778 thoughts on “Far From the Barking Crowd 6/24”

1. … now I remember that I wanted to respond to Kyra’s list of lesbian SFF books …

   I hear ya. In the shower, before work this afternoon. Head-slapping moment as I realized I should have recommended Jaime Hernandez’ Locas stories from Love & Rockets comics.

2. Macnee’s alive, it’s a death hoax making the rounds.

3. This YA discussion is very interesting but only adding to my confusion. It seems there are two distinct characteristics used, formally or informally, to identify books appropriate for young people: 1. difficulty of language and 2. appropriateness of topic (e.g. explicit sex vs. coming of age). But every individual develops differently on those two distinct axes.

   I’ve been puzzled when trying to buy books for young relatives. One cousin asked me for recommendations for her 13-year old who is reading Hyperion. Another cousin asks for books that don’t have any monsters or other scary stuff, nor any depression or self-harm for a 12-year old who is a slower reader. And then there are 18, 19-year olds who can’t read complicated sentences but are definitely dealing with complex life issues.

4. @Eve: Those were YA? I didn’t realize that. (They were on the recommended shelf.)

   I would second Eve’s recommendation for Megan Whalen Turner’s Thief books. While apparently there are more to come, they work pretty well as standalone novels (although it probably doesn’t hurt to read them in order).

5. Unfortunately, while there was some confusion, it looks as if Macnee is, in fact, gone.

6. YA and sex & relationships. I think in the category there are
   1. books that are children’s literature of a quality that makes them accessible and enjoyable for a much broader age range. These books are accessible to children, possibly (but necessarily) shorter than adult books but, in movie terms, sort of PG. They probably aren’t focused on romantic or sexual relationships. Other more grown-up themes such as war and death may be more common. The Earthsea trilogy, Coraline.
   2. books that are aimed at teenagers. These books may have a very strong focus on sexual and/or sexual relationships – perhaps even more so than books aimed at adults.
   1 and 2 crossover in terms of books focused on characters coping with new social relationships in a school or school like setting.
   3. books that are not age specific literature but which are very accessible reads that for arbitrary reasons suit a YA classification (perhaps a young protagonist). Not SF/F but The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was sometimes marketed as YA. The Alex Awards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Awards ) are interesting to consider there. I’d think of this category as a bit more prudish than 2.
   [I’d add 4. books that are violent and scary and disturbing that adults would shy away from recommending for young people but are appealing to teenagers because they are violent and scary and disturbing. Lots of Stephen King]

7. Yes, Love and Rockets, and the Legion of Superheroes, before they got weird and split up into two series at the same time (still puzzled by that); there was a long-running sub-storyline dealing with two of the women coming together in a very subtle 1990’s way. And by “subtle 1990’s way” I really mean “reading between the lines because we’re not going to commit ourselves to actually having lesbian characters but you just might like to see these scenes anyway”.

   As for whether Harry Potter was YA or not: it didn’t matter to me, we all enjoyed it. I’d classify those books as “appealing” rather than any other genre.

8. Hampus Eckerman: Soon people will call Lord of the Flies a YA book also…

   Ummm…I read it before I was 16. As a school assignment. I’ve been avoiding it (and 1984, and Animal Farm) ever since.

9. I really appreciate this round-up’s link to the Bunglespleen tumblr. I started clicking around the archives and I found this there…

   …and I basically want to shove it into the face every man (and it’s almost always a man) who has ever told me, “Why are you so focused on whether the work is sexist or racist or –ist? It should be all about the sensawunda!” or, “OK, if you want to get bogged down on issues like that, that’s your prerogative; but as for me, I can forgive the odd bad characterization because what I really read SF for is the fantastic ideas!”

   This post that the Bunglespeen tumblr reblogs and responds to does a better job than I have ever managed to do of saying “Yes, and when you’re not the actual sort of person whom the work posits as less than human, it’s a lot easier to abstract on the ‘fantastic ideas’ and squee over your sensawunda, isn’t it?”

