Disney’s “101 Nominations” 5/25

aka Crate Expectations

The Memorial Day roundup begins with Dave Freer and carries on with Cheryl Morgan, Jeff Duntemann, Sam Finlay, Adam-Troy Castro, Lisa J. Goldstein, Joseph Tomaras, Andrew Hickey, Rebekah Golden, Martin Wisse, Declan Finn, Steve Leahy and Dcarson. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day William Reichard and Jim Henley.)

Dave Freer on Mad Genius Club

“Making a living, and things that may interfere with it” – May 25

So far, to best of my knowledge, the Puppies, both sad and rabid, and their followers have avoided attacking things which make people a living. They’ve asked people to NOT take it out on the authors who have been pressured into stepping out of Noms. They’ve spoken out against punishing Tor Books despite the Neilsen Hayden’s and friends attacks on ‘Making Light’. No-one has called for a boycott or blacklist of David Gerrold, or Glenn Hauman, or to have their reputations tarnished and Amazon reviews deliberately lowered.

That’s of course NOT true in the converse. And while there’s been some passive-aggressive ‘semi-plausible-deniability’ ‘who will rid us of these turbulent puppies’ basically from the get-go it’s been attacks on the ability of the Puppy organizers and the nominees ability to make a living. We’re immoral destroyers (we obeyed the rules to letter. Patrick Nielsen Hayden broke the embargo rules with absolute impunity, not a word of criticism offered. Rules are only for little people.) who break every convention of good behavior (David Gerrold, the MC of the event, has been campaigning relentlessly against the Pups and the nominees – which is so far outside the canon of ‘acceptable behavior’ as to be a light-year beyond the pale). They organized smears on Entertainment Weekly to label us racists and sexists – which the magazine had to redact because they’re demonstrably untrue. It didn’t stop the smears mysteriously cropping up in ‘friendly’ outlets across the English Speaking world. Gerrold and TNH carefully listed all the nasty things –exclusion from Cons, denial of space in publications, editors closing doors to subs, reviews being denied… that just would happen to us. All things that would, had to affect the puppies ability to make a living. Not one of them said ‘hey, these people have families. They’re human too.’ In fact we had phrases flung about putting us down. Untermench. Then we have Glenn Hauman calling for people to use the Hugo package for a way to game the rankings against the puppies. “Oh, and to answer the title question: what do you do to rabid puppies? You put them down.”

 

Jeff Duntemann on Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary

“Sad Puppies Summary and Wrapup” – May 24

Eveybody’s got a theory on how to fix the Hugo Awards process, but to me the process is fine; what’s missing is about 25,000 more involved nominators and voters. A large enough voter base is unlikely to be swept by something like a slate of recommendations. Whether so many new people can be brought into the Worldcon/Hugos community is unclear, but I doubt it.

That’s about all I’m going to have to say about the Sad Puppies topic for awhile. I’m turning my attention back to writing, to the concept of the Human Wave, and perhaps to a suspicion I have that fandom is in the process of splitting. The problems of fandom are caught up in the problems of publishing. Once Manhattan-style traditional publishing becomes more or less irrelevant, fandom may become an overlapping group of online communities centered on authors and genres. Each will probably have its own awards, and the Hugos will become only one among many. Is this a good thing?

You bet!

 

Sam Finlay on Return of Kings

“How Female-Dominated Publishing Houses Are Censoring Male Authors” – May 25

We continued talking about why the industry seems to be so focused on just playing to the tastes of upper-middle class women in New York City, and I then told him some things that Sci-Fi author Larry Correia had said recently in a podcast concerning the Sad Puppies-Rabid Puppies controversy, and how it struck me that by pursuing their current strategy the publishing houses are ignoring huge markets of people willing to buy books and are cutting their own throats.

He broke in saying, “I know, I know…But look, Sam…you gotta stop thinking. Just stop thinking! Thinking about all this will drive you crazy! Don’t go to bookstores, if they even still have any where you live. Don’t look at other books. You’ll just wonder how in the world this thing even got published,” and then told me some more anecdotes about how the sausage is made. He then quoted Otto Priminger, saying “Nobody knows anything.”

It was sad. He’s a good man, and was just as frustrated about it all as anybody, but he’s stuck fighting a literati who only look for books that support the current narrative, and is left trying to sneak in what stories he can, however he can.

 

Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – May 25

So if somebody unfamiliar to me wins an award I was up for, and more importantly gets a big contract while I’m left begging for more porridge at Mr. Bumble’s Workhouse, I honestly give serious thought to the premise that I have missed something that excels in a way my efforts do not.

