Houndation 6/7

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aka “Let’s get Sirius!”

In today’s roundup: Andrew Liptak, Jim C. Hines, Damien G. Walter, Tom Knighton, David Gerrold, Irene Gallo, Brad R. Torgersen, Sarah A. Hoyt, Vox Day, Michael Z. Williamson, Markov Kern, bhalsop, sciphi, Jonathan LaForce, Cedar Sanderson, Amanda S. Green, Jon F. Zeigler, C. E. Petit, Lis Carey, Rebekah Golden, Mark Ciocco, amd George R.R. Martin. (Title credit belongs to Whym and Anna Nimmhaus.)

Andrew Liptak on io9

“Women Dominate The 2015 Nebula Awards” – June 7

Takeaways from this? With the exception of the Best Novel award, women swept the slate in all other categories, notable in light of the Sad/Rabid Puppies controversy with this year’s Hugo Awards.

 

Jim C. Hines

“Puppies in Their Own Words” – June 7

I’ve spent several hours on this, which is ridiculous. I don’t even know why, except that I’m frustrated by all of the “I never said…” “He really said…” “No he didn’t, you’re a lying liar!” “No, you’re the lying liar!” and so on.

An infinite number of monkeys have said an infinite number of things about the Hugos this year. People on all sides have said intelligent and insightful things, and people on all sides have said asinine things. The amount of words spent on this makes the Wheel of Time saga look like flash fiction. File770 has been doing an admirable job of posting links to the ongoing conversation.

I wanted to try to sort through the noise and hone in on what Correia and Torgersen themselves have been saying. As the founder and current leader, respecitvely, of the Sad Puppies, it seems fair to look to them for what the puppy campaign is truly about…..

So are Brad and Larry racist? Sexist? Homophobic? What about their slates?

I don’t see an active or conscious effort to shut out authors who aren’t straight white males.

I do see that the effect of the slates was to drastically reduce the number of women on the final ballots.

Torgersen made a now-infamously homophobic remark about John Scalzi, which he later apologized for. I don’t see this as suggesting Torgersen is a frothing bigot; it does suggest he has some homophobic attitudes or beliefs he should probably reexamine and work on.

More central to the Sad Puppies, when I see Brad railing against “affirmative action” fiction, I see a man who seems utterly incapable of understanding sometimes people write “non-default” characters not because they’re checking off boxes on a quota, but because those are the stories they want to tell, and the characters they want to write about. Dismissing all of those amazing, wonderful, and award-winning stories as nothing but affirmative-action cases? Yeah, that’s sounds pretty bigoted to me.

 

https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/607618525813829633

 

 

David Gerrold on Facebook – June 7

Here’s how self-fulfilling paranoia works.

Decide that something has been taken away from you — even if it hasn’t. And even if you were never entitled to it in the first place.

Then, find a group of someones to blame for taking it away from you — even if they had nothing to do with your perceived loss. (Women, LGBTs, People of Color, SJWs, liberals, whatever.) Make sure it’s a big important group with big important members.

Appoint that group — it has to be a group — the enemy. Accuse them of horrible behaviors. This is the important step. You can’t be a victim without a persecutor. So you have to say or do something so egregious that the other guys will have to respond. Their response is the proof that you are being persecuted. Even if their response is, “Huh? Who are you?” — that’s just evidence that they’ve been deliberately ignoring your importance.

As soon as you engage that very big, very important group in a dialog, you achieve credibility — theirs. You are obviously just as important as they are. The more they engage with you, the more they respond to you, the more important you are. Therefore — you must continue to escalate so as to use up more and more of their time, so as to prove just how truly truly truly big and powerful and important you are.

When the other side brings out facts, logic, evidence, rational thought, and methodical deconstruction, you must repeat your original claims, change the subject, make new charges, or point to this as evidence of their continuing persecution. The more you do this, the more followers you will attract. Everybody loves the underdog — it’s your job to be the persecuted underdog.

This tactic works for any political or social position. It worked for extreme-left activist groups in the sixties and seventies — it eventually marginalized them out of the political process. They had to grow up or get out.

 

Irene Gallo on Facebook – May 11

[Here is a direct link. Perhaps it was always public and I just didn’t scroll back far enough when I searched yesterday.]