10. @ Kevin, and yet the categories of the Rita Awards (the romance genre’s most prestigious award) are indeed based (mostly) on content: Best Historical, Best Contemporary, Best Romantic Suspense, Best YA, etc.

    That the Ritas are not as prestigious as the Hugos is an outside-looking-in value–that is, the romance genre is generally sneered at by everyone who doesn’t read or write it (which romance writers maintain is because it’s a genre for women, by women, about women, and that it is therefore actually the most political of genres…. but I digress). But within romance, the Ritas are the most prestigious award.

    (However, they’re also voted and judged VERY differently, which eliminates a lot of the confusion about which category a book belongs to. Rather than being based on popular nomination, writers enter their own books, so the novelist chooses which category her book is in. This ensures that a YA book gets judged in YA, not in Contemporary Romance or Historical Romance. I’ve no idea how that would work with the Hugo system of nominations.)

11. @redwombat Sadly it appears not.

12. @ Kurt Busiek: ” that was a long time ago. As the YA category grew into a phenomenon, boundaries were pushed, and pushed quite successfully.”

    Agreed. I haven’t read much sf/f-genre YA, but 4 years ago, I spent a whole summer reading mostly YA, and what I found is that the tone or darkness isn’t what separates YA from adult fiction. In these books, there was rape, violence, sex, profane language, suicide, murder, substance abuse, racism, etc. Tough subjects, handled head-on, no coyness or flinching. The difference was that the POV characters were all teenagers, not adults, and the stories were about teen lives, not adult lives.

13. > “Please do! … I’m very interested in your take!”

    Well … OK. I hope I don’t regret this, I know these are much loved books.

    I can’t go into it as deeply as I can with Harry Potter, because I haven’t read Kingkiller as deeply because I didn’t like them. I fully admit that there could be subtleties I somehow missed entirely. Lots of people I know, including ones I think have good taste, love them.

    Ultimately, the Kingkiller Chronicles struck me as a fairly straightforward story about an awesome guy who thinks he’s totally awesome and everyone else is either brought around to agreeing that he is awesome because they are overwhelmed by his awesomeness or they will never acknowledge his awesomeness because they are bad evil people who are also jealous of his awesomeness.

    Since I kind of hated him and wanted him to die, I didn’t end up liking it.

    When I’ve said this to other people, I’ve generally gotten one of two responses:

    1) Yes, that is the straightforward story, but Kvothe is just that awesome and I love him for his awesomeness.

    I can’t really argue with this. My main argument that the books are not good is that the “awesome guy” story is for a number of reasons (including that it’s overdone) hard to pull off, and I don’t think Rothfuss manages it. But if you think he did, well, that comes down to opinion and I do seem to be in the minority.

    2) No, it is not the straightforward story. You have missed everything. Kvothe is the one telling the story, and he in an unreliable narrator. It is in part an examination of the nature of narrative and how fact turns into legend.

    If this is true, then it is a MUCH more sophisticated story than I am giving it credit for. But I just cannot see it. And I was looking for it. I was actually hoping for it. But I see no evidence in the “present day” scenes that anything Kvothe is saying is not meant to be taken as literally true.

    In fact, everything we see him do, such as go out and kill a whole bunch of monsters, reinforces the narrative rather than contradicts it. The main impression I got from the “present day” scenes is that Kvothe is so awesome that the mere act of pretending to be not-awesome is somehow literally killing him, because his body is rejecting the not-awesomeness.

    So … well. That was my take.

14. Kevin Standlee,
    This is logical. And very very understandable. It is clear that YA has a lot of SFF in it now, full of complexity and deserving of awards. It is also clear, that there is little agreement about what is YA SFF compared to “Adult” SFF. And, watching people argue on this board makes me understand why there is a committee for it.

15. Sometimes I appreciate a book more when I view it as YA. I know Octavia Butler is one of the greats but I always found her prose pedestrian until I read Parable of the Sower with a group of teenagers. Then it suddenly worked for me.

