320 thoughts on “Comments Continue 8/24”

  1. Cora Buhlert does another roundup post. The most interesting link is an attempt at a Puppy-Free finalists list which suggests Weiskoppf, Pournelle, and SciPhi would have made it under their own steam. I imagine there will be disgarrements over the methodology (the writer estimated 330 RP) and I suspect that it’s at least partially due to a residual SP vote rather than a more popular support, but interesting nonetheless, and there’s no denying that Weisskopf’s 801 noms (45% of the ballots) is far above any possible slate effects.

  2. Nnedi Okorafor mentioned fear, the mind-killer. Coincidentally, in the preview for next week’s Great British Bake Off, one of the contestants could be heard quoting the Bene Gesserit litany.

  3. Terri Weiskoppf would not surprise me in the slightest, being the head of a successful and reasonably high profile publishing house.
    Pournelle, perhaps, he’s well known and I gingerly don’t know if the prior that like that kind of thing noticed that he’d a book out. I didn’t notice any buzz, but I don’t go the places most of the buzz would have happened.
    Sci-Phi? Seems unlikely. And if true a sign that people should listen to more podcasts. There’s good stiff out there.

  5. Currently playing “No Man’s Sky”. It’s like walking through a 1980s SF art cover. I love it, and I can see why many people dislike it intensely. This is not a AAA game of explosions and action, it’s a thoughtful exploration of worlds you will never go back to again in a huge universe.

  6. nickpheas on August 25, 2016 at 1:25 am said:
    Pournelle, perhaps, he’s well known and I gingerly don’t know if the prior that like that kind of thing noticed that he’d a book out. I didn’t notice any buzz, but I don’t go the places most of the buzz would have happened.

    I imagine Pournelle’s personal brand is quite well known and respected. But I don’t know if the Castalia House marketing machine is effective outside Puppy circles. Do they send ARCs out? I also notice that you can’t even buy There Will Be War X as a physical book.

    Actually, what is the benefit to an established author of publishing via Castalia House when you just end up published in ebook format and solely available on Amazon? Why wouldn’t you just self-publish?

  7. @Simon Bisson – I wish you the best with NMS. After 30 planets, the shine came off that apple for me.

  8. @rob_matic

    I believe Pournelle has said he got a good offer from them, although whether he was comparing that to self-pub I don’t know. I recall VD mentioning doing the slush reading for him, there’s the Amazon rank boost of Castalia fans buying it on day 1, they’re bringing the earlier volumes back out in ebook, etc etc.
    The negatives of working with Castalia are obvious to me and you, but Pournelle obviously feels differently.

  9. Actually, what is the benefit to an established author of publishing via Castalia House when you just end up published in ebook format and solely available on Amazon? Why wouldn’t you just self-publish?

    I get the impression that Castilia pays fairly decent rates. Self Pub is definitely an option when publishing your own novel or collection, but an anthologist presumably needs to put money up front to draw in the contributors, which makes things a bit more fiddly. Hurrah for Teddy’s trust fund.

  12. If I recall correctly the main appeal for Pournelle was that Castalia was happy to handle royalties for the contributors, and for previous volumes Pournelle had had to do that himself. Self-pub would have stuck him with the work again.

    It’s a shame he couldn’t get a similar deal from a better publisher. I’d have quite liked a good anthology and I can’t imagine the one that happened is to the best of his abilities. I expect the pool of authors willing to submit was smaller than it might otherwise have been.

  13. … there’s no denying that Weisskopf’s 801 noms (45% of the ballots) is far above any possible slate effects.

    That’s interesting. If Toni Weisskopf had let people know what she edited last year, even if just a page listing the books, I think she would’ve gotten a lot more votes. Editor’s a tough category to vote. I want to know what people edited.

  14. @Jeb Kinnison: Thanks for the link to your writeup; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the phrase “aggressively Canadian” used before. (It sounds a bit like the setup to a Canadian joke.)

