397 thoughts on “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Puppy 5/6”

1. “… and Rcade with the default avatar?”

   Speaking of which, how do you get an avatar here? I am not a white Fisher Price man standing in a gray room. I am a human being.

2. Rcade, I believe you need a Gravatar account.

   GK, That’s some great… word stuff you got going but ignores the point I was calling you out on. Namely “GK apparently can’t distinguish between the name Peace Is My Middle Name and their warped Mona LIsa avatar, and Rcade with the default avatar?” as in, you quoted Peace, but attributed Rcade. But… sure. Blame MY reading comprehension. *rolls eyes*

3. I’m pretty sure I’m well in the range of “an average SFF fan”

   GK, your talk is just way too smart for me. All your talk of

   “Of course, the fun of all of this and why I do engage, is I’m never going to convince them. They are loyal agents of their camp. However, the more they talk, the more they attempt to black list and add words that were never spoken, or in the case of puppies not talking to women, just flat out lie, the more people will notice.”

   just goes over my head. All I notice is that the loudest voices on one side of this argument seem to be far bigger assholes than the ones on the other side. And for the “average” fan (like myself) I suspect that counts for far more than how clever you think you are, or the subtlety of your ‘traps’ that you set, etc etc.

4. Clif, I think part of the issue is that Puppies don’t seem to quite understand sarcasm, satire, and hyperbole. So when someone says “Man, have you even TALKED to women?” it reminds me of this conversation

   Brint: Or the way Hansel combs his hair?
   Meekus: Or like, doesn’t, it’s like, ex-squeeze me, but have you ever heard of styling gel?
   Brint: I’m sure Hansel’s heard of styling gel, he’s a male model.
   Meekus: Uh, earth to Brint, I was making a joke.
   Brint: Uh, Earth to Meekus, duh, okay I knew that!
   Meekus: Uh earth to Brint, I’m not so sure you did cuz you were all ‘well I’m sure he’s heard of styling gel’ like you *didn’t* know it was a joke!
   Brint: I knew it was a joke Meekus, I just didn’t get it right away!

5. You’re missing the point, Steve Moss — just as GK was.

   The reason we’re wondering if he has any acquaintance with women is that he seems to find the women in John Ringo’s fiction realistic.

   It’s just hard for people who know actual women to read John Ringo’s fiction — which I do enjoy, in much the way I enjoy, for example, potato chips — to believe that anyone would find his female characters accurate portrayals of human beings.

6. @alexvdl

   since they obviously don’t get irony … one shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t get satire, sarcasm, or hyperbole …

   but still didn’t see the “trap” or the “gotcha” in that argument.

7. his Posleen War books in which the daughter of the primary character in the first three books takes on a significant role.

   And in which every woman is stacked and subject to sexual remarks and innuendo, including the thirteen-year-old daughter. That was one of the reasons I gave up reading that series. (The others included poor continuity and lack of plot beyond ‘redneck saves world’, which only works for about one and a half books before it’s dead.)

8. Max – ‘In debate parties agree on definitions, establish baselines, and present research that both parties either must treat as a basis for debate or debunk with equal research. In this dispute, however, I’ve noticed to a lot of people that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s much easier to simply say “My research is true, but I refuse your own,” and turn to outright mockery, playing off magnified and exaggerated flaws to undermine their “opponent” in the public eye rather than dispute their data. Why bother to admit that you might be wrong when you can merely mock someone and “win” that way?’

   It would be a mistake to characterize this a debate in the conventional sense. SP/RP put forth accusations on the community at large that a segment of the audience was being ostracized, was told they weren’t welcome, that awards were being given due to reasons of affirmative action and fiction where message overrode story over the last ten or so years of the Hugo awards. Blackgate’s Matthew Surridge and George RR Martin broke those ideas down to find evidence of such and found none.

