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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
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And another five times for the Henry Mancini music.
@ rcade: After some thought, I’m with you here. Skokie is not a useful comparison because that was a protest on public property, which does need to be protected — although if someone wants to set up a counter-protest it is equally protected, as we’ve been seeing WRT the Westboro Baptist “Church”. Worldcon is a private event (reinforced by the fact that you have to buy a membership to get in), and the con-runners have the same right to eject someone from their physical space that you or I do to ban someone from commenting on our blog.
I am in two minds about Connie Willis. I admire some of her short fiction tremendously; but I have a beef — more than a beef — with the Time Travel books To Say Nothing of the Dog and Blackout/All Clear. To Say Nothing of the Dog made me about as angry as anything I’ve ever read. I got to the end and realized that the point of the whole thing was that God had manipulated all the events so that Hitler wouldn’t conquer England. (Or, as John Clute explains about Blackout/All Clear, “the utter wrongness of the far more likely Hitler Wins future has inspired some force – Willis is not clear about the nature of this force, which may be no more than a convergence of right outcomes of history prescriptively conceived, but which also be something like the spiritus mundi, or perhaps even Gaia – to trick the three visitors into creating our own less plausible world.”) Seriously? In the face of all the genocides and destructions in history that the spiritus mundi didn’t prevent? I won’t get into other times and places but just say, that reading about the fate of some parts of continental Europe in the 20th century, all the communities, ideals, long artistic traditions, cultural continuities that were swept away, the sense of loss can be overwhelming. My great-grandparents left Poland and Lithuania around 1900; if they’d gone back 50 years later they’d have found not a thing they recognized. And these novels insist that England, and its beloved St. Paul’s Cathedral, must survive. God/Gaia decrees that history must turn out exactly the way it did turn out. Fuck that.
Lee is correct. Skokie was a public land issue. The Worldcon is, as Lee says, a private event. The organizers do have the right to eject any member with or without cause. (This policy is laid out for the would-be member to read prior to purchasing said membership.)
I don’t think this is a question of rights and free speech. Rather, our question should be: what is the healthiest level of debate we are willing to sustain at the Worldcon?
The danger is this: there’s a major chilling effect that occurs if we implement a poorly defined standard for punishing expression. Do we want vigorous discussion or platitudes on panels? I think we all want insights and not insults, but how do we create that balance in programming?
I think that the Dave Truesdale case here provides good fodder for this debate. While the ConCom could offer more clarification on his ejection, we now have abundant comments from those who were actually there at the panel as well as the audio recording to discuss this. Where do we want the line to be: Really bad moderation? Grand standing? Derisive commentary? (If so, of what length?) Bad attitude?
And another five for the finale with the train crashing into the station.
Not only Gene Wilder, but but wrestling great Mr Fuji passed as well.
Vasha:
I’m not sure I’ve read “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, but I was *deeply* irritated by Blackout/All Clear. I wasn’t even able to follow the time travel plot that closely because I was so busy being unable to deal with her so-called “historians”, both narrow-minded and feckless, tourists but boring. Not to mention that even I have read enough about WWII England to know Willis was presenting a highly-romanticized picture of The Blitz.
Mr Dr liked it, but wow, did it not work for me.
@ Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Oh, believe me, I don’t think they’re the good guys at all. When prompted, I’ll go off on my rant about how the central characters of the Vorkosigan books are mostly sympathetic monsters and I find it hard to forgive Bujold for making me like them. (But the last time I said something like that, I got hounded for it by people who insisted I explain and support my position in excruciating detail, so largely I keep my mouth shut on the matter.)
I think Dave Doering makes excellent points above.
I have no opinion on Dave Truesdale’s ejection from MACII because it’s still unclear to me what the reasons were and, specifically, whether those reasons included code-of-conduct violations that are not public knowledge, i.e. something besides or in addition his much-discussed panel appearance.
However, I agree with Dave Doering that the Truesdale incident, at least based on what is public/known about it, is suited to discussing what sort of tone, substance, and debate is healthy for WorldCon, rather than discussing the First Amendment.
