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

1. I think I said a month ago that Vox and Brad have themselves positioned so that no matter what the outcome, they can claim it as a victory condition. If they get No Awarded, they use it as proof that the system is corrupt. If they win a few Hugos, then they managed to force a victory trophy from the hands of the literati. If they manage to win all the Hugos, then they’ve won a complete victory and the literati will have to compete with slates of their own. If the literati use slates of their own , then the Puppy position is justified. If the literati change the rules, then they admit they couldn’t beat the Puppies “fairly.”

   There’s really nothing we can do to change their outlook even a little, so I recommend ignoring their outlook completely. I’d rather talk about books. Buuut that’s me.

2. @NelC 2009 so I discovered!

3. Haha, I put together two billy bookcases this weekend. 30 minutes I think.

4. YA Recommendations: Sylvia Engdalh’s Enchantress from the Stars

   The novelizations of the Girl Genius comics:

   Agatha H and the Airship City
   Agatha H and the Clockwork Princess
   Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

   Mercedes Lackey’s Dragon Jousters series: Joust, Alta, Sanctuary, Aerie

5. There’s really nothing we can do to change their outlook even a little, so I recommend ignoring their outlook completely. I’d rather talk about books. Buuut that’s me.

   That’s pretty much my thought every time someone worries that something or other will set off the Pups. They are going to wail and scream and have exploding outraged heads no matter what anyone does, so why bother thinking about what their reaction might be. We know what it is going to be. They are going to wail and scream and have exploding outraged heads. At this point, why should anyone care what any of them think, on any subject?

6. Jack Lint–yes! That was it–13 Reasons Why.

7. Glenn Hauman on June 25, 2015 at 1:45 pm said:

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

   Stephen Fry assembling flat pack furniture. Even just ten minutes of that video was painful. (I kept on wanting to tell him to take off his sport coat).

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

   Actually, Making Light’s been focused on EPH, desserts, new bikes, and the Confederate flag kerfuffle. There has been the occasional comment on items on the Hugo ballot, but little said on Puppy activities.

9. Kyra –

   So … well. That was my take

   And mine. Add to that there’s plot in the first book appeared to actively hiding behind large chunks of unimportant seeming narrative and the authors constant over usage of adverbs and adjectives for dialogue drove me nuts. He said knowingly. She said grumpily. Etc. Eyes manage to smile and dance and do all sorts of things I normally don’t associate with eyes. I thought it was sloppy as hell.

10. It’s become quite clear from the discussion here that the definition of YA is a moving target, which may make it harder to get a Hugo category established.

    Favorite Zelazny-Doorways In the Sand or A Night In the Lonesome October.

    There was a time when my answer to that question for any favorite author was, “The next one”. For all too many of my favorite writers, I can no longer give that answer. 🙁

11. Doire on June 25, 2015 at 9:54 am said:
    @ whoever thought that Italian conditions might be more conducive to snail mail than the US; last time (admittedly a fair few years ago) I was in Italy I bought a postcard and a stamp and then discovered that I had to find the right postbox to match the stamp to post it in. As it happened I never did find one and delivered it by hand on my return home

    This must be something they introduced since I left, in a glorious tradition of Making Things Complicated For No Reason, as Italians are wont to do.

12. With Scalzi busy with the book deal and Making Light discussing the EPH, it would seem File 770 has been pressed into the role of anti-christ. Do we all have to go to Meggido or just Mike?

13. Kyra–

    Actually, I’d put it up as a Google Doc, for the quickest option.

14. As near as I can tell from the Internet, there was a hoax earlier and so when he really passed away, people started googling and hitting the hoax dismissals, so now it is a dreadful mess and I have seen two retractions and an unretraction on Twitter.

    Sorry to get anyone’s hopes up.

15. Tenar: Even just ten minutes of that video was painful. (I kept on wanting to tell him to take off his sport coat).

    I actually found it heartening; it’s nice to know there’s something I can do much better than Stephen Fry can. Much needed perspective at times.