   Of course it could be they’re own politics prevents them from seeing such. However when asked in good faith for examples and evidence of such, like the accusation that people who read Sci-Fi but not the right Sci-Fi are troglodytes in this very thread, it’s excused away. There’s no debate, there’s repetition of accusations without evidence and various grandstanding. To be fair there’s some the other way around as well with calling of misogynists, racism, due in part to the association of individuals involved (and some of the SJW rhetoric used) that’s not really related to the claims of the Sad Puppies.

   Since the people accusing Worldcon of being not inclusive, of being hijacked by a secret leftist cabal, of being more interested in affirmative action than good old fashion Sci-Fi, have not or can not back up their claims it’s impossible to debate. Instead it’s just the same accusations day in and day out. It’s ridiculous in the most literal terms, deserving of and inspiring ridicule.

9. “Did I write that here?”

   Yeah, you kinda did.

   If you want to explain how a woman ceases to sound like a woman if she has too much agency, enlighten us. Throwing shade at me doesn’t explain your comment about Ringo, and it’s so unintentionally revealing I’d enjoy hearing more about it.

10. Hope you’re feeling better Mike.

11. Oh, you were thinking of Posleen? I was thinking of the _March_ books with a woman soldier called Sargent Ima Hooker, who at the start of the book has altered her uniform to make it sexier, (I think one of the lines was “showed every movement of her small, but firm, breasts.” I invite you to contemplate for a moment Sargent I. M. Giggolo whose uniform is made of a lighter material to “show every movement of his small, but firm, crotch.” Sound stupid? Yes, yes it does. They don’t let you alter your uniform; I checked to make sure. There is a real problem with rape and sexual harassment in the military because way too many male soldiers think of their sisters in arms as being “just hookers” and here comes Sargent Ima Hooker to help with that! Why didn’t he give her a middle name, “Justa”? Or maybe two middle names, “Justa” and “No-count”? Or did he think that would be jumping the shark?

    And then there’s _There Will Be Dragons_ with the fifteen year old boy who was paralyized most of his life ending up being a big hero with really improbable riding and archery skills because he played–wait for it–video games. And a fifteen year old girl who gets stuck in unicorn form who gets raped a lot, gets locked up (by the good guys yet) with horses and who ends up falling in love with the strongest stallion because “he keeps the other stallions off me.” Yes, that’s right, the fifteen year old boy is a hero; the fifteen year old girl prostitutes herself to a stallion to solve her problems instead of using her human problem solving abilities, which would start with saying “hey, you know perfectly well I’m a human; let me the hell out of here” and work their way up from there–she can kill any of the stallions at any time with that two foot horn on her head, after all.

    When one character forgets the fifteen year old girl is a human being, that’s an issue of one flawed character, and doesn’t mean anything about the author. When a lot of characters forget, that’s an issue of a flawed society see above. When everybody in the whole book forgets, including the girl herself it is time to entertain the possibility that there might be some systemic problem underlying it.

    But hey, nice that you think she’s got so much agency she’s not really a woman anymore. I think I may have found the problem.

12. What Matt Y said.

    The first time I heard this claim that SF had descended into some morass of left-wing message-fic, I was like, “huh? In what universe is Ancillary Justice more left-wing-messagey than, say, The DIspossessed, which won a Hugo forty years ago?” Black Gate and GRRM elaborated on the “huh?” in much more detail. Nick Mamatas challenged the Puppies to give a specific list of works over the past 20 years (since Torgersen or Correia had originally asserted that this rot began setting in during the 1990s) that substantiated their accusation.

    And the Puppies have done everything in response except answer those questions.

13. Cat, to be fair, you ARE ALLOWED to modify your uniform. But only if you are, or have been the Chief of Staff of the Army.

    Applicable line from AR 670-1 , page i
    It does not apply to the Chief of Staff of the Army, or former Chiefs of Staff of the Army, each of whom may prescribe his or her own uniform.

    That used to be applicable to all flag officers, but that changed within the last ten years, I believe.

    All of which is to say, yes. You are correct, I just felt like throwing out that piece of trivia.

14. “And the Puppies have done everything in response except answer those questions.”