I also don’t think the the views Truesdale expressed should be the issue in this instance. Wold WorldCon have ejected him for making the exact same statements at the bar, at a party, sitting in the lobby with companions, at his own kaffee klastsch, or in a one-man program item entitled something like “An hour With Dave Truesdale?” If not, then -what- he said isn’t relevant.
What’s relevant is that he disrupted a program panel to talk about his own off-topic pet peeves, he resisted attempts by other speakers to get/keep the panel on-topic, and his being the panel’s moderator made it that much harder for the panel to get or stay on topic when he wanted to talk about his own stuff.
That’s bad behavior which ruins a program hour and wastes a lot of other people’s time. I think that kind of behavior merits removal from the program–but, then, I also think that people should be kicked off the program for showing up at panels and saying with a stupid grin, “I don’t really belong on this panel, but I wanted the free membership that comes with doing three program items.” Or whatever.
@Lee:
Thanks! As I say, it’s a 101 class, and everyone says I’ll do fine, but even just knowing I have a possible lifeline is a palpable relief.
BLAZING SADDLES holds up for me, but only partially. I always felt the ending was a long, boring slog through forced hilarity, so maybe it holds up as well as it ever did. There’s so much that’s funny and memorable before that that I keep trying to watch it, and I always derail in the same place. I don’t want to let that affect my affection for the great performances of Little and Wilder, not to mention… too many to mention. Great theme song. CRACK!
I just finished reading _Ninefox Gambit_. It’s brilliant but thoroughly brutal. Flashback scenes are usually disfavored, but YHL’s use of them is stunning.
I hope this combination of name and email evades the queue. ETA Nope.
That opens up the question of: If Truesdale had pitched a panel about the stuff he wanted to talk about, could he have built an interesting panel with an array of different voices and opinions and drawn in an interesting audience?
I bet it could be done. Don’t know if MACII would have been interested.
But back on the old question of: If you’re moderating a panel and decide to hijack it, is that appropriate? I’d say the answer is no, whether you want to hijack it to talk about special snowflakes or to talk about your collection of autographs by SF greats.
The hijacking is the issue more than whether the views are controversial, to my mind.
Also this weekend, I WHOOPSed and fell into Strong Female Protagonist. I’m in Issue #3 so NO SPOILERS PLZ, but I like it a LOT so far.
@John A Arkansawyer
@Mark: He explains that near the end. Did you finish reading it?
Yes I did, thank you for asking. I knew it wasn’t relevant because Feder had said so. I was being a bit rhetorical, perhaps I should have asked why I should pay attention to an argument of the form “I know this isn’t relevant but…”
During a recent reread of To Say Nothing of the Dog I just about threw the book across the room. So much of the tension relies on 1. people not talking to each other for a variety of (to me) specious and author-arbitrated reasons, and 2. the POV character just letting everyone push him around. Seriously, by the third night he wasn’t allowed to sleep, I wanted to shake him and say, “If this is such an important matter of your health–and I’m pretty sure it is–then for the love of little green mittens STOP ANSWERING THE DOOR. Or run away and sleep in the bushes, I don’t care. Act like a grown adult with agency and take care of yourself.” It’s not a bad book–I mean, heck, it’s still Willis comedy–but it brushes up a little too constantly against my irritation threshold.
I adored, ADORED Saint Olivia.
Thanks to this commentariat, I just finished “The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe,” which I enjoyed (I have yet to read anything by Kij Johnson that I haven’t enjoyed), and then dove into Valente’s Palimpsest (which was mentioned here as being on ebook sale; it having been on my mental TBR list for pretty much ever, I nabbed it), which I am absolutely loving. It is strange how very many parallels there are between the two stories.
I have heard some people say they are turned off by Valente’s prose when it gets particularly lush, and I can see how it’s not for everyone. I have to slow down to really appreciate it. But it hits me in all the right spots. Sometimes I need to stop and read what I just read aloud, because I just have to taste the language. Also, hot damn, the impossible things she thinks up!
