unfair to 1. Eric Flint and 2. reality.

    The topic wasn’t *smoking* for God’s sake, it is whether Hoyt is worth engaging with. Someone who, at best, has managed to isolate herself from the publicly broadcast truth for four and a half years, and who presents (again, at best) a mangled bit of misinformation as a blind item (thus making it more difficult to third parties to check) is not worth engaging with.

    Hoyt also has a lengthy history of just such things: obviously phony quotes, obviously phony claims, and almost never any names. As my grandmother would say, Hoyt “just makes up stories.”

  16. Re: Hoyt-
    I wouldn’t have said that the essay showed any froth or head-exploding, but it was a bit odd.

    Where in the world did the Maoists come from? It felt as if she was completing a thought begun somewhere else.

    And more importantly, I’ve never heard of any movement to write violence more realistically, unless we are taking about the new(ish) grimdark fantasy. I’d want a cite on that bit about taking smoking out of fiction as well, that sounds… rhetorical.

  17. Nick Mamatas: “Hoyt also has a lengthy history of just such things: obviously phony quotes, obviously phony claims, and almost never any names. As my grandmother would say, Hoyt “ is Making Shit Up (MSU™).

    There, Nick. FTFY.

  18. I put YOUR HATE MAIL WILL BE GRADED under No Award when it was up for a Hugo. I suppose the only difference is that I listed it under No Award and WISDOM I just left off the ballot entirely.

  19. OK, Nick. My “fairness as it were” offered no rousing defense of Hoyt’s tactics beyond feeling that in addition to her not always necessarily foaming at the mouth there are a few spots where I’d leave the cap on my red pen should I ever have the good fortune to be her ninth grade English teacher.

    I was saying that I envision a future with lots of smokers in it and plugging my Not-Hugo Winner.

  20. @Will McLean –

    “4. If Wright is the best Catholicism now has to offer then that is a sad tale of decline.”

    He isn’t, as long as Gene Wolfe and Tim Powers are still alive.

    He isn’t as long as Tolkien is still in print.

  21. Both Nielsen Haydens are Catholic–in fact, the only non-Catholic blogger at Making Light is Avram Grumer.

  22. Maximillian: Hoyt’s background is Portuguese, and I believe they left the country due to the Carnation Revolution. There may be some sort of previous anecdote which she is referring back to. OTOH, the Carnation revolution is noted for its relative bloodlessness (although the former Portuguese colonies had varying levels of conflict and death as an indirect result of the revolution). There were Maoists amongst the various rebel factions, but a quick Google doesn’t find me any more information that matches Hoyt’s vague comment.

  23. @MickeyFinn – Wow, I hadn’t the faintest idea that Portugal had ever had a dictatorship, thank you. I am one of today’s Lucky 10,000!

    So Hoyt is still angry over a revolution in which (if we believe Wikipedia) only four people died, and they were all killed by the government security forces? And the movement was characterized by non-violence and flowers??? Well. Isn’t that… Interesting.

    I got the impression that the Maoist comment was something to do with US politics, but I can’t say for sure why.

  24. MickyFinn: Hoyt’s background is Portuguese, and I believe they left the country due to the Carnation Revolution. There may be some sort of previous anecdote which she is referring back to. OTOH, the Carnation revolution is noted for its relative bloodlessness (although the former Portuguese colonies had varying levels of conflict and death as an indirect result of the revolution). There were Maoists amongst the various rebel factions, but a quick Google doesn’t find me any more information that matches Hoyt’s vague comment.

    The Carnation Revolution, which fairly peacefully turned Portugal into a democracy, occurred in 1974. It’s my understanding that Hoyt moved to the U.S. in the mid-80s after falling in love with an American man, whom she married. Her dire tales of fleeing Portugal due to fear and persecution appear to be a recent “development”.

  25. JJ: I suspect that “fear and persecution” mostly translates as “her family did well under the Estado Novo, and weren’t privileged under the post revolution government”

  26. @JJ – re: Tools for building ebooks:

    I’m mostly using GrabMyBooks, a browser plug-in. The one for Firefox is terrific (the one for Chrome might be fine but it’s more of a pain to install, for some reason).

    What it does is, it lets you choose a webpage, or a link, or make a text selection, and then it “adds” that page as a chapter to your pending book. Even better, you can open a bunch of tabs, click a button to “grab them all,” and bam, you’ve got the base for the whole thing. Then you go through to the web interface, which lets you tweak, edit, make sure you got everything properly.Then it produces a file for you to download.

    I also highly recommend Calibre, if you aren’t using that yet – it manages your ebook files (so you’ve got them all in one place, easily searchable, easy to transfer back and forth from your device…), and it makes it very easy to do format conversions.

    Two provisos:
    1. I was talking about creating “preview anthologies”; what I’ve described here actually makes it even easier to create books with the entire content of every story (for free web fiction).
    To do just previews, you’d have to work a little harder – manually select the text you want, or else go in during the tweaking stage and delete most of each page.

    2. All readers, please be careful about distributing and sharing files you create in this way. It’s copyrighted material. Personal use is fine (AFAIK? It can’t not be fine, right?), but posting an ebook file to your blog with “2015 Free Fiction from Tor.com” or “My 2016 Hugo recommendations” or some such is (I am fairly certain, I bet other people here will know better than I) not OK.
    But if you put in the time to build a preview-only anthology, linking to the original site – well, I’ m not sure that a two-page excerpt qualifies as fair use, but I suspect few magazines will object to your attempt to draw them more traffic. If you’re gonna make a habit out of something like this (like I wish I had the time to do on the discovery-reading blog I wish I had the time to write), best to get permission from the magazines.

