When Uncanny Magazine #7 is released November 3 (tomorrow) among its contents will be Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs’ article “The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How To Suppress Women’s Writing.”
Tangent Online has counted coup on Uncanny Magazine by publishing Kate Paulk’s rebuttal to their essay, “Jousting With Straw Puppies”, before the target is available to the public.
Not that this required either magical powers or access to the TARDIS: Tangent Online received an advance review copy. (Uncanny Kickstarter supporters and issue contributors also got their copies ahead of time).
Paulk’s response begins with a familiar smorgasbord of post hoc reasoning and smarm:
Since the success of Sad Puppies 2 in bringing a handful of differently philosophical works onto the Hugo ballot, there has been a stream of articles, blog posts, tweets, and every possible other outlet imaginable decrying the evil of the Puppies and how the campaign is the reactionary work of a collection of redneck, white-supremacist, homophobic, Mormon men trying to keep everyone else out of the field.
Seriously? The last time I looked I don’t have the equipment for that, and I’m running Sad Puppies 4.
Of course, every time someone posts a lengthy critique of Sad Puppies, it usually comes with a lovingly constructed set of Straw Puppies who are then deconstructed and proven to be just as horrible as the author set them up to be.
So it is with the latest offering from a pair of self-described feminist geeks, Annalee Horne and Natalie Luhrs. Their article can be found in Uncanny Magazine issue 7 (http://uncannymagazine.com/), for those sufficiently masochistic to wish to wade through it, and makes extensive reference to How to Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ.
They begin their construction of the Straw Puppies with the assertion that Sad Puppies 3 was an “attempt to take over the Hugo Awards” (which failed). To someone with little or no knowledge of Sad Puppies that bland assertion (unreferenced, of course) would probably go unchallenged. The truth is simpler: Sad Puppies 3 aimed to bring works to the Hugo ballots that would normally not be nominated. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why would many of those works not normally be nominated? Is it because, like Michael Z. Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, some aren’t very good?
But why go on. Paulk shows once again that letting Sad Puppies speak for themselves is all the answer anybody really needs.
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You just have to love all the Puppies’ attempts at revisionist history after they discovered that, instead of being part of a huge silent majority, they only constituted a a small, noisy minority. It’s pretty sad and pathetic.
Is it because, like Michael Z. Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, some aren’t very good?
Why leave it at some? I’d say that most of the Sad Puppy works were terrible, and the best of them were barely mediocre.
The reason I left it at some is that most of the Puppy short fiction nominees have no other “fault” than being not Hugo-worthy — there were only a few (in my humble opinion) that were actually bad.
The Puppies do have this strange idea that the Hugos are some sort of participation award to which you become entitled simply by being a writer.
I really question why a bunch of self-admitted avoiders of anything that smacks of the literary think anyone takes their critical opinions of Ancillary Justice seriously. I mean, the people who were too overwhelmed in the brainmeats by Steinbeck to read him believe that their critical tools whittled sharp on Star Trek tie-ins and Heinlein juveniles are going to turn the tide on a book that won pretty much every single award the industry has? Between this and Hoyt’s ‘let a failed author tell you the proper way to plot’ series, it’s a race to the bottom for any new writer. They might as well add in a guide to making friends written by T. Beale for the final course.
I’m convinced that the Puppies just don’t read very well. Consider this gripe from Paulk’s piece:
The link she gives is not to a review. It is to a discussion concerning the use of gender in Ancillary Justice. It doesn’t purport to be a review, nor does it claim to be offering a general analysis of the book. It is specifically and explicitly an article about the use of gender in the book.
That this is the “go to” Paulk chooses to use as her example of how none of the reviews talked about anything but the pronoun issue is an indication of just how empty her arguments are. It would be like complaining that no one ever writes anything about Shakespeare other than the romance elements and pointing as evidence to a single article that says “In this article we will analyze romance in Shakespeare”. Such an argument would be instantly seen as fallacious – obviously people talk about a lot of things in relation to Shakespeake, and single-issue explorations happen all the time. And Paulk’s complain about MacFarlane’s article is just as fallacious.
“Mormon”? That’s an issue?
Peace is My Middle Name wrote:
“Mormon? That’s an issue?”