By contrast, a glance at some of the rhetoric issued by {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts} establishes a deep and unwavering belief that he, and those who work in his wheelhouse, represent the bastion of greatness against which the rest of us hammer in vain, like zombies trying to get past a boarded-up window.. To wit, if he hasn’t set the world on fire, if he is not met at the convention gates by a swarm of screaming groupies like the kids at the beginning of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, if books that are nothing like the books he writes get more acclaim than his, the answer can only be that it MUST BE A CONSPIRACY, that justifies an EVEN MORE BLATANT CONSPIRACY. He has no doubts at all. He deserves this. He is angry, Mr. {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}. And it is not just regular anger. It is righteous anger, bringing us to the point that being righteously angry is not necessarily the same thing as being justifiably angry, not even close.

The difference between Mr. {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts} and myself is therefore significant, and it boils down to the statement that while I am very capable of being an asshole about many things, I am not an asshole to that extent or in that particular way.

I also possess discernment about some things that apparently still confuse him.

For instance, I have absolutely no difficulty identifying my elbow. It’s the place in the middle of my arm that bends.

 

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“The Hugo Ballot, Part 15: Back to Novellas” – May 25

Okay, I’m surprised.  Tom Kratman’s “Big Boys Don’t Cry” actually reads in places like an anti-war story.  Well, let’s not get carried away here — it’s more a story about the harm that fighting wars can do, the ways in which a personality can be twisted and perverted by the aims of those in command.

Maggie is a Ratha, an intelligent fighting vehicle who has been through countless battles, and been made to forget some of her more disturbing actions.  She has been mortally wounded and is being taken apart for scrap — but the more the workers drill down, the more she starts remembering things that now seem to her to be problematic…..

 

Joseph Tomaras on A Skinseller’s Workshop

“Hugo Short Story Ballot” – May 24

“Totaled” by Kary English is too good a story to be tarred with the brush of a slate. It makes good use of not-as-far-future-as-those-unfamiliar-with-the-field-might-think neuroscience to explore the mind-body problem, the relationship of emotion to cognition, and the furthest limits to which careerist self-sacrifice can drive a person. I wish it had first appeared either in a free online venue, or a magazine with broader circulation than Galaxy’s Edge.

Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plane” attempts to cover similar ground, but there’s a crippling contradiction between the short story form, which requires some measure of crisis for the protagonist, and the author’s evident desire simply to set up a world that is confirmatory of the narrator’s Thomistic metaphysics….

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“Jeffro Johnson Hugo Nomination Fanwriter Sample” – May 25

This might be the best of the Puppy Fan Writer nominees. At the very least, I can see real substance in it that doesn’t work for me, but surely will for its intended audience.

 

Andrew Hickey on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

“Hugo Blogging: ‘Best’ Related Work” – May 25

For fairly obvious reasons, I am not going to give anything on those slates a ranking above No Award. Once again, however, I am grateful that my aesthetic instincts match my moral ones here — while these are (with one notable exception) much less incompetent than the fiction I’ve read so far, none of them are actually, you know, good.

Here’s how I’m ranking them.

Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli is half writing autobiography/how to break into SF manual, and half collection of short stories. Basically imagine The Early Asimov, but with Antonelli replacing Asimov and Gardner Dozois replacing John Campbell. Antonelli tells the story of how each of his stories was written, and how it was accepted or rejected. The difference is, though, that Antonelli has had an undistinguished career, lasting roughly a decade, while Asimov was one of the greats of the genre (at least in sales and critical status). There is an intrinsic interest in Asimov’s juvenilia which there just isn’t for Antonelli. The stories were pedestrian, and there were no real insights, but this might be of interest to someone. It’s not *bad*, just also not *good*…..

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Short Story: Reviewing L Antonelli” – May 25

“On A Spiritual Plain”, Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2, 11-2014)

If this had been longer than fifteen pages I would not have finished it. After I did finish it I looked up the elements of a story to see what was missing.

 

Martin Wisse on Wis[s]e Words

“Preliminary thoughts — Best Graphic story Hugo” – May 25

During the various discussions about the Puppies, the Hugo Awards and everything somebody, I think it was Erik Olson, made the excellent remark that new Hugo categories only make sense if there are enough good candidates each year for it. If there only one or two or even five different candidates in any given year, what’s the point? It occurred to me that the converse is also true: any given Hugo category only makes sense if the Hugo voters are knowledgeable enough to actually vote for more than just a handful of the usual subjects year after year. Otherwise it means you just have an even smaller than usual group of people nominating and most people either not voting, or only voting for names they recognise.