    Yep. In his Sad Puppies 3 announcement post, Brad Torgersen called recent Hugo Award winners the beneficiaries of “affirmative action” but didn’t name a single work as evidence. He’s never provided any. The net effect is to degrade the achievement of all the winners who belong to minority groups, which I regard as a thoroughly unprofessional and sleazy charge for one SF/F pro to make about others.

15. Seth – ‘And the Puppies have done everything in response except answer those questions’

    Up to and including how Torgerson reached his slate since he responses in the thread he created for recommendations did not match the slate he put forth, which is ironic given the accusation that the Worldcon was excluding community voices. Nick pointed out though Brad’s connections to those on his final slate in a past thread. The RP slate includes those who are financially tied to that creator’s publishing house and was put forth by a man who says he doesn’t care for the convention or the awards.

    We’re nerds. If there was evidence to pick apart and debate there would be great fun in doing so. Instead it’s just a lot of avoidance and absurd statements.

16. To support the motion to drag it back to “the stories” and “evidence” 😉

    I’ve gotten different answers on this from my friends, but I am curious to any Puppy or Puppy-supporters:

    What’s the “message” in Ancillary Justice that gets in the way, if any? What is the problem with it? (Since it’s one of the two novel-length works I’ve seen complained about, and I just (finally) finished it.)

17. Alexdvl.

    I stand corrected in the matter of the uniform of the Army Chief of Staff. 😉

    (I did not know that, actually. That’s cool. However, I suppose once one has reached the rank of Chief of Staff one is not prone to make humorous (or sexy) alterations of one’s uniform.)

18. Cat,

    Now I’m imagining Gen. Odierno wearing a beer helmet during the Army/Navy game. That would be great.

19. @Alex,

    “as in, you quoted Peace, but attributed Rcade”

    Ah my bad. However it does illustrate the point of why listening to you is largely a waste of time if that is the amount of “gotcha” you’ve got going.

    @delurking,

    “The reason we’re wondering if he has any acquaintance with women is that he seems to find the women in John Ringo’s fiction realistic.”

    Nope you are missing the point. The point was whether Ringo was misogynistic and specifically whether he showed women with agency. Ringo obviously does show women with agency. I happen to think, much like some of his feminist critics, that he writes men with breasts, but that’s a different discussion.

    @PJ Evans,
    “And in which every woman is stacked and subject to sexual remarks and innuendo,”

    I am informed by relaible sources that this is likely the most realistic part of his description. And it again misses the point which is about the characters agency.

    @rcade,
    “If you want to explain how a woman ceases to sound like a woman if she has too much agency, enlighten us”

    Because that has been the critique of his characters as exemplified by Evans comment. The concern isn’t agency it is that they are not female or that if they are they are subject to societal norms of harassment.

    I should be clear, I stopped reading Posleen after book, I think, three. It just didn’t grip me at all. But that being said the assaults on his characterization of women as lacking agency are laughable. They are either not strong enough or too strong.

20. “They are either not strong enough or too strong.”

    I’m not going to belabor the point any more. I had enough fun with your comment.

    Generally, when I evaluate female characters in a novel I don’t think it’s possible they could be too strong to seem female, or demonstrate too much agency to seem female. I can’t use examples from Ringo because I haven’t read him yet. But entertainment these days is full of bad-ass female protagonists, and I don’t stop thinking of any as convincingly female because of their strength.

21. GK, you’re the one who misinterpreted what I said multiple times. It’s not the first time you’ve done it. It is the first time you acknowledged you were wrong, so I guess that’s something.

22. @Cat And a fifteen year old girl who gets stuck in unicorn form who gets raped a lot

    Well, that went to a dark place I can’t unsee – searching for a citation / source text for this, I found writing worse than authors mentioned in this thread, on a forum with a short story called: Fates of the Unicorns – Rennae’s Rape. I won’t link it, it’s the first Google response.

