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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No argument here. As far as I can tell, most Star Trek tie-in novels are not really worth the reading.
The thing is, the good ones are so extraordinarily good that it hardly seems fair to condemn the entire category.
I recommend Barbara Hambly’s Don Ysidro/James Asher vampire novels — Those Who Hunt the Night, Traveling With the Dead, and there’s at least a few more whose titles escape me at the moment.
A friend of mine was recently telling me stuff I didn’t really need to hear about HERE COME THE BRIDES, and since he was clearly a fan, I mail-ordered him a copy of ISHMAEL.
He had no idea such a thing existed, and was delighted. He may be one of the few readers of it who liked it for everything but the Trek stuff.
I can’t argue that most tie-ins are…striving for adequacy…but I think we judge the subgenre more harshly than we should, when you consider that 90% of SFF novels are arguably mediocre as well. But we have no problem separating out the gems and not judging the whole genre. Nobody says “Well, Tolkien was good, but have you read the last dozen Forgotten Realms? Most fantasy is clearly ass.” Ancillary may share a stage with John Ringo No but we don’t condemn one for the other.
I think by being inescapably categorized together, the tie-ins may draw more fire than is warranted. I rather doubt percentage of duds is that much worse than percentage in the general populace of SF. And the numbers of Trek novels I’d call Hugo worthy are few…but that’s true of ANY given number of SFF novels. I can pull at least 5 Treks I’d have handed a Hugo to with a glad heart.
That said, I do suspect tie-ins have fewer truly transcendent novels, by virtue of authors not wanting to bleed their heart’s blood for hire. But even so, there’s been that few.
As a kid I read Travels with Charlie, The Pearl and some whose titles don’t come to mind but for me THE Steinbeck book is The Log of the Sea of Cortez.
Laura Resnick says:
We got The Red Pony a bit younger than junior high — maybe 5th grade? — with The Pearl in junior high and The Grapes of Wrath in high school. There was a good deal of “eww, icky” about the ending, but otherwise, it did fine with the high school kids of my era, some 35 years after it was written. East of Eden was one of my favorite books in high school, but I don’t remember if I read it on my own or if it was assigned. I know, for example, that A Tale of Two Cities was assigned, and even though I didn’t much like it, I went on to Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby on my own and loved both.
And here in 4380, I am happy to say that much of Steinbeck and Dickens is still available and widely read. Nobody is fond of the crossover fiction (Stickens) like Red Expectations and Our Mutual Wrath and suchlike, briefly popular around 4365. It was just a fad.
NowhereMan: As someone who hasn’t read much Barbara Hambly, could people provide recommendations which are typical of her work?… For that matter, can I ask the same regarding Vonda McIntyre?
I haven’t read any Hambly apart from the Star Trek novels, but I highly recommend McIntyre’s Dreamsnake. It appears to be merely fantasy but ends up being sneaky SF (and it won a Hugo).
Charlie Jane Anders did an Essential Star Trek Novels That Even Non-Trekkers Should Read article for io9. I have to say that I’d agree with her choices (with the exception of the last two, which I haven’t read).
Of those I can remember (I stopped reading the ST tie-ins around 1992, and there are probably others I read which are fantastic, I just don’t remember), I would probably add Janet Kagan’s Uhura’s Song and Diane Duane’s The Romulan Way to the list.
Interestingly, here’s a different take on the 10 Best Star Trek Novels, featuring a lot more newer novels and overlapping very little with io9’s list.
I like CANNERY ROW and SWEET THURSDAY, though I doubt they’d be assigned to middle schoolers. They’re funny and sweet, which would work well, but they’re packed with prostitutes, so I doubt many school boards would embrace the idea. On the other hand, I think OF MICE AND MEN gets assigned because it’s short, even though it’s written about a kind of loneliness and despair that’s not really part of your average adolescent’s consciousness.* Great book, wrong audience.