It is for the Puppies, who believe that we don’t like Torgersen because he’s Mormon rather than because he’s an ass who tried to give Hugos away like party favors.
Looking at the bright side, perhaps all this sound and fury will draw some new readers to Russ’ book, which I find as useful in identifying both suppression techniques and women writers new to me, as it was witty. Looking forward to the Uncanny article.
Peace Is My Middle Name –
Here I was wondering who insulted rednecks by lumping them in with the Sad Puppies.
Paulk –
Like mediocre and poorly edited works.
To be honest, I see nothing wrong in giving things away like party favors, so long as they are actually yours to give.
Trying to distribute someone else’s goodies to your buddies now, that’s not cool.
I can’t recall anyone apart from the Puppies themselves even mentioning Mormonism. Pietism, sure, and self-righteousness and wrath, pride, and envy. But not anyone’s particular sect as if it had any bearing on anything. That is also not cool.
We’re all aware that this is just self-marketing, right? The people still screaming are the people whose writing careers need publicity. (There are a number of very successful self-published author out there, but I’ve never seen any evidence that Kate Paulk is one of them.) They don’t really care that they’re in the minority. Any audience is better than no audience. Even if the vast majority of SFF readers ignore them, if they can increase their audiences by even a tiny fraction of a percentage, they’ve still come out ahead. And it’s not like most of them really had that many readers to lose through their shenanigans.
They care that their names are out there, that people know who they are, that people are still talking about them. (That, for example, they get the opportunity to write pieces in magazines, pieces that will then be covered on blogs like File770.) Their books weren’t getting them that sort of attention, but the Puppy campaigns did. That’s why they’re still yipping. As long as “Puppies” = “coverage”, they’ll continue to yip. A major reason why Brad Torgersen wanted Sarah Hoyt interviewed in Wired was because he wanted his friend to get the publicity attached to having her name appear in Wired. Sad Puppies 4 exists solely to prop up the internet presence of Paulk/Hoyt/etc., to give them an excuse to talk about themselves.
What Kate Paulk writes here doesn’t matter. She’ll write whatever she needs to to ensure that people don’t ignore her.
Darn, I was waiting until it released tomorrow to post a link to the hilarity that is that essay – it’s genuinely very good, plus Whelkfins!
Isn’t fisking something that people can’t read yet a bit odd?
@Aaron
Excellent point. The actual Tor.com review several months earlier does praise the pronoun use, but as one of several major elements of interest.
Over on Black Gate a while ago, Bruce Baugh made a very good post collecting actual original AJ reviews to see how often the pronoun use was a major point of praise. While it got frequent mentions, it was nowhere close to being the major point of praise in any review.
There’s so much more nonsense in Paulk’s retort that it could fill pages.
Ahem. I will die on a couple of those hills. Janet Kagan writes a damn fine First Contact novel, even with Kirk & Spock along, and Diane Duane is marvelous no matter what world she’s writing in.
That said, I’m also not a literary critic. It is a worthy skill, but not among those I possess.
Not familiar with Janet Kagan’s work but I trust your recommendations.
Heartily agree about Diane Duane’s fine Star Trek work and would also like to add the brilliant Barbara Hambly and the exquisite John M. Ford to the roster of genius Star Trek tie-in novelists.
Do I gather that Star Trek tie-in novels are being used as some sort of Object Lesson?
RedWombat: That said, I’m also not a literary critic. It is a worthy skill, but not among those I possess.
I believe that I do have sufficient credentials to call myself a literary critic, more or less, and I’m with you on Janet Kagan and Diane Duane’s Star Trek novels. For that matter, I think that even I could write a solid, scholarly essay on Heinlein’s juveniles (and I imagine that people have done so). For me, the implication that resonates is: Steinbeck is too difficult to read? Or too–what? Now, I’m not a big fan of Steinbeck, for a variety of reasons having to do with personal taste as much as anything else, but anyone who believes something like that hasn’t got the critical skills sufficient to analyze BAD Star Trek tie-in novels, let alone good ones–or to tell the good ones from the bad ones, I suppose. Which . . . I suspect is kind of the point.