    I actually agree that having 2/3 to 1/2 of the panel Canadians led us to spend more time comparing existing electoral systems than taking about emerging ones. It would probably have been a stronger panel with just Karl on it and not me, since he’s much more of an expert than I am on these things, but you go where Programming sends you. (Though I am glad I made my point about the perils of trusting too much in direct democracy.)

  15. Travelling today, reading Penric and the Shaman on the plane. Early on there is an incident of what looks like self-harm, which was one of Tasha’s trigger issues. (She has probably aleady read it anyway.)

  16. Cora Buhlert’s excellent Glyeresque post-Hugos roundup includes this comment:

    Coincidentally, for someone who is supposedly such a giant in SFF art, I have to say that I’d never heard of Larry Elmore before this Hugo season. My book on 1960s to 1980s fantasy art certainly doesn’t mention him.

    Elmore made his name in the early ’80s on roleplaying game art. He was on the staff at Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR and created the visual look of the epic fantasy Dragonlance saga, which extended from game books to novels. He also created the fantasy comic strip SnarfQuest that ran in Dragon magazine from 1983 to 1989. After leaving D&D’s publisher he did the covers for the MMORPG EverQuest.

    I’m surprised your book omits him. Elmore had received wide acclaim on the gaming side of fantasy. I would agree he’s one of the giants of fantasy art, though he’s reduced his workload dramatically after the death of a fellow artist and friend a decade ago, so he may not be doing much that could get him a Hugo.

    Because he didn’t submit anything in the Hugo packet, I had trouble figuring out what he’d done in 2015. Since I don’t vote as if the award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t pick him.

  17. I have now read several of the Puppy responses to the Hugos (thanks for the round-ups Cora), and have a few thoughts:

    1. They are all incredibly similar, no matter what stripe of Puppy the author claims to be. For a group that claims to be an individualistic bunch, they sure do seem to march in lockstep when it comes to opinions about the Hugos.

    2. In their wailing an gnashing of teeth about how the Hugo voters treated some finalists badly “because of who nominated them”, they seem to forget that Folding Beijing was a Rabid Puppy pick and won anyway. So were File 770, The Martian and Andy Weir for that matter. Several other Rabid Puppy picks finished above No Award. Where the Rabid Puppies pushed quality items onto the list of finalists, their picks did well. Where they pushed subpar material, their picks didn’t.

    3. There is a seriously misogynistic and racist element to the claims that the winners only won because of “politics” and not because of the quality of the work. The Pups claim not to be racists or misogynists, but the actual statements they have made in response to the Hugo results pretty much shows that claim to be a lie.

  18. @Tasha Turner,

    My favorite 2016 release so far is the short story “Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman” by Rebecca Fraimow, a charming work of historical SFF epistolary fiction. Regarding your triggers, it does contain one very inexplicate mention of a possible rape that may have taken place several decades before the events of the story. But the story as a whole is funny and heartwarming and has become one of my recent comfort reads.

  19. @StephenfromOttawa oh no you’re absolutely right, self harm is a recurring plot point with one of the characters in Penric and the Shaman. This is why I should not recommend books unless they are absolutely fresh in my memory :/

  20. Aaron, I stumbled across a Puppy-friendly site (for reasons unrelated to the Hugos) and noticed commenters there seemed in lockstep in complaining about how “dreadful” Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures, Please” was. So I guess Kritzer may be the new choice for dinosauring by Puppies.

    Kinda ironic that people who moan about the lack of “fun” stories choose to slam a story that, whatever else, is tremendous fun.

  21. @Bruce Arthurs especially as it made the SP4 recommendation list, a document which has been curiously unreferenced in all pup discussions of lefty elitism and the terrible erasure of Kate and Sarah.

    They recommended Binti top for novella too. Lest we forget.

  23. My view has always been that there are no Puppies: ‘Sad Puppies’ and ‘Rabid Puppies’ are the names of campaigns, not of groups of people (though after first objecting to it, some of their adherents have begun to use ‘Puppies’ of themselves); and when we talk about ‘The Puppies’ it’s often not clear whether we mean the organisers, the voters, the nominees or (in the case of SP4) the contributors to the list. Questions about why ‘the Puppies’ are doing so and so often fail for lack of specificity; and people tend to accuse ‘the Puppies’ of inconsistency as if they were all required to believe the same thing, when there’s no reason they should.