    So, John Ringo has an untapped market there, it would seem. Whether or not he can contain his loathing while pitching it to them is another thing entirely. Yes, they’re furries. Yes, there are multiple similarities. I believe it’s called “horseshoe theory“.

    @GK Chesterton Of course, the fun of all of this and why I do engage, is I’m never going to convince them. They are loyal agents of their camp. However, the more they talk, the more they attempt to black list and add words that were never spoken, or in the case of puppies not talking to women, just flat out lie, the more people will notice.

    Given that some members of the puppies are actively stealing my schtick, and are abusing Aristotle (without knowing their Hegel) I’m tempted to wander over and start throwing some weight around.

    And not in the nice fashion that is done here, I’m talking old school rules of engagement – on their terms, not on the neutral territory, bared teeth and proper growling. We’ll see how I feel in a week or so.

    However, I’ll leave you both with this:

    “What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

    This goes for both sides – to be fair to the puppies they at least are aware of the concept (however much their self-righteousness precludes it working), while some of the less aware ‘snowflakes’ really aren’t. Then again, most of the SF/F responses are not from the worst Twitter warriors and so a little bit of mutual respect would be good.

    “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeC285uL6_w

    p.s.

    Note to hosts: please make your comment section scroll downwards – constantly having to go pages to get the conversation is a little jarring.

23. @Steven Schwartz-
    On the Ancillary books, the only thing I can think of that would bother them is the pronoun usage shtick. That gets their knickers all in a twist. It also starts a bit slowly, perhaps they just glanced through the beginning?

    I’ve seen a number of Puppies assert that anyone who says they enjoyed the book is lying, so there’s definitely some problem.

24. Maximillan – ‘On the Ancillary books, the only thing I can think of that would bother them is the pronoun usage shtick. That gets their knickers all in a twist. It also starts a bit slowly, perhaps they just glanced through the beginning?’

    Not a puppy but it twisted my knickers because it was annoying and the use of such I never felt was justified or given any sort of context in the story. Sure it’s a computer but even then I’d have assumed it would’ve used gender neutral terms instead. I also had a problem with the reliance of sheer coincidence to explain major events in the book.

    Didn’t see a message in it though unless it so closely mirrored my own thinking that I just didn’t notice.

25. @Maximillian:

    I started Ancillary Justice last night; I either just finished chapter 4 or am about to start it. (I don’t feel like turning the ereader on to check.)

    The beginning of the book certainly does throw a lot of stuff at you, and I can see how a casual reader could be thrown for a loop. After all, not only do you have multiple time frames going on, but the multiple-bodied “I” is a bit bizarre. Next to those, “I don’t grok gender, so I think of everyone as ‘she'” is nothing.

    That’s not a criticism of the book, BTW. I’m just saying that it takes some work to settle into the story, and that’s something I like getting from SF. There’s a good deal of “aliens are alien” here, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

26. I am informed by relaible sources that this is likely the most realistic part of his description. And it again misses the point which is about the characters agency.

    And you miss the point, which, among other things, is that most women aren’t stacked, most thirteen-year-old-girls have no figure to speak of, and the sexual remarks and innuendo have nothing to do with the story – that’s teenage-male-libido expressing itself inappropriately.
    None of that qualifies as ‘agency’, even though it’s about three-quarters of his writing of female characters. They only have ‘agency’ when he needs something done which would make a man look silly (or stupid).
    That doesn’t fix the other problems with his writing. Which I’m sure, that you, in your great knowledge and wisdom, have noticed.

27. @Anna Feruglio Dal Dan : Nobody’s going to test you on it.

    Hmmm – now THERE’S an idea for restricting voting on the Hugos…

    @James Davis Nicholl: [Leo Frankowski] Dropped by Baen in 2004 for “bad writing” (which suggests there is prose and/or plotting so dreadful even Baen won’t touch it!)

    Really? The Stargard series seems right in line with the oeuvre of Ringo or Correia. I guess he was just before his time (no pun intended).

    @Peace Is My Middle Name: I had the impression that in Ringo’s most popular books many or most of the female characters are underaged sex slaves, prostitutes, and small hordes of teenage hangers-on, sometimes without even names of their own.