A big part of Paulk’s reply is defending the exact nature of the puppy criticism of AJ. She quotes Luhrs/Horne:
Obviously she disagrees, saying that it was “more irritation at the focus on the pronoun thing” and that the actual criticism was based on the low quality of the book – she herself says it was “a reasonably competent first novel which might have enticed me to read further had the prose been less self-consciously twee”, which adds Paulk to the list of people criticising AJ without having read it. (Other confirmed members of that club include Hoyt and JCW). Here’s what various prominent puppies have actually said about AJ:
Brad: “Here’s the thing about Ancillary Justice. For about 18 months prior to the book’s release, SF/F was a-swirl with yammering about gender fluidity, gender “justice,” transgenderism, yadda yadda. Up pops Ancillary Justice and everyone is falling all over themselves about it. Because why? Because the topic du jour of the Concerned Intellectuals Are Concerned set, was gender. And Ancillary Justice’s prime gimmick was how it messed around with gender.”
Sarah Hoyt: “the clumsy Ancillary “but pronouns” would have won first place” “Ancillary Pronoun” “just pronoun dysfunction”
JCW: “the honors for best novel to ANCILLARY JUSTICE, by Ann Leckie, a story about pronouns and modern feminist piety, utterly unimaginative and bland” “gimmicky books that instead of telling a story pull a stunt, like using no pronouns in order to challenge common binary notions…”
VD: “it’s just the usual pinkshirts talking up the usual Pink SF/F sewage, albeit with the innovative concept of playing games with pronouns…”
Kate Paulk in the same essay: “the idiosyncratic use of English” “someone accustomed to English being gendered when dealing with people … might just find the whole thing distracting at best”
Luhrs/Horne made the claim that puppy criticism of Ancillary Justice was focused on the pronoun issue for a very simple reason: it was.
Peace Is My Middle Name: Janet Kagan unfortunately died much too soon. She left us a Star Trek novel (Uhura’s Song), an original novel (Hellspark) and a collection of intertwined short stories (Mirabile). If you can find them–and that won’t be easy, as they are long out of print and I believe only the Star Trek novel is available in ebook–I recommend them all.
And I also agree with you about Hambly’s and Ford’s tie-in work. Emphatically.
See Dex, above, for the original reference to Star Trek tie-in novels, Heinlein juveniles, Steinbeck, and critical skills. It was perhaps a bit sweeping, but (as I said) I think Dex was making a rather different point . . .
*sob* I have an autographed copy of Uhura’s Song; the author told me she’d based the character of Tailkinker on her mother *sob*
You’d think Puppies would get tired of proving themselves bad at reading comprehension, writing, literary analysis, etc. But the Dunning-Kruger is strong with them.
I wonder how Brandon Sanderson has managed to overcome all the anti-Mormon prejudice and Brad hasn’t. Could it be… talent, modesty, and not acting like an asshole? What about Howard Tayler and Dan Wells? How do those guys keep getting nominations? And that Orson Scott Card — he’s so poor and unknown, he’s only had ONE big-budget A-list movie made out of his work. Man, I’d hate to be as unsuccessful as any of those guys, and as impoverished as Mitt Romney.
Really good Star Trek novels (such as mentioned above; you’re getting my hardback Duane over my etc.) have been written by — and this is the key — people who are/were really good writers both before and after that, in different genres. However, Sturgeon’s Law is too generous when considering them as a whole.
And Steinbeck is too hard for their brainmeats? The Steinbeck everyone reads in public high school*? With the linear plots, American settings, the manly men, and nothing sfnal at all?
*Except for “The Red Pony”, which I was taught in 6th grade. Age 11.
Uhura’s Song is one of the very few First Contact books I can think of that does not hinge on something going disasterously wrong with the cultural communications and where both sides are trying very hard not to be assholes. So many FC books hinge on the other side never giving anyone the benefit of the doubt, which I always found unrealistic. This was one of the very few where people of goodwill of both species are trying so hard to bridge the gulf, and it’s not saccharine and there isn’t the sudden horrible Incident that jeopardizes all contact forever. I found it so much more realistic than most where we assume that aliens will be hidebound traditionalists or we’ll be trigger-happy yeehaw types.
I read Hellspark when I was quite young, and do not remember all that much about it, other than that I liked it.
But I have NEVER, EVER, EVER forgotten the proper pronunciation of Hellspark. It will be there in my brain when most else of my childhood is dust and shadows.