16. Whenever a celebrity dies, there are a couple of “prank” sites that declare the death a hoax automatically. For example, this link generates generic “hoax” claims.

17. Pettern Recognition

18. It just occured to me that my local public library recently moved all their fantasy books into the young adult room. It sometimes feel weird to venture in there to pick up a book. But I usually chuckle at seeing the spine of something I know is really gory and/or with explicit sex.

    Our bookstore does the same. They don’t even have a sf/fantasy shelf. Most fantasy can be found next to Twilight and that is shelved as “Girl’s books, Ages 14-18”. They do the same with Paranormal Romance, including really explicit ones. I sometimes wonder if a 14-year-old should be reading the Black Dagger-books.

    Sometimes, tough, they get fantasy books that don’t fit into thier concept of “girl-books” (Patrick Rothfuss, Tolkien) and you can see they have no ideas what to do with those and where to put them (usually they end on some kind of side-table and disappear after a few weeks).

    The idea that fantasy=kids books is still strong in Germany.

    My favorite tale though is finding the French “Valerian & Laureline”-comics in the box in which the library put children’s picture books. Anyone who knows the comics, knows that they are very explicit SF comics and not something little kids should be looking at or would be able to understand.
    Granted, that was the 80s but still. To my young self (barely a teenager) it came as a bit of a surprise.

19. With all that talk about YA and sex I’m surprised no-one has mentioned New Adult so far.

20. Most fantasy can be found next to Twilight and that is shelved as “Girl’s books, Ages 14-18?. They do the same with Paranormal Romance, including really explicit ones. I sometimes wonder if a 14-year-old should be reading the Black Dagger-books.

    It’s not an ideal situation, but the part of me that grew up being told that SFF was “boy’s books” and there was basically no seat for me at the table unless I was the hapless girlfriend or the evil queen, I can’t help but squee a little at that.

    (Except for the Twilight part.)

21. “Valerian & Laureline”. Yep, remember them. Were in childrens part of the library here too. No problem with that, kind of safe on violence. And was great adventures.

22. It’s not an ideal situation, but the part of me that grew up being told that SFF was “boy’s books” and there was basically no seat for me at the table unless I was the hapless girlfriend or the evil queen, I can’t help but squee a little at that.

    In Germany Fantasy is very much viewed as girl’s-stuff. It’s also dominated by women and often mixed together with paranormal romance. Science Fiction is still considerd more a boy’s thing although Perry Rhodan (longest German SF-series) has several female writers. But I’ve had SF-readers sneer at me because I tend to read more fantasy than sf.
    Our Star Trek-dinner is usually 50/50 and has been like that for decades.

23. Re: sexually explicit books being shelved in the Girls’ Books section:

    I grew up in a household where despite being Very Concerned about my purity as the firstborn and only daughter (and thus putting many restrictions on what I could and couldn’t do), my parents had Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series lying around, and I think I started reading them when I was 12. They were quite educational.

    The weird thing was that my vocab still didn’t match well to other kids in jr. high, so I used to get teased, because I didn’t know what condoms were, and I kept on saying “you mean condos?”, and couldn’t figure out why everyone would be talking about flats.

    I realized later that if I’d understood that they were talking about sex, I might have had far more to discuss than most … but I didn’t know.

24. Gabriel F.

    I hate to say it, but the arguments against the YA category and what voters “might” do to game the award sounds an awful lot like Brian Z.

    Yeah, but I have confidence that everyone outside of Brian Z. is actually acting in good faith on this one, even if I disagree.

    Personally, I think the YA Hugo is a good idea, as it could be used to get more under-18s involved in Worldcon and the Hugos. I know there might be other ways to do this, but I don’t know of anything as specific that would both act as an incentive for teens to buy a supporting membership *and* give them a greater sense of ownership, leading to more young adult supporters of Worldcon and a larger, more involved fan base. Note: I’m assuming this would be an everyone-votes category, not a teen-only category.)

    (I recognize that not everyone has a goal of increasing Worldcon membership, but at the very least a Hugo for Best YA category would be worth, say a trial run of 3 to 5 years.)