I had forgetten until I reached [rot13]gur cneg jurer Yhpvn yrnirf Yhqb[/rot13] that this is the book S. J. Tucker’s song “Girl with the Lion’s Tail (Lucia)” is expanding upon. Bit of deja vu there. Did the same thing with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and the moment where I went, “These words are very familiar… OH! This is what S. J. Tucker’s ‘September’s Rhyme’ is about!”.
Trigger warning, of course, for a whole hell of a lot of problematic/dubious sexual consent issues, given the premise of Palimpsest. Valente is very aware of the implications of the worldbuilding she’s perpetrated here.
Not finished reading it. Going back to it now.
Vasha: I am in two minds about Connie Willis…. God/Gaia decrees that history must turn out exactly the way it did turn out. Fuck that.
I absolutely love Connie Willis’ stories — but I agree that several of them have religious elements with which I do not agree, and which I have to sort of just handwave to enable my enjoyment of the rest of the story. Certainly she is entitled to put whatever level of religion in her stories as she wishes — but when she does, it doesn’t really work for me.
Oh! Forgot.
Apropos of memories of Gene Wilder, specifically Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: one of the skaters who was participating in D2 Lansing just this past weekend has the roller derby name of Violent No-Regard.
BLUEBERRY!!!
My favorite Willis so far is Bellweather. I kept thinking they should put that scene in the Office. And that one. And that one.
I thought Saint Olivia was great, but thought the second part was one of the worst books I’ve read. 🙁
I thought Black Out/All Clear was a white hot mess and needed serious editing. I barely managed to finish it and was shocked/appalled when it won the Hugo. I guess I was just so annoyed with it that I never noticed the religious aspect.
I’ve read a few other Willis books (including Doomsday and Dog) and have decided her writing and “humor” just doesn’t work for me.
I was also annoyed that she ended up talking the most at a panel at Worldcon. Yes, she was entertaining, but I didn’t think it was fair to the two other mid-list authors. That was partly the fault of the moderator who allowed her to take over.
That said, I find she’s delightful and very entertaining when she’s around Silverberg.
Reading:
I’ve joined a online book club to read A Song of Ice and Fire from the beginning. I’ve never been in any book club at all and I never read Martin’s opus before, so new experiences all around. We’re barely started with Game of Thrones, but it’s been interesting so far.
The Obelisk Gate Just finished. It’s on my Hugo long list. I’d like to second someone’s request that whenever OGH is home and feeling better, if he’d create a discussion thread for Season and Gate, it would be greatly appreciated. I think I’ll reread Season in the next week or so.
Recently finished the latest Raksura novel by Martha Wells, The Edge of Worlds. It’s the start of another trilogy starring Moon, Jade, and their Indigo Cloud clan traveling through the fascinating Three Worlds universe of various alien races and cultures. An adventure/mystery tale. The book ends in a cliffhanger which is a bit frustrating, but I knew it probably would when I started. Wells is one of my autobuy authors. :-}
I reread The Goblin Emperer and loved it as much as the first time.
Also recently finished the latest Liad Universe book, An Alliance of Equals by Lee and Miller. This is deep into a multi book universe, so not a stand alone story. I agree with someone who mentioned earlier that this is a weaker addition to the Korval tale, but it’s still fun to hear about the adventures of old friends.
Am thinking of getting The Invisible Library next, based on recommendations from filers.
Haven’t been reading as much as usual recently, so that’s all I got for now.
@vasha and @Doctor Science
I’ve liked other books by Connie Willis, but Blackout/All Clear was just irritating and Connie Willis “Oh, WWII bombings were so exciting and romantic” remarks made around the time were just clueless, not to mention infuriatingly offensive. Coincidentally, every German fan I’ve ever talked to hated that duology with a passion, ditto for Brits and Russians. If anybody wants to get angry about a recentish Hugo winning novel, that would be the one to pick rather than Redshirts or Ancillary Justice or The Fifth Season or whichever book has infuriated the puppies this week.