Steinbeck is hated by pupdom for bumming people out with the ending of his novel “Of Mice and Men.” I distinctly remember reading that back when I was splashing around a lot in puppy puddles, searching for evidence that I was living in a bubble and suffering from confirmation bias.
I’m glad there are respectable types here who will defend tie-in novels. I was never much into them, and it’s easy to get hoity-toity about them and see them as mere consumer items, forgetting they can be good in their own right.
I do think, though, that many Pups see books as mere consumer items. They obsess about selling, they are upset when they don’t receive eyeball-summoning awards*, many of them apparently got into SFF via product tie-ins, they think literary is a nasty word… on top of that is the way they constantly try to show that they don’t really have much fun – they’re all too busy blue collaring to do anything but write the books they need to sell to keep their kids fed and their guns loaded.
* And they see those awards largely in terms of giving out favors to people they like – note that even now (or at least, the last time I checked) on the SP4 site, a lot of people are nominating authors, not works.
While I certainly can’t disagree that Janet Kagan died too soon, I also note that she stopped writing long before she died. I can well remember around 1990, give or take a year, when she seemed to be very productive, and was having a really promising start to a career, culminating in a Hugo win; one that seemed like it might be the first of many. And then after the Hugo win she just sort of…dried up. A very great pity.
(And yes, I know she had a bunch of health issues; I’m speaking from a reader’s perspective here.)
Gosh. This is very inaccurate.
Although speaking of the term ‘redneck’ I thought the inclusion of an Appalachian student in this update to a series of posters on Halloween cultural appropriation was ace.
The first rule about puppies is that they seem to have no clue about just how terrible the nominated works they spammed on to the ballot were. I feel some degree of jealousy for them – after all, they didn’t need to read the dreck, just nominate it.
The second rule is that they run around going “look over there” whenever rule one is discussed.
I’m sure the same half-formed and badly edited garbage will be forced onto the ballot again this year, through the same ‘open and democratic’ (yeah, right) process.
@ Peace Is My Middle Name:
I’ve never read any of Hambly’s tie-in work – I’m not the Star Trek fan in the family – but if her Star Trek novels are half as good as her Benjamin January mysteries, then they’re very good indeed.
As the Puppies get ever more apoplectic, I am reminded of John Oliver’s wisdom on Sarah Palin:
There is so much *objectively* wrong with the Paulk article that I don’t even know where to start. I’m not particulalrly concerned with her opinions, it’s the revisionism on the facts that’s so spectacular.
Just 2 things that I want to specifically note: where she says “note the presumption that colonialism is automatically bad…”
What. The. Frak.
Is this a Puppy shibboleth? Oooh, accentuate the positive of colonialism? The Redcoats weren’t all that bad, after all? What’s depopulating the native population of Tasmania between friends? Srsly – what the frak is that?
The other noteworthy bit is where she ends by saying “The facts are so far removed from the version of events presented and implied by the authors that they are either woefully ignorant or shameless liars (and could be both).”
Oh you dear sweet summer child. Can I just say how much I love you imagining others failing standards that you refuse to apply for yourself? Bless your heart. Really.
The Steinbeck everyone reads in public high school*?
*Ahem* I don’t remember any Steinbeck in HS. But it was available at home. Not my cuppa.
I heard that Kagan stopped writing after her mother died.
And yeah: hells park.
There’s so much to fairly criticize Hoyt for, do we have to sling epithets like “failed author” and “C-list author” around? The first is arguably untrue, the second… Who cares if her books are popular, what matters is if they are good. And generally, her sales are irrelevant to to the truth of whatever argument she is making.
PJ Evans: I think Kagan’s stopping writing was a combination of things, including the illness that finally killed her.
Hell spark.
Jonathan Edelstein: I’ve never read any of Hambly’s tie-in work – I’m not the Star Trek fan in the family – but if her Star Trek novels are half as good as her Benjamin January mysteries, then they’re very good indeed.
Hambly’s Star Trek tie-in novel is Ishmael — it’s actually a crossover with the TV series Here Come The Brides, which was airing at the same time as Star Trek, and which had Mark Lenard in a starring role (and 2 of the other main characters are played by actors who each appeared in a Star Trek episode). Hambly also includes references to numerous characters which are recognizable from other TV series of the time. In the book, Lenard’s character is destined to prevent an alien invasion of Earth, and Spock goes back in time to prevent the Klingons from killing him to change the future. Except that Spock ends up in the past with amnesia.