    And when they’re not, esoteric alien technology will be used to ensure they at least have massive tits to ensure readers can remember them…

    And speaking generally of “staying within the rules” in RPGs – feel free to listen to this Spoony story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3AEBnH1kAM

28. Sure it’s a computer but even then I’d have assumed it would’ve used gender neutral terms instead.

    Not a computer, exactly (more like AI in a humanoid body), and after you read a bit you find that the Radch don’t have a gendered language (or, AFAICT, a gendered society), but some of the other species/races do, and pronouns show up there as you would expect (Breq has trouble figuring which ones to use, sometimes).

29. “I’m just saying that it takes some work to settle into the story, and that’s something I like getting from SF.”

    I think the perception that a book takes some work can be to its advantage at Hugo time. Readers who have seen it all from SF/F over the decades want to be challenged and get a reward for their effort.

    Correia often speaks of his own books as if they are merely an entertaining read, yet he thinks that they should be worthy of Hugo consideration. I find those two ideas incompatible. There are hundreds of SF/F novels each year that are entertaining, gripping, exciting stories. There needs to be something more than that to get a rocket.

30. @P J Evans most thirteen-year-old-girls have no figure to speak of

    You’re showing your socio-economic background. Ciswhite, comfortable, correct?

    Berkley: Girls in homes without a biological father are more likely to hit puberty at an earlier age, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

    https://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/09/17/puberty/

    As a neutral observer: don’t do that thing where you assume your empirical knowledge is actual fact.

    I’m actually on your ‘side’, but you won’t see it.

31. @Matt Y
    Why did you expect gender neutrality? The character explains at the beginning that they are concerned with passing as a non-AI and picking female as a guess has the highest success rate against planetary demographics.

32. From the report:

    Last month, a study of 1,200 girls led by BCERC researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center found that about 15 percent of the girls showed the beginnings of breast development at age 7, an increase from similar studies conducted in the 1990s.

    Moral of the story? Don’t flood your water supply with estrogens or pump your food full of grow hormones.

    Bonus round: that was five years ago in the USA.

    So, unless people can get down and get groovy with some actual research, let’s cut the rhetorical flourishes on both sides, ya?

33. Perhaps you should read your own link, which provides this qualifier for the finding: “but only for girls in higher income households.”

34. Matt Y: “[Ancillary Justice] twisted my knickers because [the all-female pronouns] was annoying and the use of such I never felt was justified or given any sort of context in the story”

    Actually, I thought it was given perfect context in the story. Imagine that you’ve grown up in a culture in which eye color, rather than gender, is a huge part of everyone’s identity. Then imagine someone from another culture, who is color-blind, trying to parse your culture. As far as they’re concerned, everyone looks the same, and they don’t understand how you natives are able to recognize the difference — or why there is any value in doing so, since to them, all that matters is what a person says and does, and eye color doesn’t have anything to do with that.

    That is how the main character in AJ perceives those around her. Her perspective is “I get that this distinction means something to you, and I’ll do my best to respect it and speak to it, but I really don’t understand it.”

35. Perhaps you should read your own link, which provides this qualifier for the finding: “but only for girls in higher income households.”

    Perhaps you should read a little bit further and hit the other parts mentioning different studies. It’s a tentative PR report from 2010.

    There’s been a lot of science done since then, it’s your job if you want to snark to go find it.

    Pro-tip: Have you heard of the angler fish?

36. “On the Ancillary books, the only thing I can think of that would bother them is the pronoun usage shtick.”

    As someone who speaks a couple of languages that do not have any gendered pronouns at all the usage in the first of the books is weird and suggests that the author is not actually familiar with any such languages, but I have not bothered to check the author’s credentials.

    I would have suggested using it.

37. Actually, rcade, if you read past the first paragraph there are two studies referenced. One is the study of higher income girls (444 participants). The second was a study that published a month earlier (1200 participants).