  27. MickyFinn –

    Hoyt is also extreme enough libertarian that she said, on her blog, that she was going to quit SFWA because they were changing incorporation from MA to CA so, supposedly, SFWA could get grants.

  28. So Hoyt is still angry over a revolution in which (if we believe Wikipedia) only four people died, and they were all killed by the government security forces? And the movement was characterized by non-violence and flowers??? Well. Isn’t that… Interesting.

    I think she said nobody died because the stupid Maoists sprayed bullets at the ceiling. So she does seem to be filtering her observations of the science fiction genre through her experiences with the Carnation Revolution.

  29. @BrianZ – “So she does seem to be filtering her observations of the science fiction genre through her experiences with the Carnation Revolution.”

    Maybe. It’s a bit strange, though. ‘Those darn Maoists who are against killing people, dictatorships, and censorship!’ Really?

    For that matter, even the Chinese aren’t Maoist these days. Find a new hobby-horse!

  30. Brian: and she is unable to tell the difference between “didn’t shoot anyone because they didn’t know how to handle their weapons” and “Didn’t shoot anyone because they weren’t planning on shooting anyone”? But this is all blind speculation without more detail of wtf she was talking about.

  31. David Goldfarb: Not that I mind the discussion at all, but isn’t such a question more likely to get answered at Making Light?

  32. Maximillian: And the political party in portugal which is maoist has a grand total of … 0 seats in the government.

  33. @MF “Maximillian: And the political party in portugal which is maoist has a grand total of … 0 seats in the government.”

    Oh no! They are about to take over!!!!!

  34. @Our Gracious Host- “Not that I mind the discussion at all, but isn’t such a question more likely to get answered at Making Light?”

    But we like you, and you appear to be neutral(ish) for certain values of neutral.

  35. Ken Johnson

    I hope the best of these filk-works can be collected together. Digging them out of what will eventually be tens of thousands of responses will be tough.

    I’m putting together an old school commemorative summer ’15 zine but need someone to lend me their stash of stencil paper.

  36. And I’ll improve my proofreading skills between now and then, Mr. Josenhans!

  37. MickyFinn: Brian: and she is unable to tell the difference between “didn’t shoot anyone because they didn’t know how to handle their weapons” and “Didn’t shoot anyone because they weren’t planning on shooting anyone”?

    Some could object to people so much as carrying automatic weapons without knowing how to use them properly, but like you I am guessing. (I gather the situation was quite complicated.)

  38. Peace Is My Middle Name: “someone pointed out how from the Puppies’ perspective, one non-Puppy making a threat condemns *all* whom they classify as “SJWs”, but any Puppy threatening people, “well, that’s just his way.””

    That was me.

  39. ‘sorry that should be, “Maoists can’t shoot”’

    Stop! Or My Mao Will Shoot!

  40. ULTRAGOTHA : Does CPaca have a brother named Al?

    Well, that’s not his name, but I call him that.

    And he calls me “Betty”.

  41. @David Goldfarb:

    Nope, I’m Catholic.

    I presume the confusion stems from a comment about a priest writing back to me in Greek when I wrote to him in Latin. That was just because we’d had That Classicist Conversation, and unlike me, he likes Koine.

  42. ULTRAGOTHA :

    Does CPaca have a brother named Al?

    CPaca:

    Well, that’s not his name, but I call him that.

    And he calls me “Betty”.

    <chortling>

  43. Brian Z: when you put together your Classic Filk From The File 770 2015 Hugo Comment Section Collection (I’d suggest coming up with a better name for it than that, btw, but its the best I’ve got atm)

    “No Matter Where Hugo, There You Are”?

  44. Ann Somerville on May 29, 2015 at 12:22 am said:

    Peace Is My Middle Name: “someone pointed out how from the Puppies’ perspective, one non-Puppy making a threat condemns *all* whom they classify as “SJWs”, but any Puppy threatening people, “well, that’s just his way.””

    That was me.

    Thank you, Ann Somerville. I recalled that it had been said very recently, but I could not track it down in thecomments.

  45. @Standback.

    Actually, it most likely is “illegal” for you to make the anthologies you are making for yourself.

    “Copyright grants the holder the EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THE WORK.

    (From copyright.gov: Exclusive rights of the copyright owner (section 106 , title 17, U.S. Code):

    1. To reproduce the work

    2. To prepare derivative works

    3. To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending

    4. In the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the work publicly

    5. In the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly

    6. In the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission”

    It really depends on how the material you are copying has been placed on the web:
    the website may have rights of publication that you would be violating if you don’t have permission to copy

    The author certainly has rights, but may have allowed publication under one or another limited form of creative commons that would allow you to freely copy.

    “Copying” text, whether for your own use or for wider distribution, is exactly the same as copying a music file or movie file or some other electronic file that you have not been given permission to copy.

    It does not matter for whom the usage is intended.

    Of course, most people don’t want to (and largely can’t) control what individuals do for their own convenience. If I print out the story to read on the road…no one will really care (nor even be aware it took place).

    A story that someone obtained the right to publish online was intended to be read not just online, but while remaining on the website that published it. By copying it and reading it in a different medium (Kindle for example), you are at the very least denying that website the time you would have otherwise spent there, which is a metric used to evaluate the website, often when setting advertising rates. Just an example. (If everyone who normally read stories on that site grabbed the fiction and read offline, the website would retain the unique visits, but the length of stay would drop from multiple minutes to seconds.)

    All of this is one reason why current copyright law is seen as being largely inappropriate these days. (How and why is making a copy for your buffer different from making a copy in a file?)

    Here’s a good place to find more detail: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copyright.html

    Bottom line: “a copy is a copy” and the originator/rights holder gets to decide how and when.

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