    It’s a mechanism to suck teens in (much like the Sad/Rabid Puppies sucked *me* in such that I’m now attending Worldcon for the first time ever.) If I’d known you could vote on the Hugos, I would’ve been a voter when I was 16 (although the internet wasn’t pervasive then like it is now.)

25. “Our bookstore does the same. They don’t even have a sf/fantasy shelf. Most fantasy can be found next to Twilight and that is shelved as “Girl’s books, Ages 14-18?. They do the same with Paranormal Romance, including really explicit ones. I sometimes wonder if a 14-year-old should be reading the Black Dagger-books.”

    In sweden, that is one year before people are supposed to start having real sex. School has had their first classes on sex education and even “children studies” in case of someone missing the part with contraceptions. So I don’t really think there is a problem with children reading explicit sex scenes at that age.

    When I was young, it used to be The Clan of the Cave Bear that we read for the sex scenes. Mostly the second part.

26. Fifty Pedigrees Below

27. Purebred and Circuses

28. @Will, your avatar is making me misty-eyed.

    “The Avengers” is one of the first sci-fi shows I recall watching regularly.

29. Gabriel F said

    I think I said a month ago that Vox and Brad have themselves positioned so that no matter what the outcome, they can claim it as a victory condition. If they get No Awarded, they use it as proof that the system is corrupt . . .

    Yes, I became aware of Puppies last year and noticed the same thing about Correia. He had left no way for the data to tell him that any of his assumptions were false. If all his conservative SF pieces failed to win, that was prejudice. If one of his conservative SF pieces won, conservative SF was just that good and being ignored because prejudice.

30. @Jane_Dark – *raises hand* I read ’em when I was like eleven. Loved the second one, which scratched all my pre-teen survivalist itches, and kept skipping the bits about him, because seriously, dude was a whiny angst-pile and Ayla was domesticating horses!

    Certainly the first graphic sex I ever encountered in a book. My stepmother dismissed this as “better to learn about it by reading it than doing it.” My mother was less sanguine but I promised to skip those scenes. (I may have lied through my adolescent teeth.)

    I was bitterly disappointed with the way the series ultimately turned out. Chekov’s gun on the mantle for six damn books and actually it’s a metaphor and the real hero is monogamy and dude turns out to be an utter shit stain. Blaaaarrrgh.

    But I’ll comfort read the second one even now because sometimes you just want to think “Yeah, I could totally club a bison to death with a horse legbone if I really NEEDED to in order to survive.”

31. Glenn Hauman: I actually found it heartening; it’s nice to know there’s something I can do much better than Stephen Fry can.

    Even I can assemble flat packed furniture better than Stephen Fry can, and I’m no great shakes at it and infinitely prefer someone to assist. Though even I would have thought to take my coat off before commencing and check that all the pieces were present. You’re right, that is cheering to know.

32. In sweden, that is one year before people are supposed to start having real sex. School has had their first classes on sex education and even “children studies” in case of someone missing the part with contraceptions. So I don’t really think there is a problem with children reading explicit sex scenes at that age.

    In a way it’s the same in Germany but I think much depends on the sex scene in question. And considering the hissy-fit that is currently going around the German publishing-scene concerning “explicit eBooks” and rating them, it is kind of funny.

    Of course, I’m probably the wrong person to judge. I was reading henry Miller at 15/16. And Gor (our library didn’t have much Fantasy but they had a huge number of Gor-books). And of course the old bodice-rippers weren’t exactly tame either and much more problematic concerning questions of consent.

33. Gabriel F

    I suspect that one of the reasons Beale et al are so freaked out by what they perceive as political influence in SF/F is that the really heavy hitters are women; even if we took out JK Rowling as an outlier, the sales figures for Laurell K Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, JD Robb (aka Nora Roberts) are vast. The more the Sad Puppies moan about good old fashioned stories, the more book buyers in general demonstrate that they don’t give a toss.