The Best Graphic Story category, which was first awarded in 2009, at first seemed to fail that second requirement. The first three awards were won by Girl Genius and you do wonder whether that was because people recognised Kaja & Phil Foglio from fandom, rather than for the comic itself. The Foglios themselves were gracious enough to withdraw after their third win and since then the category has improved a lot, having been won by three different comics since. I’m still a bit skeptical of how well it will work out in the long term, or whether it’ll become just another category most people won’t care about, like the best semi-prozine or best fan artist ones and just vote by rote, if at all.

On the other hand though, if there’s one thing the Hugos, as well as Worldcon needs if it wants to stay relevant, is to get in touch with wider fandom, to not just focus on the old traditional categories. And comics suit the Hugos well. There are plenty of science fiction comics published each year, even omitting superhero series and there does now seems to be a core of Worldcon fans invested in nominating and voting. Since there isn’t really a proper comics orientated sf award yet, haivng the Hugos take up the slack is an opportunity to make them relevant to a primary comics geek, as opposed to a written sf geek audience.

 

Cheryl Morgan on Cheryl’s Mewsings

“The Wages of Sin” – May 25

Yesterday Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, announced that they now have 9,000 members. Fannish mathematics thus makes it the first billion dollar Worldcon1.

On the back of this unexpected windfall the Commie Pinko Faggot Feminazi Cabal that controls Worldcon via Tor Books has announced the 10-year, $3.4 million deal for its primary gamma rabbit author, John Scalzi.

Scalzi’s editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, explained the rationale behind this move. “It was a tough decision,” he said, especially as none of Scalzi’s books have sold more than a dozen or so copies, mostly to his friends and family. The convention revenue simply doesn’t cover the shortfall.” ….

 

Declan Finn on A Pius Man

“The Anti-Puppies (Sad Puppies Bite Back VI)” – May 26

[Putatively humor.]

[GRR Martin …gapes, blinks, then turns to NKJ] And you, hold on a second. You’re not content with having a personal vendetta and an online feud with Vox Day, but you want to deliberately taunt the Dark Lord of the Fisk!? Have you no sense of self-preservation?

[Scalzi frowns] I thought he was the International Lord of Hate

[Jemisin] Anything he says to me will prove that he’s a racist!

 

Declan Finn on A Pius Man

“Putting down the puppies (Sad Puppies Bite Back VII)”  – May 26

[Three hours later, down the road, lying in wait, are the Evil League of Evil. Tom Kratman tirelessly watches the road, awaiting the dog catcher truck.  John “Dr. O. No” Ringo, now that the sun is down, furiously taps away on his laptop, cranking out a rough draft of a 15-book series on an alien invasion. Larry Correia, the International Lord of Hate, is fisking the entire back catalog of The Guardian. The Cuddly Skeletor, Brad Torgersen, clutches the flamethrower on loan from Larry, looking like a kid waiting for Christmas morning.]

[LC looks up]  I’m running out of Guardian articles.  Are they coming or not?

[TK growls, frustrated]  I don’t see them sir!  We still have the Claymore mines ready and waiting to blow them straight to Hell at the first sign!  Assuming the land mines in the road don’t get them first! Or the three backup snipers!

[LC]  Geez, Tom, are you sure that we’ll even need to fire a shot, assuming they ever get here?

[TK] Better to be prepared than not, sir!

[LC sighs, closes the laptop, and stands up, taking care not to hit the flagpole above him]  Okay, everyone, we’re packing up. Brad, sorry, no flamethrower for you tonight.

[Brad, frustrated that he never got to use his flame thrower on the self-destructed anti-Puppies, fires it off into space.  The massive fireball makes it way to low orbit.  It impacts and explodes against a low-flying alien spacecraft, a scout for the incoming armada.  The armada, thinking their surprise has been ruined, turn around and retreat. The wounded ship hurtles in an uncontrolled descent, slamming right into Tor’s officers, taking out the entire suite of offices, and a few cockroaches — including an intern named Joe Buckley, but no one noticed one way or another, since interns are all disposable anyway. But Joe died happy. He FINALLY got to see an exploding space ship!]

 

Dcarson on Steve Jackson Games Board & Dice Forum

“Mars Attacks (Worldcon)” – May 24

Played Mars Attacks this weekend at Balticon. We noticed that the cities showing were all ones we had been to a Worldcon in. So for the next game we sorted through the city deck and if we allowed San Diego as the site of a Nasfic we had 16 city and monument cards. So a 4 player game of Mars Attacks the Worldcon.