One of my bucket list goals is to get around to reading all of Steinbeck. Of what I’ve read, I’ve liked some and not been wild about others, but there isn’t anything of his I’ve read that I didn’t think was worth the time. And all of it has made me a better writer than I was before reading it.
*and in case someone’s about to argue that adolescents do so know about loneliness and despair, please note I said “a kind of.” What MICE deals with is a mature concern; it’s a book for adults who’ve had time to build up experience of the world. GRAPES OF WRATH is much more suitable to adolescents, thematically.
I don’t think anyone disputes that.
What is disputed is why those works wouldn’t normally be nominated; the means by which those works got nominated; and SP3’s various repetitious accusations about corruption in the Hugo nominations and voting process (everything from “voters nominate works they don’t like but which fit an affirmative action agenda,” to claims that PNH and/or Tor Books control the Hugos, to accusations of vote tampering). That is what disputed. not tht SP3 got works on the ballot that wouldn’t normally be nominated.
On the other hand, I think OF MICE AND MEN gets assigned because it’s short, even though it’s written about a kind of loneliness and despair that’s not really part of your average adolescent’s consciousness.*
But but but! reads footnote Yeah, that’s true. In high school I found A Clergyman’s Daughter far more comforting (in an “at least my life’s better than that” sense) than Of Mice and Men.
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.
That’s pretty much the reason for the Pups though. I mean, from their perspective, they wrote books too, and no one tells them that their books are good. It’s just not fair that people prefer books that other people have written and don’t spend time praising the Puppy books. I mean, all books are fungible, right? They are just stacks of paper with ink on them after all, so why does Leckie get attention when Paulk doesn’t? It is a mystery to the Pups, a mystery that is only explainable by a terrible liberal conspiracy against them!
My junior high offered a Steinbeck and Hemingway class that I took when I was 12. We had no problem understanding the material.
This articles proves that the Puppies have not just not read any Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radsh books, but that they haven’t read How To Suppress Women’s Writing either.
@NowhereMan:
Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre has already been mentioned. It’s excellent.
By Barbara Hambly I can recommend A Free Man of Color and its sequels. Bride of the Rat God and Dragonsbane (a great examination of lots of fantasy cliches).
I loved most of Hambly (never read her tie-in fictions).
I discovered her by Dragonsbane, which was in 1990 really different than my usual fantasy books ( i discovered Kay a few years after). It’s a bit dark – not Covenant-dark, but dark. Mud and rain and survival rather than high elf and white castle and brillant banners.
“A free man of color” is a great book about a dysfunctional society (like, having words like octavon = having one black grand parent). It’s quite depressing, because it was a real society.
I really loved Dog Wizard (third in a trilogy, but the first I read), because it was just like Ars Magica, and contained some aphorisms like “The great problem with the creation of deathless elemental daemons to do one’s bidding lies in finding a place to put them afterwards.”
Stranger at the wedding was also a nice mystery ( not Noir) fantasy.
And now, I just want to reread them all…
We are the hollow pups
We are the stuffed pups
Leaning together
Dog collars filled with straw. Alas!
A school I briefly taught at used EAST OF EDEN as a sort of placement test — it was taught in Grade Nine and students who bounced off it were steered into the non-academic stream. (I felt little sadness at not getting a permanent job there.)
Matthew Johnson: A school I briefly taught at used EAST OF EDEN as a sort of placement test — it was taught in Grade Nine and students who bounced off it were steered into the non-academic stream.
That’s more than a bit horrifying. By 9th grade I was well enamored of SFF, and East of Eden is a melodramatic soap opera that I would have almost surely bounced off. It’s scary to think that students like me have been routed to a non-academic stream because of that.
@Will R: I like that very much.
Good gods, that’s horrible.
I resented all the grim, horrifying, dark, pessimistic *realism* my high school classes flogged in the name of Great Books.