    It was the 1,200 participant study, which did not link to income, that referenced the onset of breast development at age 7.

    I have no idea why this matters (other than we should be taking steps to keep our children, children until natural biology intervenes), but Gibarian is not wrong.

38. “Berkley: Girls in homes without a biological father are more likely to hit puberty at an earlier age, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.”

    This stuff is discussed from time-to-time at West Hunter.

    The question is: Is the precocious sexual development a facultative response to the absence of fathers or is it that mothers (and fathers) are passing on a package of genes that includes precocious sexual development and the selection of Cads for the fathers of their offspring.

39. I have no idea why this matters (other than we should be taking steps to keep our children, children until natural biology intervenes), but Gibarian is not wrong.

    Read the first response:

    @P J Evans most thirteen-year-old-girls have no figure to speak of

    This is factually wrong, and horribly sexist / classist, based on an empirically incorrect view of the world. It also totally alienates any women reading the thread as the “male voice proclaiming truth“.

    So, don’t.

    This is neutral territory: fear not, the puppies will face worse.

40. “Perhaps you should read a little bit further.”

    Your comment was wildly misleading. You suggested P.J. Evans was showing “ciswhite, comfortable” bias and quoted a summary of a study that appeared to back you up. But the very next sentence of that summary showed your quote (and the study it describes) didn’t support your argument at all.

    It’s bad form in a discussion to misrepresent a link like that.

41. It’s bad form in a discussion to misrepresent a link like that.

    You’ve still not read the link, have you?

    Ok, Steven Jackson
    time:

    Do you want to turn to page 101 and get slammed by about 8 scientific studies all showing a correlation between the outlined theory

    Or

    Do you want to turn to page 255 and admit that you’re posturing in front of an angry bull and are not wearing anything but bright red boxer-shorts

    ?

    The choice is yours.

42. Beyond Anon: “As someone who speaks a couple of languages that do not have any gendered pronouns at all the usage in the first of the books is weird and suggests that the author is not actually familiar with any such languages, but I have not bothered to check the author’s credentials. I would have suggested using it.”

    I’m quite sure Leckie is aware that there are languages in which pronouns are not gendered. Her choice to use primarily female pronouns was not due to her not realizing that there were other options; it was a very deliberate choice on her part.

    I personally find all the hullaballoo over the female pronouns wildly amusing. I found it a bit distracting for the first few pages, then my mental processes adjusted, and I just didn’t notice it any more. There was a guy commenting over on Scalzi’s about how he just couldn’t deal with the book because every time it was mentioned that a “she” was in a relationship with a “her”, he kept imagining hot lesbian sex — and he called the book “Chick Lit Space Opera” (which it is anything but). The fact that he was utterly oblivious that these things said nothing about the book and everything about him was rather funny.

43. Gah. Looks like I also need to purchase a few cut-rate italics end tags from one of our resident artisanal posting fences.

44. “You’ve still not read the link, have you?”

    I quoted the link, so quite obviously I visited it.

    You haven’t refuted the only thing I challenged you on: the misleading use of the quote and the study the quote described. Instead, you want to pretend that I challenged you on the overall subject and multiple studies, neither of which I have commented on.

45. Er–not to intrude on this conversation, but has anyone here ever taken a pre-teen girl bra shopping? When the studies refer to “breast development before the onset of menarche” (or even just after), they aren’t referring to much, trust me. Bras in the girls department rarely come in cup sizes higher than A and are usually not sized by cup at all (starter bras, sometimes called “crop bras,” are little more than short, elasticized tee-shirts). Most tweens grow a size or two as their bodies develop, including height and weight. So while I acknowledge that there are “stacked” thirteen-year-old girls out there, they are probably as rare as the thirteen-year-old boys who already have deep bass voices–or (maybe a better comparison), than thirteen-year-old boys who have already gone through their major growth spurts.