16. P.S. Wish I could remember the name now, but one of the books I read that summer, which I chose because it was on various “Year’s Best” lists, was about a 13 year old boy, a 8th grader, who’s listening to a set of recordings sent to him by a classmate of the same age who has recently committed suicide. The recordings tell the story of her final days, and what led to her decision to kill herself. One of the incidents is that she was present when 2 of their other classmates raped a girl they know–also all their age–about 3 feet away from where she was hiding at the time.

    Booksellers and librarians tell us that young readers tend to read about kids their age or a little older than themselves, so this book was presumably aimed at junior high kids.

    There were also various articles in the media that year wondering why so many YA books were so dark. (I’m guessing it’s because more kids than we realize are dealing with this shit.)

17. John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series is quite good

    also, although not SFF, L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack series

18. Red Wombat: really? the story seems to be all over the place: and the Grauniad links to a statement from Macnee’s son on what sure looks like an official website.

    I only wish it were a nefarious plot for Steed & Peel to defeat.

19. Just randomly, it looks like File 770 has officially replaced Making Light in the Puppies minds as the locus of the Puppy-kicker army.

    I suspect the actual reason is the ping-backs that hit the key Puppy blogs when it is included in the daily round-up. Even my tiny blog gets visitors from Puppy sites if I link from a post of my own to, say, John C Wright’s blog. So puppy supporters are more likely to follow the ping back to here and then read the comments?
    Making Light doesn’t link as often to Puppy blogs as here?

    Also, I assume they would regard the people who comment at ML (or Scalzi’s Whatever or GRRM’s live journal) as to be so deeply embedded in the hive mind as to be incapable of independent thought. They may assume the commenters here are spitefully and willfully not agreeing with what an awesome idea the Puppy campaigns were.

20. P J Evans:

    Yep, I read it in school too. Together with Candide, Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird and Grapes of Wrath. I skipped out on Crime and Punishment.

21. Briefly de-lurking again to say that as someone who read a lot of what was then marketed as YA fiction as a tween/young teen in the early-to-mid 1980s, I’m baffled by the claim that YA cannot have strong sexual content, or that its inclusion is in any way a recent development. Works of that era by Judy Blume, Norma Klein, Julian F. Thompson, M.E. Kerr, and many others frequently included sex scenes, some of them rather (and famously) explicit.

    That said, none of those were SFF. I read plenty of that, too, of course, but little of it was marketed as YA.

22. Kyra, that was more or less my reaction to Kingkiller Chronicles as well. I made it through the first one, as I kept on expecting it to get good at some point, since people raved about it so — but the second one made me so bored that I almost felt made enough to throw the book across the room. I kept trying to figure out what people liked, but when I got to the fairy sexcapade, I’d had enough. I find Ferret Steinmetz’s take to be rather entertaining.

    I know other people here like it a lot though; I’m really glad it worked for you.

23. Just randomly, it looks like File 770 has officially replaced Making Light in the Puppies minds as the locus of the Puppy-kicker army.

    I assume that ML is talking about the Puppies and their pronouncements less and the Hugos themselves more.

    We’re almost there though.

24. How do you know when a series is over? Cryoburn looked like the last Vorkosigan book. Then Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance *really* looked like the last book. Is Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen the last book?

    I’d love to see the series roll right on into a new generation, with Miles and Katerina slipping into the roles Aral and Cordelia once held.

25. Kurt Busiek said: “I wonder. If Torgersen and his pals get consistently voted under No Award, as the rules provide for, will he view that as democracy in action as much as he’d see victory that way?”