    But as to whether there’s a difference between Sad and Rabid Puppies – among people who vote for the slates, or who make noises on the internet in support of them, I don’t know. But among the leaders: VD certainly differs from Correia, Torgersen, Hoyt et al on some political issues. Whether he differs from them about science fiction I’m not sure – I’m not convinced he is interested in science fiction – but JCW, who is a long-term associate of VD, and certainly is interested in science fiction, differs from them in some ways, being keen on his literary credentials, and by no means an uncritical admirer of Heinlein or of the Golden Age more generally.

  24. Where the Rabid Puppies pushed quality items onto the list of finalists, their picks did well. Where they pushed subpar material, their picks didn’t.

    This. The puppies claiming Toni Weisskopf, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Elmore as victims of unfair treatment never talk about the quality of the work they did in 2015.

    It’s ironic that people who alleged for years that the Hugos rewarded favored people instead of excellence are angered because that wasn’t done for their favorites.

  25. One problem about estimating the strength of the slate is that some people who looked to it for guidance would not have followed it in every detail; VD actually said this year, unlike last, that you didn’t have to.

    There is also, as Mark says, the SP factor: I think very few people will have followed that list in every detail (though I believe one ghostly personage said he did), but people influenced by it will have overlapped with the RP slate at some points.

    There’s also the problem that some people who aren’t in any way slate voters may have noticed something because it was brought to light by the slate – I’m thinking especially of Slow Bullets here.

  27. Sorry I’m having far too chatty a sick day over here and will be going to bed soon but have to add to what is already common knowledge among Filers : omg the Invisible Library is AMAZING. (Also no rape, child abuse, serial murder, self harm; but a fair few deaths and a bit of body horror. And friendship!)

    Is this 2016 published in the US?

  28. I have nostalgic fondness for SnarfQuest, but the only thing I could find that qualified Larry Elmore in 2015 was a book cover for Larry Correia. I didn’t think that was enough, frankly, nostalgic fondness notwithstanding.

  29. Andrew M: 2. Thomas Olde Heuvelt has a book out (shelved under Horror rather than SF, but my local bookshop shelves all sorts of things under Horror). Should we prepare ourselves to see it on next year’s Hugo ballot? Why? Do you think there’s a bloc for him? My guess is that Hex won’t make the ballot; it’s incredibly grim (Naturalistic rather than realistic, if you were taught that differentiation in high-school English class), IMO doesn’t do anything for the genre, and has none of the surrealism of his nominee (so it won’t attract the same people). PS: “horror” is a flexible classification; the Datlow/Windling annual used to contain both supernatural and mimetic works. I would not offer Hex to anyone with \any/ trigger issues.

    James Davis Nicoll (re discovery): as I posted elsewhere, where’s Adam Strange when we need him? (Yes, that wasn’t quite the same place — but very close….)

    Petréa Mitchell: I know there’s hope for real planets beyond the demoted Pluto — but does anyone expect them to support life?

    Camestros Felapton (re {mono,duo}puppyists): I see another T-shirt to go with the Byzantine Stooges’ orthodox vs monophysite eyepokes.

    Bartimaeus: ISTM that there are not enough possible candidates for your proposed category.

    Camestros Felapton: [proceeds to place ear piece of spectacles into mouth and sucks on them having mistaken them for the pipe] That’s better than drinking from the flask that doesn’t have water in it. (Old chemistry story, ending with “Please get me six dozen egg whites.”)

    James Davis Nicoll: another fascinating collection of reactions. I would worry about Mel’s how-could-she-be-so-blind remark, but (a) they’ll probably learn in time and (b) ISTM that the driven-crazy-by-one’s-environment stories were a 1950-60’s thing that we haven’t seen much of recently; possibly they were a reaction to the mundane belief that everything was just peachy.

  31. Remember that John Lennon song? The one about “I don’t believe in Elvis. I don’t believe in Beatles. I don’t believe in B. J. Thomas. Just Yoko and me, that’s reality”?