If love of a single Steinbeck work had been the sole criterion for who gets allowed onto the college track I’d have never made it.
Thank all Providence no one in my extended family of sci fi lovers ever went to that terrible school.
It seems to me that using a single book, however fine, as a litmus test for an academic stream assumes that aptitude is the same as taste. I can’t imagine that being anything but deeply flawed, so I hope there was a little (or a lot) more nuance involved.
The Uncanny Magazine article is now up and vastly superior to the puppy response:
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-call-of-the-sad-whelkfins-the-continued-relevance-of-how-to-suppress-womens-writing/
Apologies if anybody has posted this already, but I didn’t see it.
I really like Uncanny Magazine. I participated in the Year Two Kickstarter, and I’m glad to have done so.
@Cora
It wasn’t up a few hours ago, so you have the official scoop!
@Nicholas
First off, I agree that neither Gibson nor VanderMeer falls into that “clever” category. For me, the virtues of each have much more to do with traditional literary qualities. I’m tempted to say Annihilation was closer to “clever,” but even then, I have to acknowledge it’s really not very “meta” (I haven’t read the sequels yet, but it’s my understanding that doesn’t change greatly). And I’m fine with meta and enjoy a good metanarrative (heck, I probably prefer it), but I guess that’s part of why I thought these two books would have more widespread support–that they aren’t postmodern in that self-aware way, and I tend to think Filers are more likely to be OK with either mode.
Have “meta” and “not-meta” perhaps become shibboleths? I would quickly clarify that my background is partly in anthropology, and that such things are essential parts of group identity everywhere and thus not necessarily negatives. (Apologies if I’m equating cleverfun and “meta” in a way that wasn’t intended, too.) And yet, I don’t think a position on the meta question should be dealbreaker for a book. Plenty of books I like just aren’t about that (as in the case of these two).
Finally, let me say this year’s ballot wasn’t generally very meta by most standards and that I realize we’re talking “relative meta” here and that the “meta bar” is getting pulled waaaay toward the not-meta end (even though I see as much or more meta in their own stance; they just call it something different–which seems to be precisely the point). Yikes.
Peace Is My Middle Name on November 3, 2015 at 4:28 am said:
If love of a single Steinbeck work had been the sole criterion for who gets allowed onto the college track I’d have never made it.
It wasn’t love, because they didn’t expect any of the kids to like it — they seemed to have deliberately chosen one of Steinbeck’s longest and least-accessible books as a test to see which students would be able to read and engage with a difficult book that they hated. Great way of introducing kids to the study of literature, huh?
The Uncanny Magazine article is now up and vastly superior to the puppy response:
Definitely. Unless one were specifically told that Paulk’s “response” was to that article, one might think she was responding to a completely different work.
I got rid of my Star Trek books long ago, except for one. How Much For Just the Planet is a timeless classic.
We were assigned Grapes of Wrath in high school. It’s the only book I failed to finish. It isn’t too hard, but god, what a slog!
@Cora
Thanks!
…and reading the article, I (unsurprisingly) see that Paulk has either completely mislead, or misunderstood.
At this point I’m just thankful that she didn’t write the article in her Kate the Impala persona.
@Snowcrash
That’s what you wanted, right?
(@Mike: Tilting At Whelkfins)
@snowcrash
So by focusing on the pronoun issue, the sad whelkfins can completely avoid the fact that one of the major themes of the book—of the series, actually—is colonialism and the subsequent examination and deconstruction of colonialism as a trope in genre fiction.
This. From what I read, Kate Paulk doesn’t think colonialism is that bad a thing.
She also seems to be looking at the subject from somewhere outside our universe’s reality.
Hambly-wise, I’ve read the Darwath “trilogy” and a couple (I think) of the Windrose books. I absolutely loved the Darwath series (this would have been in junior high or high school – somewhere between age, say, 11 and 16). I bounced off the Windrose books because they weren’t more Darwath. I re-read the first three Darwath novels again maybe 6 years ago and while it wasn’t as utterly-immersive and escape-enabling as I recalled, I still liked it.