 

 

501 thoughts on “Disney’s “101 Nominations” 5/25

  1. Will wrote

    “Voters in the Paws of an Angry Puppy”

    You’re on fire today!

  2. @Stevie: Oh, there are plenty more authors, some modern, that manage to excel at both sf and fantasy (and lets face it, I don’t think of Vance as that good an sf author, his qualities lied in other areas).

    Some examples off the top of my head:

    Lois Bujold has written both first-rate fantasy and sf. Yes, she’s not the prose lyricist that Vance is (but then who is?), but she’s far better at world-building and plotting.

    Michael Swanwick is also a fantastic author, equally at home in both genres. His _The Dragons of Babel_ is just amazing. (Note: the middle square in the Puppy bingo shouldn’t be “dinosaur” or “SJW”, it should be “sodomy”.)

    Going back a bit we have Tanith Lee (a toast in her honour), Poul Anderson, and Roger Zelazny.

  3. I suspect that there was very little actual involvement of GamerGate participants who did not identify as SF/F readers before hearing about the Puppies. That’s not the problem.

    The problem is that Puppy leaders tried to recruit a mob of misogynist doxxing trolls as shock troops (in addition to Day, I mean). Whether they succeeded or not is another matter. My view of them is also formed by the attempt.

  4. My weigh-in on Weinbaum:

    Weinbaum is probably best known for his short story “A Martian Odyssey”, which is a truly seminal work of science fiction published in 1934. The concepts in it have been repeated many times since by other authors, so it probably won’t be as mind-blowing to modern readers as it was then, but even so it contains a really great early example of a truly alien-seeming alien being.

    However, it is not the place to look if you’re interested in Weinbaum’s treatment of female characters — as far as I can recall, there weren’t any women in that particular story. Most of his other stories do, however (such as Patricia Burlingame in “Parasite Planet”, “The Lotus Eaters”, and “The Planet of Doubt”) but bear in mind that his stories after “A Martian Odyssey” are very pulpy in feel, so you might want to only check them out if you like the really early pulpy sci-fi era.

    I suspect if your looking for his depiction of female characters specifically you might want to look at his posthumously published novel The Black Flame. I haven’t read it, only his short stories, but Samuel R. Delany compared the main character to Joanna Russ’ Jael and William Gibson’s Molly, and said that Weinbaum was “a man particularly concerned with the construction of his female characters.”

  5. Chris Hensley on May 26, 2015 at 1:14 pm said:

    Because there wasn’t one until Brianna Wu brought it up.

    Demonstrably false. Correia has been openly courting GamerGate for a while now. VoxDay has openly declared his support for GamerGate on many occasions, and has stated that the Puppies are a skirmish in the “wider culture war” being engaged in by GG. Puppy leadership has appeared in pro-GG spaces appealing for support, including an appearance by Torgersen on a podcast put out by HoneyBadgerRadio who were thrown out of the Calgary Expo for GG related shenanigans.

    So more attempts to victimize and scapegoat Brianna Wu, huh.

  6. I always think of science fantasy as planets + psi/magic. Modern exponents, Lee/Miller (Liaden), Doyle/Macdonald (Mageworld) and just lately, Judith Tarr’s latest.

  7. ‘Conjure Wife’ is horror, and I don’t do horror stories; this leaves me with trying to find the dividing line between horror and noir and/or dark fiction which I do read.

    This isn’t easy, but at least it prevents me from encountering stuff marketed as horror which I know I’m really not going to enjoy. Also, I used to hide behind the sofa whilst Dr Who was on so I’m probably not qualified to say anything about the genre at all…

  8. Andrew P said: “They can’t both be right. If GG were truly involved before the nomination process closed, given how visible and active GG is, there would have been a lot more noise and numbers from the GG side.”

    This has been discussed before, but you’re operating from a flawed premise. You’re assuming “GamerGate” is an organized movement of a consistent and measurable size that operates as a group, whereas in fact they’re a mob of people whose numbers have never been formally quantified with no leadership, who operate as individuals connected by nothing more than shared presence on social media and a shared goal of harassing Zoe Quinn…er, ethics in gaming journalism.

    So it’s distinctly possible that when Correia and Beale reached out to the Puppies for assistance, the fact of which has been repeatedly confirmed, they got a sufficiently large number to sway the ballot (which could have been as few as a hundred) but not a sufficiently large number that the movement adopted the Puppies’ cause en masse. And certainly, given that Correia and Beale and Torgesen all have been promoting a narrative of “GamerGate? What GamerGate?” then any GG members who did help out would understand that trumpeting their affiliation now would be counterproductive.

    tl;dr: Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. 🙂

  9. Aaron on May 26, 2015 at 1:22 pm said:
    What is known is that Correia and Beale both actively courted GGers.

    And I think that’s what needs to be held onto. That is simple fact.