    According to what I know of psychology, the answer is no. Brad has internalized the idea that his politics are the norm, and that opposition to his beliefs is limited to a noisy fringe minority. As such, any sign of mass agreement with his views is taken as “the voice of the people”, while any sign of mass disagreement is clearly the work of a tiny minority putting their thumb on the scales in some way. He’ll continue to rationalize away the Puppies’ unpopularity as a conspiracy even in the face of overwhelming and direct evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised, depending on what kind of nomination and ballot data gets released after the awards, if he doesn’t start claiming that the awards committee is falsifying the ballot data. It’d be one way to keep his worldview consistent in the face of evidence to the contrary.

    In happier/funnier news, is anyone else reading ‘The Severed Streets’ by Paul Cornell? There’s a hilarious celebrity cameo at about page 110. I wouldn’t spoil, but it has easily one of the best jokes in Cornell’s works, and I say this as someone who’s been a fan of his for decades.

26. Hampus Eckerman: Yep, I read it in school too. [It being Lord of the Flies.]

    So did I. I also had to read Pincher Martin for my A levels when I was 16-18. I’ve been avoiding Golding ever since, because I loathed both books with a deep and abiding loathing.

27. I have no problem with someone disliking the Kingkiller books; I haven’t even attempted to read them, on the basis that if the interview with the author which I did read simultaneously bored and repelled me then the odds that the books will too are extremely high.

    Also, mere king killing seems unambitious; nowadays I expect at least a god, though I suppose an emperor would be acceptable for a short read…

28. A Cumberbatch too far? He’s playing Rumpole on Radio 4.

29. Ok, what I can say is that what is now known as YA is totally different than what I’ve learned before. It is just something to accept, I guess.

    I checked in at our local store and seems like we have started to copy the american categories now. Mazerunner is a youth book. So is Hunger Games. Battle Royal is not. Seems a bit arbitrary.

30. John Seavey: He’ll continue to rationalize away the Puppies’ unpopularity as a conspiracy even in the face of overwhelming and direct evidence.

    The thing is, evidence isn’t always the best way to change someone’s mind on things. You’d think it would be, but it’s not.

    Research by Gal and Zuker in 2010 indicated that, “The results from [their] other two experiments (involving the participants’ beliefs about vegetarianism/meat eating and Macs/PCs) were similar.

    “In all three cases, Gal and Zucker found that doubt turns people into stronger advocates,” writes Yong. “More subtly, their study shows that this effect is stronger if someone’s identity is threatened, if the belief is important to them, and if they think that others will listen. It all fits with a pattern of behaviour where people evangelise to strengthen their own faltering beliefs.” [My emphasis.]

    I also found an interesting site which suggested a way around this – for business people anyway.

31. We never positioned Battle Royale as a YA novel.

    (I’m the US editor of the book, but as always I speak only for myself when commenting here or anywhere else online.)

32. @Laura Resnick:

    Was the book Thirteen Reasons Why?

33. Jane_Dark

    Thank you for the link to Ferret’s bravura review. I’m deeply, deeply grateful that I never invested any time in reading the books…

34. @ MPM Rommel: The suggestions in that article you linked are similar to suggestions in the book GETTING TO YES from the Harvard Negotiation Project. Wisdom I tend to remember only long after positions have already become entrenched.

35. I said the Hunger Game pits teenagers against one another in a battle royale, which may be the source of the confusion. I didn’t mean the book, I meant a free-for-all to the death.

36. Kyra

    I would likewise be happy to argue that the Kingkiller Chronicles are, well, not good books.

    I thought I was the only one who thought that.

37. Gabriel F:

    Ah, no, it wasn’t anything you said. It was just me wondering why books that are so a like (mazerunner, battle royal, hunger games) would be seen as in different categories.

    He, I actually have it easier to place Battle Royal in the YA category, but thats because I read the Manga first. 😛

38. Kyra and Jane_Dark, I’m with you.

    After finishing The Name of the Wind, I was reminded of another series – shorter, but with much more likeable characters. So I reread Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed and felt much better. Didn’t read the rest of the Kingkiller Chronicles and now I’m glad I didn’t.