 

Irene Gallo in a comment on Facebook – June 6

Not friends, rest assured. And ZOMG, teeth! Somehow this got dug up from early last month and pitchforks are out. And since then more people are aware of, and excited about, the upcoming Hurley book. So as long as the thread lasts, we’re spreading the good news.

 

Brad R. Torgersen in a comment on Facebook – June 6

Irene Gallo, I am going to ask a question, and I expect a response other than a cat picture non sequitur. How did you arrive at your conclusion that Sad Puppies is “neo nazi”?

 

Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt

“Shout it from the rooftops” – June 7

However, let’s be clear: mud sticks. Get something associated with unspeakable sins like “racism, sexism, homophobia” and the idiots will go on repeating it forever, no matter how often it’s disproved. This is how they came up with the notion that Brad Torgersen is in an interracial marriage to disguise his racism, or that Sad Puppies is about pushing women and minorities from the ballot, even though the suggested authors include both women and minorities. And I’m not sure what has been said about me. Echoes have reached back, such as a gay friend emailing me (joking. He’s not stupid, and he was mildly upset on my behalf) saying he’d just found out I wanted to fry all gay people in oil and that he needed a safe room just to email me from. Then there was the German Fraulein who has repeatedly called me a Fascist (you know, those authoritarian libertari—wait, what?) and her friends who declared Kate and I the world’s worst person (we’re one in spirit apparently) as well as calling me in various twitter storms a “white supremacist” (which if you’ve met me is really funny.) A friend told me last week that he defended me on a TOR editor’s thread. I don’t even know what they were saying about me there. I make it a point of not following all the crazy around, so I have some mental space to write from.

However, enough people have told me about attacks, that I know my name as such is tainted with the publishing establishment (not that I care much, mind) and that some of it might leak to the reading public (which is why G-d gave us pennames.)….

This feebleness of mind was in stunning display recently in the Facebook page of one Irene Gallo, Creative Director at TOR. (I hope that’s an art-related thing. Or do they think authors need help being creative?)….

Note that those statements are so wrong they’re not even in the same universe we inhabit. Note also that when she talks about “bad to reprehensible” stories pushed into the ballot by the Sad Puppies, she’s talking about one of her house’s own authors, a multiple bestseller, and also of John C. Wright who works for her house as well.

Note also that when one of my fans jumped in and tried to correct the misconceptions, she responded with daft cat pictures.

 

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/607571265537363969

 

https://twitter.com/mzmadmike/status/607257593824845824

 

 

 

bhalsop

“Tor and Sad/Rabid Puppies” – June 7

There is a war going on in the blogosphere between certain employees of Tor, the once great publisher of scifi/fantasy, and the proponents of alternate slates for the Hugo, the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies. I have watched it with some interest, since I am undoubtedly one of those the Puppies in general would not like, but I have found their position actually has merit.

There was a time, many years ago, when one could buy a book honored with the Hugo award and know that the book would be well written, well edited, and thought provoking. This has not been the case for several years, I am sorry to report. In fact, there was a time, again many years ago, that one could buy a book published by Tor, and have a good read that might be thought provoking but was at minimum a good story well told. This is sadly no longer the case. I used to buy a Tor book even if the blurb wasn’t particularly inviting, because I trusted Tor. This is no longer the case.

Tor employees have attacked the Sad/Rabid Puppies as racist, misogynist, right wing whackos. The fact is that this reviling became much louder after the Sad Puppy slate won most of the Hugo niminations. What? They outvoted you? Doesn’t this sound like the Republicans after our current president was elected? Are you sure you want to go there?

 

sciphi on Superversive SF

“Irene Gallo, #Sadpuppies, #Gamergate and Tor” – June 7

What I find particularly insulting is that I have been following #Gamergate for quite a while, since at least Internet Aristocrats original Quinnspiracy videos, and I am extremely right wing (Nazi’s and Neo-Nazi’s aren’t though, fascists really were/are kissing cousins of socialists), and I can tell you for a fact that the talking heads of #Gamergate like Sargon of Akkad are thorough going leftwing moderates, they just aren’t frothing at the mouth SJW’s (I guess that makes them “far-right” in SJW land). I’m insulted as an arch conservative and reactionary to be regarded as basically the same as such thorough going hippies.