    It doesn’t matter all that much to me whether they got appreciable, or any, response.

    Correia and Beale deliberately tried to recruit people known for stalking, violent threats, abuse, doxxing, rape threats, bomb threats, and SWATting.

    That damns them, right there.

  10. Yeah, last time it was TNH who was accused of getting them all riled up. And leaking nominations. I’m sure by next week it’ll be someone else.

    I don’t think we need a Bingo card. I think we need storytelling dice, one with characters and one with incidents. Roll them both to figure out who will be randomly accused of what this round!

  11. Abi Sutherland on May 26, 2015 at 1:46 pm said:

    Yeah, last time it was TNH who was accused of getting them all riled up. And leaking nominations. I’m sure by next week it’ll be someone else.

    I don’t think we need a Bingo card. I think we need storytelling dice, one with characters and one with incidents. Roll them both to figure out who will be randomly accused of what this round!

    What, which woman is responsible for goading them into creating the Puppies this time?

  12. I’m sorry. That’s not fair. The Puppies are perfectly willing to scapegoat men as well, as long as they can label them unmanly somehow.

  13. @Peace Is My Middle Name:

    So more attempts to victimize and scapegoat Brianna Wu, huh.

    That is exactly what I am accusing the responsible posters of, yes. This is just GG performing it’s daily two minutes of hate. I’m not even certain they know why they’re doing it anymore. They just know that they’ve always been at war with Brianna Wu.

    More generally: Members of GamerGate are an organized portion of the Puppies, and have been since before nominations closed. The leader of the Rabid Puppies openly affiliates himself with GamerGate, as does many of his vocal supporters and those throwing around the #SadPuppies hashtag. I have not seen evidence that there was a great influx of outside GamerGate nominators, but the leaders of the Sad Puppies and the mass of Rabid Puppies have declared themselves to be part of the GamerGate movement.

  14. Hmm I know Lovecraft is a touchstone for horror fans (and I do read a fair amount of horror) but I’ve never been able to get into his stuff. I keep trying because I feel like I *should* but…meh. My favorite Lovecraftian thing is Welcome to Night Vale.

    I don’t know if I’ve read any Howard but Burroughs didn’t do much for me and I sort of think of them in the same basket. I’m willing to be proved wrong. I enjoy pleasant reading surprises.

    I’m pretty sure I read Star Man’s Son as a kid. The plot summary sounds familiar, and I know the book I read was Andre Norton, but it seems to me the book I read was a hardcover book and had an African-American looking woman on the cover. But maybe my memory is squishing two different books together.

    I’ve been meaning to get around to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories forever.

  15. Chris Hensley on May 26, 2015 at 1:56 pm said:

    @Peace Is My Middle Name:

    So more attempts to victimize and scapegoat Brianna Wu, huh.

    That is exactly what I am accusing the responsible posters of, yes. This is just GG performing it’s daily two minutes of hate. I’m not even certain they know why they’re doing it anymore. They just know that they’ve always been at war with Brianna Wu.

    More generally: Members of GamerGate are an organized portion of the Puppies, and have been since before nominations closed. The leader of the Rabid Puppies openly affiliates himself with GamerGate, as does many of his vocal supporters and those throwing around the #SadPuppies hashtag. I have not seen evidence that there was a great influx of outside GamerGate nominators, but the leaders of the Sad Puppies and the mass of Rabid Puppies have declared themselves to be part of the GamerGate movement.

    Serial drive-by wall-o-text poster and Puppy apologist Tuomas Vainio, who keeps showing up here to drop very large, very ignorant posts and promptly declare that he is leaving, has identified himself as a GamerGater.

  16. Cmm, I think Lovecraft is much better taken these days via his influences on others. 🙂 He wasn’t really wrong in some of his self-criticism about the limits of his craft, and you can get the good parts in the work of people like Caitlin Kiernan and Laird Barron.

  17. I find it darkly amusing that Jeffro’s response to someone thanking Kowal for giving them fiction in which women are people with agency (you know, sort of like the real world) is to say no no, don’t thank her, and also you should read this man.

    It’s just so…perfect.