It sounds bizarre, but Hambly totally made it work.
Hambly also wrote one called Crossroad, which was pretty good.
It seems incredible that the Puppies don’t realize that what they say about Ancillary Justice makes it clear that they haven’t actually read the book and don’t have the slightest idea what they are talking about.
I look forward to the day when a puppy — even just one! — finally actually reads Ancillary Justice and posts something truthful about the book.
Needless to say, I am not holding my breath.
@LunarG
Seconded.
jayn: Hambly also wrote one called Crossroad, which was pretty good.
Oh, that’s right, and one called Ghost Walker — though if I remember correctly, that was one of several ST novels at that time which the Pocket ST editor had substantially revised/re-written by another author without the original author’s permission.
Also, can I just say how weird I find the following:
…by publishing Kate Paulk’s rebuttal to their essay, “Jousting With Straw Puppies”, before the target is available to the public.
Right now, that means all most people have is Paulk’s (obvs biased) claims as to what the article she is rebutting says. That strikes me as a strange way to argue. I mean, yes, for the clicks and all that but why not issue the article on the same day?
There is a list of references provided below, and the supposed link to the article is to Unacanny’s front page. I would hope that Tangent updates the article with a direct link once it does come out, so as to mitigate their rush to publish.
@ Peace
re: Janet Kagan
Get thee to a used book emporium and find Hellspawn and Uhura’s Song!
I wish Hellspark would get digitized. My one paperback copy is getting old and fragile. :/
::tick:: I forgot…again. ::sigh::
My one paperback copy is getting old and fragile. :/
I was lucky enough to get a used hardback, somewhen after the current year of 850.
hell’s park!
Likewise. Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, The Pearl, and Of Mice and Men were all assigned to us in my junior high lit class. Considering the level of study a Jewish child has to do at that age to become bar or bat mitzvah, I certainly don’t think Steinbeck’s novels can be considered too difficult for a youngster (let alone an adult). And considering the subject matter I encountered in popular and/or acclaimed YA books, some of them about kids that age, that I read the year I did a lot of YA reading (about 4 years ago), I also wouldn’t agree that Steinbeck’s subject matter is too mature for them. If you follow YA fiction, kids that age are reading heavier subject matter by choice, in their free time. The context is the only thing they might struggle with since, unlike someone my age, they probably don’t have grandparents who vividly remember the era in which those stories are set; hopefully their teachers fill in those gaps.
The Grapes of Wrath was assigned in my high school lit class.
Bit of a side topic:
As someone who hasn’t read much Barbara Hambly, could people provide recommendations which are typical of her work? I read her two Star Wars tie-ins a long time ago, Planet of Twilight and Children of the Jedi, and hated them (as did most other fans, according to the reviews I read), and so hadn’t read anything else she wrote, but I recently saw people online saying that most of her books were much better than those. Since people are talking her up up-thread, I thought I’d ask.
For that matter, can I ask the same regarding Vonda McIntyre? I also read her Star Wars tie in “The Crystal Star” (which I subsequently saw described in several places as the single worst Star Wars tie-in of all time) and didn’t care for it, but other people were saying that most of her other books are much better. Is there a good place to start with her?
@RedWombat
There certainly are excellent tie-ins, but I remember motoring through the hundred or so ST tie-ins from the 80s and 90s one summer, and for every gem, there was a tremendous amount of bad cookie cutter hackery along side it.
NowhereMan asks:
I can vouch that The Moon and the Sun is good and solid. Read it before it has a chance to be wrecked by the movie adaptation…
LunarG
I apologize. I just find it so unbelievably arrogant that they feel they can make statements as fact that Leckie is a poor writer, when the woman has been lauded more for her first book than most of them have in their careers.
[ticky]
Hambly: If you want something typical of her writing, you might try
The Silent Tower
The Silicon Mage
or alternatively the Darwath Trilogy.
The more recent Vampire Asher series are a bit longer in total. I am aware of the Benjamin January series, but have never read it, so I cannot speak to it.