 

Jonathan LaForce on Mad Genius Club

“Dear Tor” – June 7

Tor, let’s face facts: that you repeatedly allow straw man makers like John Scalzi to have a place in your stable, even as he vainly justifies his arrogant idiocy is absurd.  To allow bigots like NK Jemisin bully pulpits without regard for fact or truth is wrong.  To encourage people to put one-star reviews on Amazon, simply because you don’t like an author’s politics, rather than because you didn’t like the story is not only disgusting, it is a willful manipulation of the Amazon rating system.

Whereas I believe in the principles of the free market, I don’t want to see somebody create new laws over this.  We already have government invading our bedrooms, our computers and our bank accounts daily.  No, ladies and gentlemen, instead I ask you this:

Don’t buy anything made by TOR. Not pamphlets. Not novels, not audiobooks.  Not even if it’s free.  Let Tor know that they do not decide what we want as fans of science fiction and fantasy.  Instead, I ask that those of you whom trust my opinion cease to buy their products ever again.  Show them that in the end, the consumer drives the market. Why? Because nobody can make you buy anything.  Not health care, not books, not movies. NOT A SINGLE DAMN THING.

In older times, a bard who couldn’t sing or orate well, much less properly play an instrument (in short, when the bard could not perform well, the crowd kicked him out. And he went hungry until he got better or he died from starvation. Or he found a new profession that he was actually good at.

 

Tom Knighton

“Tor Creative Director bashes Tor authors among others” – June 7

Based on how she phrased this, she’s implying that that both Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are extreme right wing to neo-Nazis.  Now, I generally don’t defend Rabid Puppies because Vox is a big boy and can fight his own battles, and since I’m not part of that group I really can’t speak for it. Vox has seen this, and I suspect he’ll jump in soon enough.

As a Sad Puppy, I’m freaking pissed.

First, I’m sick of being called “unrepentantly racist, mysogynist, and homophobic” simply because I don’t like their taste in books or because I disagree with them about what the government should spend its money doing.  It’s funny, because these are the same people who bitch about “slut shaming” or “fat shaming” or whatever, but now they’re trying to “thought shame”, like we’re horrid human beings just because we don’t trip over ourselves on identity issues.  No evidence, no examples, nothing except libelous rhetoric.  Nothing….

I’ve read multiple times that Tor isn’t so much a publishing house as a series of editorial fiefdoms, a confederation of miniature publishing houses under a single roof and a shared marketing and art department.  If that’s true, then there probably isn’t a lot of oversight on these kinds of things, so I really don’t think there will be any kind of change.

 

Cedar Sanderson

“Fear and Loathing at TOR” – June 7

Almost since the advent of the internet, there have been warnings about what to say – or not – on it. The internet is a vast and mostly public arena. Imagine, if you can, standing in Grand Central Station and screaming slurs at the top of your lungs, while the sane people standing near you back away slowly. Online, this doesn’t happen. One person starts screaming and frothing at the mouth, and others are drawn like moths to the flame to scream along with them.

This is disturbing and upsetting, but it is easy enough to avoid this kind of behaviour if you want to (and some like to troll-bait. Personally, I find it unkind to taunt the mentally ill and don’t stoop to pillorying their personal lives). On occasion, though, we are not dealing with a lone individual, but one that is tied to a corporate identity. And this situation is why most reputable companies have policies in place about the use of social media. Because when a person using their real name, which can easily be tied to their workplace, starts to cast slurs on their own colleagues, not to mention large sections of the business’s client base, that can reflect very badly on their employer.

 

Amanda S. Green on Nocturnal Lives

“Interrupting my vacation and not happy about it” – June 7

But what galls me is how she calls us “Extreme right-wing to Neo-Nazi”. To begin with, if she were to really look at who wound up on the final ballot, especially those backed by the Sad Puppies, she would see that there are conservative, libertarian AND liberals represented. There are women and minorities. If I remember correctly, not everyone on the ballot is straight. (I don’t remember because I don’t care what a person’s sexual preference. It has nothing to do with their ability as a writer.)

Then there is the personal reaction. Ms. Gallo doesn’t know me and I don’t know her. So she doesn’t understand what sort of wound she opened for my family by calling me “extreme right-wing to Neo-Nazi”. My family comes from Germany and the Netherlands. Fortunately, the family was here before Hitler came to power. But they remember what it was like living in parts of this country and having to defend themselves because they had a Germanic last name. Nazism is and always will be a personal anathema to my family and to be called a follower of that hated philosophy/government is beyond acceptable.