In fact, I tend to avoid any novels about WWI and WWII (including Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers and I usually love her work), unless vetted by trusted readers, because they have the potential to be bleedingly offensive.
@Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little:
Oof. Thanks for that. I was thinking of giving TSNotD a read, but what you mentioned there was the most infuriating part of Blackout/All Clear for me. I don’t think I literally shouted “stop worrying and share information, you blistering idiot!” at the characters, but by the end my eyes were fixing to roll clear out of my head.
<sigh> maybe I can remember to tick the box this time
Thanks to all of the suggestions, I have a healthy to-read list, was able to check out several titles from the library before leaving work, and placed a number of other items on hold through our consortium. I have a strong feeling that most if not all of those holds will arrive at the same time, so I’ll be buried in books for a while. 🙂
SciFi4Me’s coverage of the MidAmeriCon II Masquerade contest
So, I’ve not read any Ilona Andrews. Tell me about her work in a reasonably non-spoilery way? What should I start with?
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little said:
To Say Nothing of the Dog was the first Willis I read, and I loved it. Being that it was a comedy, I was fine with specious communication problems.
However, then I read Doomsday Book, where they were less amusing. And then I read Passage, where I reached book-flinging levels of irritation because of that and things like, “OMG, we’re on the verge of a huge scientific breakthrough! Never mind, we must have Chick Flick Night and deliver pages of pointless commentary on Titanic first!” And I was starting to notice that some of the same characters show up over and over again in different books under different names. Particularly the annoying little kid.
My household is split on Gene Wilder. The SO misses him most for Blazing Saddles, and for me it’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I watched it over and over and over as a kid, forgot about it for a while, rediscovered it during college and loved it again, and went to a singalong showing for its 40th anniversary.
I had a huge, huge crush on Gene Wilder when I was a kid. Those eyes….
I’ll have to schedule a Willy Wonka rewatch for some time soon.
@ Ita: I’ve never seen Willis on a panel, but I have seen her take apart a pretentious twit at a bookstore signing here in Houston. She’d finished her talk, opened the floor for Q&A, and the very first question was some dude saying, “People keep calling you a science-fiction writer. How do you feel about that?”
Her response opened with, “Unless someone has invented time travel and nobody told me, I AM a science-fiction writer!” and went on from there. She talked about how much she enjoyed her interactions with fandom, and how proud she was of the Hugos on her mantelpiece, and she absolutely shredded the snobbery of thinking that SF is somehow inferior to other genres, including lit-fic. It was a righteous smackdown and I wish I’d been able to record it! I’ve had a great deal of respect for her as a person ever since, though I haven’t read a lot of her work.
Magic verbs (Magic Bites, Magic Burns, etc.). Urban fantasy set in Atlanta around the year 2040, magic came back, tech started falling apart and our hero is Kate, a merc. She does things like show up and kill the fire-breathing chinchilla that decided to nest in your back yard.
To go with the discussion of Connie Willis, here’s a link to information about her new book Crosstalk, a romantic comedy about telepathy. She read the first chapter at her WorldCon reading.
http://azsf.net/cwblog/?p=180
And, this announcement may be of interest as well:
ConnieWillis.net will be giving away 10 Advance Reading Copies of Crosstalk by Connie Willis (courtesy of Penguin Random House). All you have to do to enter is to send an email to [email protected] with the subject CROSSTALK and your name and city in the text of the email. Entries will be accepted until Midnight PT Monday, September 5th. Open only to US residents at this time. One entry per person.
Disclaimer: I am Connie’s webmaster for ConnieWillis.net and manage the Fans of Connie Willis Facebook page.
Saint Olivia? All I’m finding is Santa Olivia…
Re Crosstalk: here’s an older blogpost where she describes it in more detail. It’s hilarious!
The first chapter is available in this free Del Rey sampler. (Might be US-restricted).
Santa Olivia is the correct name.