    Me, either. But I do remember this one:

    There ain’t no puppies
    And there ain’t no kits
    Just science-fiction authors
    Writing about tanks

    @Rick Moen: I can help with this!

    what somebody-nobody-in-particular-without-a-real-name spews onto some Web-forum-or-other from Crankville, Arkansas

    That’s not a real person. That’s a nearly-sentient regular expression written, yes, in Perl. It’s the bot equivalent of a Boomer.

    How do I know? Crankville, Arkansas doesn’t have the internet yet. Not even dial-up. You can’t get a good modem signal across a four-way party line.

  33. @Arifel. Yes. The Invisible Library came out in 2015 in the UK, 2016 here in the US

  34. @Dawn Incognito

    Those Abigail Nussbaum reviews were excellent, thank you for posting them. I don’t really agree with quite a lot of them but she argued her cases really well.
    She’s correct that the planet-based sections in Children of Time are far superior to the ship-based ones, but I see the ship as necessary for the theme and the long perspective of the story. Mind you, a novel based purely on the planet from the POV of the inhabitants would have been a bravura choice.

    @Arifel/Paul

    I hadn’t realised Invisible Library was going to be eligible for next year, but it’s excellent news and a handy addition to my draft shortlist (which I really need to start getting into shape now that award season is over).

  35. @Mark

    I imagine there will be disgarrements over the methodology (the writer estimated 330 RP) and I suspect that it’s at least partially due to a residual SP vote rather than a more popular support, but interesting nonetheless, and there’s no denying that Weisskopf’s 801 noms (45% of the ballots) is far above any possible slate effects.

    Something that makes counting the puppies harder is that some people apparently do use the slates as recommendation lists. That’s why it’s important to look at the votes for total trash to get a good estimate of the number of vote-without-reading slaters. For example, Jerry Pournelle has lots of fans, and it stands to reason that many of those people looked at the slate, said, “Oh, did Jerry produce something this year?” and then nominated him–even if they didn’t follow the slate in any other way.

    I also suspect that there is a group of people (perhaps a large one) who don’t like the puppies as a whole, but who do believe that they’re right about one or two things. Those folks are apt to vote for selected things from the slate, and I suspect they inflate Vox Day’s votes for Best Editor. (Alternatively, those could just be people who’re too lazy to copy/paste the whole slate but still want to send a message of “Go Vox!”)

  36. Talking of The Invisible Library: should we be thinking about the series Hugo?

    This comes on line in 2018, unless Worldcon 75 chooses to run it as a special Hugo: but stuff that’s eligible is being published now, and given the difficulty of reading it all in either the nomination or the voting period, it’s best to be prepared.

    An obvious candidate is The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin, which I presume finishes next year.

    Then there’s City of … Things by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’m not sure if that’s an open-ended series or one with an arc, and if the latter how many volumes it has. (Since a series can only win once, it seems sensible to nominate series when they end, if they’re the kind that does end. I’m not sure when it would be best to nominate those which don’t end.)

    Thessaly ends this year, and so, I take it, does the Three Body series, so they would only be eligible if there’s an award in 2017.

    What else?

  37. An obvious candidate is The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin, which I presume finishes next year.

    I’m hoping that the series Hugo favors excellent series that wouldn’t get attention at the awards otherwise — because there are too many books and the first book didn’t get a nomination. Because of this year’s novel win, I’d be disinclined to nominate the entire trilogy unless it was so great it couldn’t be ignored.

  38. Planet confirmed in the Goldilocks Zone around Proxima. “Now that we know it’s there, surely we have to go.”

    And a dose of bitter reality.

    (The sad truth is that the vast majority of science fiction dreams will never be any closer to reality than fantasy dreams. We will be traveling to other stars around the same time we are flying around on the backs of fire-breathing dragons and casting spells from magic wands.)