  18. Comparing GG to a hydra (or hell, to HYDRA, stupid salute and all) is pretty apt, in my opinion. It looks like there’s a rabid core of a few hundreds guys (at most) coordinating in IRC channels and setting up their websites and so on, who are primarily MRAs and anti-feminists, not gamers or SFF fans although they may play Call of Duty and read some good-old white male hero protag SFF from authors like…well, Correia and Torgersen. But I don’t see any evidence that they have a genuine interest in either video games or SFF lit as a medium — their interest is only in pressing their culture war in any venue where they sense a vulnerability. This is probably the group that worked with the Puppies to mess up the Hugos. They like to trumpet about games and SFF “belonging to them” and act like everyone who isn’t them is some kind of interloper and thief, and in both cases they are factually wrong. That doesn’t stop them, however, because they’re not about facts, they’re about propaganda.

    Then there’s a much larger group of random GGers who think it’s fun to harass women on Twitter and scream about SJW cabals and so on. This is a pretty diverse group. It includes some Troo Believers — mostly young guys whipped into a frenzy by the idea that somehow “letting the SJWs win” means they won’t have CoD or Monster Hunter International any more and will have to spend their days playing Depression Quest and reading Joanna Russ and Sheri Tepper. It includes a lot of snickering trolls, some who think they are cleverly mocking “outrage culture” by faking great outrage about things like “ethics in games journalism” when they know perfectly well it’s hogwash. And it includes some people just trying to make a buck, like Milo at Breitbart, Vox Day, and quite few Youtubers of various stripes.

    I think the lesser heads probably are not terribly interested in the Puppies because messing with the Hugos just isn’t as much fun as endlessly ranting about Anita Sarkeesian. VD may hate Scalzi with a passion but I would bet your average GGer probably either hasn’t heard of Scalzi (he’s not on Youtube!), considers him not a very interesting target (a white male? What fun is that?) or may even actually like his stuff (I would say “Redshirts” would be right up the alley of your average media-focused young male nerd.)

    But the primary head just wants to hurt the “feminazis” and “affirmative action minorities” unfairly taking creative and monetary opportunities away from deserving straight white guys and ruining their escapism comfort zones with novels that aren’t clear about gender, or are accepting of non-binary sexual identities, or that ask them to step into the skin of someone of a different race for a while. This bunch are definitely deeply involved in both GG and the Puppies, I would wager.

  19. @cmm,

    Heiro’s Journey had the black woman on the cover. (With an afro no less.) She was a disappointing character but you get the feeling the author was trying to do the right thing.

    Howard is not at all in the same basket as Burroughs. ERB was a pioneer and a brilliant creator… but Howard’s artistry is unsurpassed. Those first several Conan stories are astoundingly well crafted. I can’t get over them. I will never get over them. I say that as a card carrying member of ERB’s target audience.

  20. cmm: ” I know Lovecraft is a touchstone for horror fans (and I do read a fair amount of horror) but I’ve never been able to get into his stuff. I keep trying because I feel like I *should* but…meh.”

    I also find it a lot easier to enjoy Lovecraftian-inspired work than the work of the Old Master. I was very impressed by Richard Wadholm’s Astronomy, for one example.

  21. One way you can tell your relationship to SF is warped, from whatever source:

    “I don’t know if I’ve read any Howard but Burroughs didn’t do much for me and I sort of think of them in the same basket.”

    Your first thought is “What does Conan have to do with Naked Lunch?”

  22. Chris Hensley – I have not seen evidence that there was a great influx of outside GamerGate nominators, but the leaders of the Sad Puppies and the mass of Rabid Puppies have declared themselves to be part of the GamerGate movement

    It’s where the leaders of SP/RP dragged their rhetoric and arguments from certainly, most likely as bait hoping they could get a few GamerGaters to help them pad the votes. It might’ve added some numbers but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of cross interest.

  23. Steven, you’ve read Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod”, I hope? (For those unfamiliar, it’s pretty much “Tarzan as written by William S. Burroughs”.)

  24. It’s where the leaders of SP/RP dragged their rhetoric and arguments from certainly, most likely as bait hoping they could get a few GamerGaters to help them pad the votes.

    VD and his followers seriously believe what they are saying in this regard. VD likes to trumpet his success as a video game designer, leads workshops on video game design and a lot of their methods could easily have crossed over from online gaming communities.

  25. @Bruce Baugh: Steven, you’ve read Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod”, I hope?

    I have not! Another thing for me to track down!

  26. Regarding Brianna Wu: when a number of GamerGate types were told that Brianna’s husband Frank Wu had won a few Hugo awards, that was just extra incentive to come in and mess up the entire thing.

  27. Lovecraft is a great writer I don’t think he’s a particularly difficult author to read either. Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath remains one of my favorite things to re-read.