    What this means for female characters in John Ringo’s novels, I’ve no idea. I’ve read a few and wasn’t impressed–as I remember, they seemed more like male-wish-fulfillments characters than anything else, even (maybe especially) the ones capable of beating people up, but I didn’t find his books to my taste for a variety of reasons and didn’t really pay that much attention to any of the characters.

46. I stayed away from Ancillary in large part because the couple of reviews I had come across randomly (and these were the praising reviews) were about the pronoun gimmick and not the story (to the point that in one of them, i couldn’t even tell what the story was). Since “this is an important book” is the literary recommendation equivalent of “he’s got a great personality”, in my experience, I passed. May have been a mistake, but that’s how I got there.

47. You haven’t refuted the only thing I challenged you on: the misleading use of the quote and the study the quote described. Instead, you want to pretend that I challenged you on the overall subject and multiple studies, neither of which I have commented on.

    Ahh, one of those.

    Peanut gallery, he went with the worst choice: not having the courage to even do a little research, and not having the ability to step to the choice and with the lack of back-bone to suggest that pedantry will solve this issue.

    Note: I wasn’t interested in you, I was talking to P J.

    Btw, your kind still exist in the wild? I do suppose literary forums are kinder than most.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVV06jTYjeY

    In future: make a choice, make a stand, but please – know what the frakk you’re talking about.

48. Craig (2): “Since “this is an important book” is the literary recommendation equivalent of “he’s got a great personality”, in my experience, I passed. May have been a mistake, but that’s how I got there.”

    I hope you’ll reconsider. The gendered pronoun thing is merely a characteristic of the story and doesn’t really have much effect on the actual plot. Granted, AJ isn’t a typical SF “rockets and robots and shoot ’em up” adventure — but it is an SF adventure story, and anyone who calls this book “literary” hasn’t read it.

49. “However when asked in good faith for examples and evidence of such, like the accusation that people who read Sci-Fi but not the right Sci-Fi are troglodytes in this very thread, it’s excused away. There’s no debate, there’s repetition of accusations without evidence and various grandstanding.”

    Because we know your game. You’re not asking in good faith. When presented with evidence, you will simply redefine and come up with various excuses to claim X is not X. We went through it on the “slate” issue. First it was the claim about 5 per category. Once it was pointed out that there weren’t 5 per category on AND there were other lists with 5 per category, then it was the use of the word “slate”. Then when other “slates” were identified, the distinction between “political slate” and “non-political” slate was invented. And so on.

    George Martin called for “debate and honest dialogue” after writing almost non-stop for days about Brad, Larry, and me. I offered him a debate and he promptly ran away.

    I asked if people would refrain from criticism if we obeyed the newly invented distinction between “slate” and “recommendations” and was promptly informed that it would not matter. It’s the familiar SJW game of “I called heads, and by the way, I have redefined “tails” as heads.”

    See, we actually observe, learn, and adjust. We understand your game, we know you don’t even know what “good faith” is, and we’re not going to answer your questions. We’re not going to present you with any evidence. We know you’re simply seeking to DISQUALIFY and we know no amount of information or evidence will be sufficient to change your little SJW minds. So we’re not giving you anything, we’re simply answering your rhetoric with rhetoric.

    Which is why we’re seeing this sort of message every single day: “You got two more evil minions voting in the hugo awards. Thanks for standing up to these SJW Nazis. Fuck them all.”

50. @Craig (2):

    So far (12%), Ancillary Justice is not an easy book to summarize. Yeah, the pronoun thing’s there – it’s explained in the first chapter. There are two and sometimes three stories being told at once – “present day” and “19 years ago” being predominant so far. Sometime in between there, the narrator went from being a ship intelligence that also routinely inhabited multiple humanoid bodies as needed from inhabiting a single body and trying to pass for organic human. She’s also gone from being the agent of an occupying empire to being on the run with next to no resources.

    I’ve already loaded the sequel onto my ereader. I’m not sure where the story’s going, but I’m coming along for the ride. One thing I have already twigged to is the significance of the book titles. Justice, Sword, and Mercy are three progressively more powerful ship classes…

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