K8: Happy reading! 😀
Hampus, RedWombat – Yes, thank you, sorry! Santa Olivia it is. Just because I adored the book doesn’t mean I’m not prone to spontaneously and inappropriately translating its title into English, apparently…
I should modify my comments about To Say Nothing of the Dog – while I dislike much of the situational humor, I did enjoy the 1st p. POV narration. He was prone to a sort of stream of consciousness style of commentary (often aided and abetted by his constant sleep deprivation) that made me chuckle.
I never got my link to SurveyMonkeyDragon. I wonder if it’s the same link for every email address, or if there’s a pattern that could be determined? Because I would like very much to vote for “Fifth Season” again. Twice! And I know the movies and TV shows too.
@Snodberry: the nypbubyvfz is mentioned several times in the first book. Ur qevaxf nyy gur sbhy ubbpu Punje tvirf uvz, Tenpr pnyyf uvz na nypbubyvp evtug gb uvf snpr.
@Doctor Science: Someone greatly resembling bar bs gur Qbpgbef fubjf hc va rirel bar bs ure obbxf. Vg’f abg nyjnlf gur Qbpgbe uvzfrys, fbzrgvzrf vg’f whfg n thl jub ybbxf yvxr uvz. Naq vg’f nyjnlf n cnffvat pnzrb gung unf abguvat gb qb jvgu gur cybg. Nf sbe gur bgure snzvyvne anzr, ur’f boivbhfyl gur naprfgbe bs bhe Oevt. V zrna qhu. 🙂
@Mallory: I personally like the “prequels” Local Custom and Scout’s Progress because, being written later, they are a lot better technically — improving with practice (Also Daav, Aelianna, Anne, and Er Thom are not nearly as Mary Sue as Val and Miri).
@Wombat: I think they do mean “Santa Olivia” which was pretty good, but am sad to hear Hampus report the sequel sucked. Amazon reviews seem to concur.
I am bummed about Gene Wilder even though I knew he was in bad shape.
I don’t think the First Amendment applies inside Worldcon. It’s a private event, in a semi-confined space to which you have to have a badge to enter, and it’s not run by the government. So any comparisons to legit First Amendment issues are, quite simply, stupid. And when it takes place outside the US, they’re even stupider. Truesdale deserved to be thrown out for bad behavior; if he’d monopolized the panel to chastise fandom for being insufficiently PC and SJW (with props and a long prepared opening diatribe), that would have been equally a violation of his responsibility as moderator. Same as if he’d decided the State of Short Fiction panel needed an opening diatribe about the superiority of model railroads as a hobby, with toy choo-choos to wave around.
In my own ongoing reading adventures:
I bounced very very hard off of Ninefox Gambit, and then off of Infomocracy. Disappointing, because those were both books I’d really been looking forward to. I know a lot of other people have enjoyed them a lot, but they were Not For Me.
Rule of thumb: I do not care who wins your imaginary war. I do not care who wins your imaginary election. Give me a reason to care, or give me some stakes I do care about.
On the other hand, I finally got to The Girl With All The Gifts, which I’ve been wanting to read for the past year+. I really enjoyed this one! Killer opening, and well-done the whole way through. This is one of those books where even knowing the genre in advance is a spoiler, sooo hard to write too much about it – but I think it has very wide appeal, and the Kindle sample was certainly enough to get me very, very intrigued. (Don’t read spoilers. Don’t read the book jacket.)
And yesterday I started on Joe Hill’s The Fireman. Wow. The first few chapters are intense. Hill is a fantastic, fantastic writer; I haven’t loved everything of his, but I’ve loved most of it. This book — well, again, I’m only a few chapters in. But it’s an aching portrayal of a world going up in flames, and who doesn’t identify with that?… And, as usual for Hill, he lays in hints and promises and great characters so deftly and powerfully.
Lastly, I just saw the Prime Books’ Best SF&F Novellas collection for 2016 has been out for a few months now – and I’m soooo pleased to see they’ve include “Gypsy” and “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear,” which were absolutely stellar. I’m so glad to see they haven’t sunk without a trace 🙂 I haven’t read most of the others, but the names in that ToC are very well regarded. It looks like an awesome collection.