  28. Nick Mamatas: Lovecraft was good, and difficult, and not everyone’s taste. Like, really not to everyone’s taste. Not “once you appreciate how his writing works, you’ll come to appreciate it”.

    Some are fans of his writing, and some don’t give a rats about his original work, it is the use to which other people put the mythos that is important. And some love both.

    For me, his writing leaves me cold, but Gaiman and Stross’s uses of the Mythos makes it an awesome and significant thing.

    Shoggoths Old Peculiar is, IMHO, the single greatest Lovecraftian work, and thats including every borrowed use of the mythos and every work by the man himself.

  29. Nick Mamatas: Here’s another reason to hate me — I enjoyed the writing of Clark Ashton Smith. So go figure.

  30. I’m only on P2 of the comments, so this may have already been addressed and I just haven’t gotten to it, yet.

    Amazon ratings:
    I’m out of NDA terms now, and I’m anonymoused, so I can disclose that I’ve worked at Amazon in a role directly related to analyzing ratings metrics against other types of metrics.

    In books, Amazon.com reviewer ratings have no significant statistical correspondence to sales, awards, market/pro reviews, or anything else of note. Amazon.com “people who liked/bought this also bought” is a better indicator of all of the above, and is not publicly disclosed.

    Ratings (especially “stars”) and reviews correspond much more strongly to sales in categories like women’s shoes and the general “Marketplace”. A chili paste with 121 4* reviews will continue to sell heavily, while one with 4 3* reviews will fall off of the Marketplace.

    When categorized according to OS&D (over, short, & damaged), customer service, price, quality, and a couple of others, arts & media category reviews type under non-measurable “quality” (measurable being stitch count, observable defects, etc.) i.e. subjective measures, while Marketplace reviews and ratings slant heavily towards objective/measurable/observable defects or fault of the supplier or carrier.

    In other words, Amazon reviews for books, media, and other arts/crafts are the equivalent of fanfic reviews: a lovely ego-boo, and producers should enjoy the strokes, but it is not a significant indicator of economic, political, or social dominance in any Marketplace other than that of Amazon reviews. Which is a community itself, much like fandom, including long-running memes, in-jokes, parodies, fisking, and other forms of fan-fun.

    Being dropped into the deep-end of Amazon.com reviewer culture to try to extract meaning was one of the most surreal experiences of my professional career, and that wasn’t even my Prime Directive, just part of the research to define the scope of the question. Bizarre and fascinating.

    TL; DR – Authors who use Amazon reviews as a measure of anything are ignorant of the facts. Fortunately, ignorance is curable. Refer above.

  31. I think we broke our Nick! does anyone have a spare charged up and ready to go?

  32. mintwitch, Fascinating! Nice to hear from someone in a position to actually know.

    Mike, I also love Clark Ashton Smith’s work.

  33. Cat on May 26, 2015 at 5:37 am said:

    If someone has released information about how many Hugo nominators come from which country, I’m unaware of it. I would also be interested in that information (and the same about the voters) if it is available somewhere.

    Every (relatively recent) WorldCon releases numbers on how many *members* come from which country, state, province, etc. You can look it up on line.

    AFAIK, No WorldCon releases demographic data on which of those members nominated or voted. They probably don’t even collect it. I doubt they would unless the Business Meeting asks them to.

    .

    Petréa Mitchell on May 26, 2015 at 8:27 am said:

    All that made it to SMOFs before the announcement was oblique discussion of a couple of nominees that broke the embargo, with no names attached. To this day I still have no idea who one of the two was.

    That matches my recollection as well.

  34. @Jeffro Johnson, while I love Weinbaum’s fiction, I don’t find, “No, you shouldn’t like this current woman writer if you want real women characters in your fiction; instead you should be reading this man who had an sff writing career of about 18 months back in the 1930s” to be especially persuasive. In fact, it’s downright laughable.

    Much as I love Weinbaum’s work, for reasons that ought to be obvious to you, but perhaps aren’t, I will continue to spend most of my fiction reading time on writers, both male and female, who are more contemporary, who are aware of the real issues and challenges of life in the 21st century. While valuing past writers for the wonderful things they gave us, they did not give us everything that would ever be possible in sff, nor were they processing today’s world in writing their fiction. Weinbaum’s, just for the most obvious example, reflects a world in which WWI was a living memory, WWII was gathering on the horizon, telephones were still far from universal, and an ocean crossing typically took weeks, not hours. He did wonderful work. And he also reflected the world of the first big wave of independent working women, after the slaughter of the First World War, and before the post-WWII push to get Rosie the Riveter back in the kitchen so that the returning male soldiers could take their jobs.