  39. I enjoyed Penric and the Shaman. Some writers can include triggers in an acceptable way or I know they write stuff which includes them but the writing is so good I plan self-care when reading them. LMB is an author I either love or really enjoy depending on the world and she is usually sensitive in the issues she writes about – not glorifying or discounting the harm but not dwelling on it. Jemisin is brilliant and always worth the emotional distress – you feel all the harm but it’s never “this is a good thing” – it’s to shine a light on problems and make one think – the ideas stay with you long after you’ve read the book.

  40. GSLamb said:

    After 30 planets, the shine came off that apple for me.

    Wow, I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky almost every day since the PC release and haven’t made it to half that many planets. Probably in part because I’m easily distracted. “Now I just need to walk over there and get one more batch of plutonium so I can… oh, hey, what’s the formation made of? Hey, look, another knowledge stone over on that hill! Hey, look, that animal I befriended earlier found another interesting thing! Hey, I gotta get a shot of that other thing for my gallery!” Etc…

    Plus the fun of just exploring hasn’t worn off yet for me.

  41. Chip Hitchcock said:

    Petréa Mitchell: I know there’s hope for real planets beyond the demoted Pluto — but does anyone expect them to support life?

    Hardly. But there are still hopes for the oceans of Europa, the recently-discovered ocean on Enceladus, the clouds of Venus, and maybe one or two other spots that I’m not aware of.

  43. @Greg Hullender

    My view is that there is only one set of puppies. There are different leaders, some of whom call themselves “sad” while others use the “rabid” brand, but they are competing for control of a single group of people. To see this, note how “sad” leaders, like Larry Correia, immediately jump to the defense of the rabid puppies no matter what. Look at the comments section in places like Mad Genius Club. Rarely does anyone criticize the rabid faction, and whenever someone does, that person gets instantly, viciously, and personally attacked by the supposedly more-moderate “sad puppies.”

    It is true that some of the sad leaders didn’t do a slate last year. It’s equally true that they got almost zero support. Nearly all the puppies followed Vox Day last year. They really are a single group, and they always have been. I understand why the sad leaders want to pretend otherwise. I don’t see why anyone else should help them do that.

    I’m going to have to respectfully disagree, based on what I’ve been observing over the last few months. While they may have sprung from a similar source: the belief that the Hugos have become a clique, that Worldcon leans too far left, etc. The Sads seem to want reform, to bring attention to those authors they think worthy of consideration (whether they actually are or no is, of course subjective) The Rabids just seem to be going “Burn, baby, burn!” They are actively trying to harm the award. That by itself makes me see them as two different groups with, unfortunately a different name. Makes me kinda wish one of them would rebrand.

    Skimming through the Mad Genius Club site, from the last few months, I don’t really see Vox Day mentioned, neither in a positive or negative light. I freely admit my searching skills among the comments may be lacking. I do see some, erm, “less than charitable” comments about File 770. But then I see some pretty mean-spirited things said about them here. So glass houses and stones and such…

    As for Correia, I did find this blog article from last year. But again, I don’t see him leading an ardent defense of VD either.

    http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/16/im-not-vox-day/

    Perhaps they are seen as “defending” Vox Day because they are simply ignoring his antics? Silence is approval?

    The Sads didn’t do a slate this year. They did a recommended reading list. There were as many as ten items per category, and I’m sure that seriously diluted any influence they may have had compared to the Rabid slate.

  44. Skimmed Cora’s round-up, which was excellent. Did not click through to any of the puppy wailing. I lost my ability to listen to them whining the exact same thing over and over and over and over and over and over.

    If the Dragon Awards don’t collapse and crater, it should interesting to see how they play out and the reaction there.

  45. “Kinda ironic that people who moan about the lack of “fun” stories choose to slam a story that, whatever else, is tremendous fun.”

    I doubt that conservative folks would regard a story that has an AI manipulating the dissolution of a existing nuclear family, so that the husband can enter into a gay relationship as a major plot point all that fun.

  50. I have a soft spot for The Economist, or at least the EIU part of it, as they let me write fun bits of futurist analysis for them from time to time. So far this year it’s been pieces on digital currencies and on geo-engineering (and why it is a bad idea).

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