    There is also the yawning chasm between European views on sexuality and the US; Wright likes to pretend that his views are mainstream Catholic but if you look at countries which are unambiguously Catholic in Europe there is far more acceptance of same sex relationships, and distinct revulsion from Wright’s views. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that he is fighting a losing battle with the Pope when it comes to hating those who are different…

34. @RedWombat — CHRIST ON A CRACKER, yes, that ending was just all manner of wrong. OH JEAN AUEL NO. There, puppies — that’s a story mucked up by a message.

    But The Valley of Horses, yeah, I’m glad I read that when I did. And I don’t think I’ve read it since, but since you mention it, maybe I’ll go look it up.

35. Nick Mamatas said: “Brad thinks that the Hugos are corrupt because the current voters are wrong; any No Award will just be further confirmation.”

    He’ll have more work to do after the awards ceremony, because I’m pretty sure he’s operating under the assumption (again, mainly because it’s the only thing he can believe given the underpinnings of his worldview) that the thousands of new supporting memberships are all heroic and valiant Puppies coming to support him against the CHORFs. Remember, from Brad’s point of view all shows of mass support must be for his point of view, because he believes himself to be the norm.

    If the Puppy slate loses, especially if it ranks below No Award, he will need to rationalize away the inconsistency between what he “knows” is true (thousands of Puppies buying Worldcon memberships to vote for his slate) with the evidence (thousands of people buying Worldcon memberships specifically to protest his conduct). The easiest way to resolve this inconsistency is to assume that the Worldcon committee is lying about the votes and that the Puppies did win but that they gave out No Award anyway and are lying about the vote totals because that’s what SJWs do. I fully expect this to become the new narrative after the Hugos are over.

    I don’t care, because it will still be the delusions of a vanishingly small minority of the SFF community who can stew in their own conspiracy theories all they want, but I’m expecting it.

36. Redwombat: Certainly the first graphic sex I ever encountered in a book.

    I found an uncle’s porn collection (some of which was SF/F porn) hidden in the cupboard of my room when we went to stay with relatives one summer. I’d read them – well, all but two – before my parents and the aunt and uncle discovered that I’d found them and took them away.

    Of course I lied through my adolescent teeth, too, about having read them, something I told my mother when I was in my forties and she was in her seventies. She had always suspected as much, she told me. But on the other hand, at my age at the time (about 13) she was already chasing boys, and was a thorn in her mother’s side and she was more worried about that.

    I gathered she always expected me to do the same with the chasing boys thing, but I never did. I stayed in my room in my spare time throughout my teens and read books, lots and lots of books, which she found very odd. I did the boyfriend thing at university, where I wasn’t being watched.

37. I doubt Brad will accuse Worldcon of mishandling the votes. Instead he’ll blame the Nielsen Haydens, File770, Entertainment Weekly, John Scalzi, Irene Gallo, and various unnamed female homosexuals of color for conspiring against democracy via scaremongering and reverse-race-baiting.

38. As regards big, fat novels with lots of dubious sex (and dubious violence and, I assume, dubious historical accuracy), mine was Gary Jennings — Aztec in particular — although I think I was in college by then, so I assume they didn’t warp me too profoundly.

39. I’m a bit relieved to find out I probably wasn’t being unfair to the Kingkiller Chronicles by steering clear of it. I was sold off the series by someone trying to sell it way too hard.

40. @Gabriel F.

    I think I said a month ago that Vox and Brad have themselves positioned so that no matter what the outcome, they can claim it as a victory condition.

    So you’re saying that Vox Day is David Xanatos?

41. @peace Steed has always struck me as a real pioneer. Macnee and Rigg together in particular were just so far ahead of their time.

42. Simon Bisson : [On Torlings] Psionic Ability: +2 to receive commands from their masters in Newe Yorke’s Flatted Ironne Buildinge.

    “Three Hugos for the Scalzi-kings upon their lawns,
    Seven for the Tor-lords in their hall of irrone,
    Nine for the Baen folk doomed to be victims,
    None for the Dork Lord on his dork throne
    In the Land of Europe where the IRS quails.
    One Puppy to rule them all, One Puppy to find them,
    One Puppy to bring them all and ineffectively loose them.
    In the Land of Europe where the IRS quails.”