    He was a fantastic writer. He doesn’t replace writers who are processing the world I live in in their fiction.

  35. Mintwhich : TL; DR – Authors who use Amazon reviews as a measure of anything are ignorant of the facts. Fortunately, ignorance is curable. Refer above.

    Put it this way – TK waffles on about Amazon reviews and VD boasts about blog hits. And John Scalzi announces a $3.4 million book deal. Which side do you think uses the more important metric?

  36. Eric wrote:

    Well, maybe next year someone will right a fluff fan piece about Day and all his other online personas, and they can include the posts where he harassed people to the point of suicide, and helped shut down various fora. The he can put out a middling apology, and all will be forgiven, and a fan Hugo will be in order?

    Your characterisation of Laura Mixon’s detailed, long and intensively article about Requires Hate/ Benjanun Sriduangkaew as a “fluff fan piece” shows your bias as well as your ignorance of the piece itself. (Implying that Mixon is a mere fan is insulting as well.)

    However, to address your complaint – there is no need to write an exposé of Beale because he has not spent more than a decade creating separate personas and cultivating people by one persona attacked under another persona. Beale uses sockpuppets but they are clumsy things and easily detected. And Beale himself seems to feel people spend far too much time criticising him, if quotes from his blog are anything to go by.

    If you are trying to paint Miss Hate as worse than Beale for her actions, there’s certainly an argument that she has possibly done more real world harm to individuals. However Beale’s advocacy of marital rape and of shooting young girls in the head to stop them being educated, not to mention his truly noxious views on race, give support to a dangerous element in society who would destroy women and non-white people if they could get away with it, and certainly do all they can to keep them subjugated. The degree of damage to all of society by people like Beale outweighs Miss Hate’s toxicity among a small sector of it.

    Her apologies were seen as self-serving at the time and largely dismissed as such at the time. Certainly her continuing behaviour means they cannot be taken seriously now, if they ever were.

    You also miss something very significant about Mixon’s report. Beale is frequently criticised by his political opposites – sensible conservatives, liberal and progressive left wingers, and so on. Sriduangkaew was exposed by people ostensibly on the same side of her alleged social justice campaign (I say alleged because her actual commitment to social justice is a demonstrable fraud). In other words, we policed and exposed one of our own. That’s what should happen when people care about actions, not stances.

    For your complaint to have any validity, the ‘fluff fan piece’ talking about Beale’s real offences should be written by Larry Correia or Brad Torgenson (or David Freer?). But I can confidently predict this will not ever happen.

  37. Sometimes when I’m feeling pithy I’ll call Lovecraft “great, but not necessarily good.”

    Basically, he fails utterly — doesn’t even attempt — most of what I like in the other writers I like. Little things like having actual characters. And he could be abhorrent in his views — infamously. Yet, I’m still a fan. There were things he did well that nobody else, not even his many very talented imitators, has managed.

    On the other hand, I often do like the efforts of his very talented imitators, Neil Gaiman in particular.

    There was a theater group in Seattle — Open Circle — that did a Lovecraft adaptation every year for Halloween season, and some of them were fantastic. My favorite was the year they did a trio of classics — The Shunned House, Cool Air, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth — pretty straight, except with female protagonists. It changed the stories very little, but some of those changes were really interesting.

    Sigh. I miss Open Circle.

    Anyway, I would recommend anyone who just doesn’t see what the Lovecraft fuss is all about to have someone read one of his major stories out loud to you.

  38. If you are trying to paint Miss Hate as worse than Beale for her actions, there’s certainly an argument that she has possibly done more real world harm to individuals.

    Both have done things so utterly f’ed up, that arguing which one is worse is purely an academic exercise.

    You also miss something very significant about Mixon’s report. Beale is frequently criticised by his political opposites – sensible conservatives, liberal and progressive left wingers, and so on. Sriduangkaew was exposed by people ostensibly on the same side of her alleged social justice campaign

    This can not be stressed enough. As much as I disagree with some of those on the ‘side’ Mixon claimed to be a part of on a great many issues, they refused to be involved in harassment, violence and threats of violence. In fact, they outed the misdeed of their own allies, rather then look the other way because it was convenient or actively defend those negative actions out of a sense of solidarity.

  39. Shoggoths Old Peculiar

    Apropos of nothing, this story title sounds like the best name for a beer ever.

    A web search reveals that a brew pub in Illinois agreed with me. We could all be drinking Shoggoths Old Peculiar while reading “Shoggoths Old Peculiar.”

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