Someone at WorldCon was asking me about swedish crime novellas. While there are so many written today that you could use them for fertilizer, I’m woefully lacking in knowledge about them. However, the book that started everything was Roseanna by the married couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They wrote several great books in the realistic way that would set the standard for all future swedish crime novellas. The last book is unreadable today, a heavyhanded political leftist manifesto, but all books before are well worth reading.
While Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson are well known outside of Sweden today, other swedish authors of crime novellas are Leif GW Persson and Kerstin Ekman.
But the only one of them I’ve read is Sjöwall Wahlöö, because this isn’t my genre.
I nominated for the Dragon Awards in the categories where I had favorites. I didn’t vote, because I don’t think there was a single category where I’d read more than one finalist (and in most I haven’t read any). I hope the voters with stronger opinions than I get the award they want 🙂
I enjoyed Blackout/All Clear a lot. I don’t see why people are saying the God is intervening. It’s not like CW was the first to posit a world with time travel to a fixed past. This is how history happened. You can’t change it because if you were to change it then that change would already be part of the past. I want to call this a conservative time travel story, but worry this will be confused with one in which a heroic straight white man goes back in time to become Teddy Beale’s grandfather.
@Doctor Science: Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother! Okay, I’m not sure how well it holds up, but I loved it when I saw it as a teenager with my then-girlfriend. So it must still be good, right?
@Lee: Thanks for commenting about the Kurland “Lord Darcy” sequels. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to get them; I’ll probably give them a whirl, in audiobook. I “re-read” the original 3 books via audiobook (ETA: in the past year or so) – first time I’d read them in many years – and I still liked them. The narrator was good; the two Kurland books have two different narrators (!), but the samples sound fine.
Unrelated: My pre-order for the “Tor.com Collection: Season 2” audiobook is available to download – yay! But I just started The Obelisk Gate a few days ago, so this (and the “Lord Darcy” books) will have to wait. 😉
Also from Michael Kurland, his Moriarty series, with criminal mastermind Moriarty and his Watson-equivalent, are quite good. I read the first two, THE INFERNAL DEVICE and DEATH BY GASLIGHT, when they were first published in the late-70’s/early-80’s. He didn’t return to the series until 2001, with three further novels and some shorter pieces since then. (I only discovered the series had been revived about a year ago, and haven’t read the new novels yet, but expect to enjoy them.)
@Nick Pheas: I enjoyed Blackout/All Clear a lot. I don’t see why people are saying the God is intervening. It’s not like CW was the first to posit a world with time travel to a fixed past. This is how history happened. You can’t change it because if you were to change it then that change would already be part of the past.
It’s been quite a while since I read those books, so I no longer recall exactly why it was clear to me (and to John Clute) that some cosmic force was manipulating the actions of the time travelers to bring about a favored historical.outcome. You’re not going to get me to re-read them to clarify, sorry.
Re:To Say Nothing of the Dog.
I really enjoyed it, the (mis)communication problems, though frustrating, were apt for that style of comedy. The same (mis)communication problems problems in Blackout/All Clear (which was serious and not comedic in tone), I found very frustrating, and a big reason I liked that a lot less.
@NickPheas & Vasha,
I read it not as divine intervention but as someone(s) from the future manipulating the past (ensuring history happens as it’s meant to), at least that’s the message I got from comments made in passing near the end of TSNotD.
Oh, that looks good.
@Bruce Baugh
Blazing Saddles holds up very well, IMHO. There’s very little that makes me think “oh Brooks and Wilder no” – stuff that’s offensive is supposed to be, and makes a point.
Hell, the scene with the line “How about a good old n***r work song?” by itself is one of the most delicious skewerings of racism on film
rob_matic: Oh, that looks good.
That anthology contains 3 of my 5 Best Novella nominees. I especially recommend Carter Scholz’ Gypsy — that was my Number 1 this past year.