    Neil W : This book contains Adult Content including scenes of tax accountancy, daily commuting and explicit gardening.

    What you do in Australia is forbid a teenager from reading it because it has explicit scenes of two people rooting. And then you watch them steal it and get very disappointed in reading it…

    Hampus Eckerman : What we need is more random encounters. I mean, you are walking to work and suddenly come upon a pixie trying to drag away a sock with something heavy in it. Or your subway have to wait because there is some problems with a wondering tunnel troll.

    “The door opens and you enter an 8×8 foot elevator. Inside the elevator with you are [rolls dice] two red dragons and a yeti.”

    David W. : Everything I know about IKEA furniture assembly I learned from putting Kinder Egg toys together.

    Everything I knew about sex the first time I learned from IKEA furniture assembly. And, boy, did I make a mistake with the lubricants.

    Seth Gordon : Over on FB, Adam-Troy Castro pointed out that one of the Tor employees whom JCW described as “Christ-hating” wears a yarmulke.

    I do believe that that’s grounds for endless tantrums about anti-semitism, based on Puppy-logic.

    And lastly (for this post), regarding Lois McMaster Bujold and Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen:

    READ THIS ONLY IF YOU DON’T MIND SPOILERS FROM A PRE-READ!!!

    Jr’er ab fgenatref gb ybir. Lbh xabj gur ehyrf naq fb qb V. N shyy pbzzvgzrag’f jung V’z guvaxvat bs. Lbh jbhyqa’g trg guvf sebz nal bgure thl

    V whfg jnaan gryy lbh ubj V’z srryvat. Tbggn znxr lbh haqrefgnaq

    “Arire tbaan tvir lbh hc. Arire tbaan yrg lbh qbja
    Arire tbaan eha nebhaq naq qrfreg lbh
    Arire tbaan znxr lbh pel. Arire tbaan fnl tbbqolr
    Arire tbaan gryy n yvr naq uheg lbh”

    Funzr ba lbh sbe guvaxvat n cer-ernqre (juvpu V nz abg) jbhyq tvir njnl fcbvyref. Tb naq ohl gur obbx jura vg pbzrf bhg, lbh cbygebbaf!

43. Octavia:

    I’m surprised no-one has mentioned New Adult so far.

    After this many people are so confused just by Young Adult?

    Why do you want to torture them so?

44. Nick Mamatas: I’m Spartacus!

45. @Dawn Incognito,

    The Comparison to Xanatos gambit has been made here.

    Multiple times even.

46. After this many people are so confused just by Young Adult?

    Why do you want to torture them so?

    I’m a cruel, cruel woman. *evil cackle* 😀

47. Dawn: Beale has claimed Xanatos Gambits for a very long time. Even in this, he claims he is “prepared for all eventualities.” P.S.: he hasn’t.

48. McJulie: Oh! Does one of our resident filkers want to puppify the Simon & Garfunkle song “A Simple Desultory Philippic” ?

    I think there’s a much easier choice.

    “In the clearing stands a Puppy,
    A shit-stirrer by his trade,
    And he carries the resentment,
    Of every word that cut him, till he cried out
    In his anger with no shame:
    “I’m boycotting, I’m boycotting”
    But mighty Tor still remains.
    La la la la la lahhh….”

49. Ah. I see Soon was sooner. (Yes, I’ve had that one for a while.)

50. I started watching The Avengers when I was 19, and Emma Peel was hugely important to me because she was strong and suffered no fools and was completely willing to go her own way in defiance of men, women, or whoever — but she smiled all the time. And that mattered, because it felt like the majority of the role models available were either women with way more gravitas than I could muster (Dana Scully) or were weirdly sullen (Buttercup), or were heroines from Christian romance novels who were just smiley and accommodating and obedient. (I was at a Christian university). And I hadn’t learned how to not smile yet, because learning that is hard work when you’ve been really strongly socialized to.

    So the Avengers taught me that I could smile, and yet not capitulate. And Peel (and Steed, too, really) were really the reason that I could learn that.

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