I need to check out some more of her work.
@ Cora
Thanks for the link: very useful article with insightful comments by Camestros. Like one of the authors, I found Leckie’s treatment of gender a very interesting challenge to my own attitudes, and thus a boost to my enjoyment of the novel.
Dex – I totally get that, they can drive me to teeth-grinding fury, too.
@Mark
Exactly – if by what I wanted you meant that which makes me “wince so hard I’ve got an unibrow”….
I do note that your Impala is far more accurate than the actual one though…..
::well done, please use powers only for good::
@Kurt Busiek: Nope, EVERYONE likes “Ishmael” for the non-Trek elements. It’s the reason people still talk about it and read it after this long. Hambly’s other work is great too — I ADORE “Bride of the Rat God”.
Impalas, to me, are “the things that bounce around wildly and then get ripped up and eaten by things higher up the food chain”. I’m just sayin’.
Wombats, though — those are tough beasties.
When I was in Botswana earlier this year, the guide was amused when we wanted to stop for impala. “Trust me,” he said, “you will see THOUSANDS.” And indeed, by the end of the week most of us got very jaded. Ho hum, another impala…another ridiculously colorful lilac-breasted roller pigeon…another crocodile…another set of outrageously colored starlings designed solely to make European starlings seem even worse than they are…
Elephants, though. Elephants are never not impressive. If King Haggard had been in Africa, he would have said “I can never gaze at anything for very long except the sea. And elephants. Elephants work too.”
This doesn’t actually disagree with what I said.
I guess I needed a footnote for that, too, but I thought I said it clearly enough.
Okay, I read the article Cora kindly linked to, now where’s the one Paulk was responding to? Because it clearly can’t be this one. It doesn’t resemble her remarks at all.
@Red Wombat: Cheetahs. Those are the animals you want to see. I lived in Africa for nearly a decade, and in that time, I only saw two cheetahs.
*offers RedWombat ALL the virtual cookies for forever rewriting my mental image of King Haggard*
@Aaron – No cheetahs for us. Got an African wild dog which was enough to delight me, and one of the weird little antelope that only live in the Chobe River marshes. (Which, quite frankly, looked like a scruffy impala.)
I suppose the closest equivalent to Impala here would be getting excited over white-tailed deer, which are common as rats. No elephant equivalent, though. There is nothing like megafauna except megafauna.
Kate Paulk does not understand the meaning of “twee”, does she? Because there’s not really any way you could call the prose in the Ancillary books “twee” with any accuracy.
Vocabulary meanings do seem to be a problem for the <cough hydrophobia cough> Puppies, don’t they?
Does it sometimes seem that the Puppies are describing not actual earthly books but imaginary books from some bizarre alternate universe where everyone has evil little goatees and the unthinking masses are passively yoinked around by corporate overlords?
It is otherwise difficult to reconcile their descriptions of certain books with the books themselves.
Most definitely not twee. Dry as a martini that had only ever heard of vermouth once in an overheard telling of dream, yes (one of its charms).
And congratulations added to @RedWombat!
Peace Is My Middle Name: Does it sometimes seem that the Puppies are describing not actual earthly books but imaginary books from some bizarre alternate universe where everyone has evil little goatees and the unthinking masses are passively yoinked around by corporate overlords?
I think you’ve put your finger on the crux of it! The Puppies are living in the Star Trek Mirror Universe.
Is the “twee” bit supposed to be the pronouns..? Because… That would also not be twee, but the prose in general certainly isn’t so I’m not sure what else it could be?
(At least she didn’t mention gin.)
I keep having an urge to go over the whole essay and point out the Wrong bits, but then whenever I go to read it over and do the prep work I realise that there’s so much Wrong it would take ages, and I don’t want to spend that amount of time on Wrong.