39. Hey, all. I’ve had a request to post a single page, easily linkable (and ideally cleaned up) version of my lesbian romance SFF recommendations somewhere, and I’m having a little trouble figuring out a good place to do so. Any suggestions?

40. @ Kyra

    Throw together a wordpress blog for it? Fast, dirty and free.

41. YA Tolkien:

    Gandalf: The Early Years.

    Our plucky young hero, Gandalf, (simply called ‘Grey’ among his crew), along with his sidekicks Elrond and the ever-brooding Isildur, enters Mr. Sauron’s Wizarding School for Wayward Waifs. Gandalf immediately forms a bitter rivalry with the gifted, yet troubled Saruman, while seeking the heart of the lovely Galadriel. Will ‘Grey’ and his crew uncover the mysteries of the mysterious and rarely seen Mr. Sauron before it’s too late?

    Read volumes 1-17 to find out!

    I’d buy that in a hearbeat!

42. Kyra: I recommend Medium for that sort of thing.

43. As such, any sign of mass agreement with his views is taken as “the voice of the people”, while any sign of mass disagreement is clearly the work of a tiny minority putting their thumb on the scales in some way.

    Conspiracy theories, such as the ones the Puppies have posited, are self-reinforcing ideas. Any evidence that the theory is incorrect is just more evidence that the conspiracy is suppressing the truth.

44. @Laura Resnick Thirteen Reasons Why (Or Th1rteen R3asons Why) by Jay Asher?

45. Brad thinks that the Hugos are corrupt because the current voters are wrong; any No Award will just be further confirmation.

46. Kvothe was also a bit of a bastard and apparently sucks at nothing which annoys me no end. I also blame the whole draccus fiasco on his stupidity/arrogance but Kvothe is apparently incapable of determining he was the catalyst for the unfortunate situation. I was also hoping The Chandrian were going to be a bigger factor but they have yet to be.

47. In re: The Kingkiller Chronicles (which I laughed at when I learned that was the name of the trilogy, because, yes, it’s silly)

    All valid reads, and I would tilt towards the Unreliable Narrator camp, although we won’t know to what degree until book 3.

    The fairy sexcapade was far and away the worst episode in any of the books so far. My eyes rolled so far back, they fell on the floor.

    What saves the books for me, and really why I love them, is that Kvothe is a kid, essentially. He’s only a few years older than HP when he goes to university, and even in the contemporary scenes he seems in his 20s–not even late 20s, I think. He is insecure, poorly socialized, defensive, egotistical, and most of his problems are his own fault, even before he gets to University. (With the notable exception of being orphaned.)

    For me, the teenaged male braggadocio of the story, with it’s core of insecurity and social fears, works. It’s a nice contrast to fantasy heroes who are written as really that awesome, no caveats, no subtext, no unreliability. Kvothe being largely unlikable is part of why I enjoyed the books.

    All of that said, if book 3 sucks rocks, I disavow everything I’ve ever said or even thought about Kingkiller, Rothfuss, Kvothe, and the horse they rode in on. Never happened! (No fairy sexcapades, please, Mr Rothfuss! Think of the children…)

48. I bounced off Kingkiller as well. My reaction was there was nothing he could not do because .. He was awesome.

    I keep planning to try again once there are a few books out; I think he has 2 of the planned three written at this point ?

49. Simon Bisson — The young Rumpole as I recall, so it’s not too much of a stretch. And it’s voice acting only, so if you can keep the image of Sherlock/nuKhan/Frankenstein out of your mind’s eye, and perhaps think of a younger, sleeker version of Leo McKern, he serves quite well.

    Also, old news, Cummerbund started playing Rumpole last year.

50. Adult fiction: Warning contains scenes of Ikea flat pack furniture assembly.

    I cannot believe the filth you Christ-hating crusaders for Sodom post.

    Everything I know about Christ-hating crusaders for Sodom assembling flat pack furniture I learned from this video…

    https://youtu.be/P_10vkCgS3k?t=11m10s

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