Did she commit slander or libel? No. Did she consider the impact her words would have on other people? I don’t know. Part of me wants to believe that she did not but I have my doubts. She used a number of “trigger” words in her response, words meant to create a negative impression. She did not consider or care about how her allegation would impact fans of those authors she was condemning nor did she apparently think or care about how such a hateful allegation could possibly lead to termination of employment.

 

https://twitter.com/JFZeigler/status/607566847681134593

 

C. E. Petit on Scrivener’s Error

“Pre-Road-Kill Link Sausages” – June 6

There’s a proposal to tweak Hugo voting rules somewhat jocularly labelled E Pluribus Hugo that I cannot support, for three reasons. First, it depends upon accepting the proposition that a popular vote among those who pay a poll tax to vote is the best way to determine actual quality. (I’d be probably be more supportive if the Hugos themselves were renamed from “Best” to “Favorite.”) Second, it does nothing whatsoever to deal with the far-more-serious problems of source restrictiveness and the inept calendar (really? for an award issued in late August, we start nominations in January?). Third, at a fundamental level it fails to engage with the dynamics of cliquishness (for both real and imagined cliques, I should note) that are at issue; in fact, it bears a disturbing resemblance to the evolution of voting patterns in Jim Crow country following passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964, if not with the same obvious discriminatory animus.

I think this proposal has been put forth in good faith, in a highly conservative attempt to retain, and even reify, a particular (and wildly inaccurate) fannish/SMOFish perception of what the Hugos “are” and “mean.” The irony of that characterization is intentional, especially compared to the various canine complaints; it is obvious, disturbing, and all too typical of attempts to tweak selection mechanisms without pondering what is being selected… and whether that requires a farther-reaching change.

 

Rebekah Golden

“Reviewing; Meta Post” – June 7

This goes back to my post about Totaled. It was a good story. Had some interesting ideas. Didn’t do it for me and I think the reason why not has to do with compelling questions. Look at Ancillary Justice and the story is full of compelling questions. Then there’s Mono No Aware.

Cutting for spoilers about Mono No Aware, Totaled, and me….

 

Mark Ciocco on Kaedrin Weblog

“Hugo Awards: Short Stories”  – June 7

My feelings on short stories are decidedly mixed, because most of the short fiction I read is from collections that are, by their very nature, uneven. As with Anthology Films, I generally find myself exhausted by the inconsistency. Also, as someone who tends to gravitate towards actual storytelling rather than character sketches or tone poems (or similar exercises in style), a short story can be quite difficult to execute. A lot must be accomplished in a short time, and a certain economy of language is needed to make it all work. There are some people who are great at this sort of thing, but I find them few and far between, so collections of short stories tend to fall short even if they include stories I love. In my experience, the exceptions tend to be collections from a single author, like Asimov’s I, Robot or Barker’s Books of Blood. That being said, I’ve been reading significantly more short fiction lately, primarily because of my participation in the Hugo Awards. I found myself quite disappointed with last year’s nominated slate, so I actually went the extra mile this year and read a bunch of stuff so that I could participate in the nomination portion of the process. Of course, none of my nominees actually made the final ballot. Such is the way of the short story award (with so many options, the votes tend to be pretty widely spread out, hence all the consternation about the Puppy slates which probably gave their recommendations undue influence this year). But is the ballot any better this year? Only one way to find out, and here are the results, in handy voting order:

  1. Totaled by Kary English – Told from the perspective of a brain that has been separated from its body (courtesy of a car accident) and subsequently preserved in a device that presumably resembles that which was used to preserve Walt Disney’s head or something. In the story, this is new technology, so the process is imperfect and while the brain can be kept alive for a significant amount of time, it still only amounts to around 6 months or so. Fortunately, the disembodied brain in question was the woman leading the project, so she’s able to quickly set up a rudimentary communication scheme with her lab partner. Interfaces for sound and visuals are ginned up and successful, but by that point the brain’s deterioration has begun. This could have been one of those pointless tone poems I mentioned earlier, but English keeps things approachable, taking things step by step. The portrayal of a brain separated from the majority of its inputs (and outputs, for that matter), and slowly regaining some measure of them as time goes on, is well done and seems realistic enough. One could view some of the things portrayed here as pessimistic, but I didn’t really read it that way. When the brain deteriorates, she eventually asks to be disconnected before she loses all sense of lucidity (the end of the story starts to lilt into an Algernon-like devolution of language into simplistic quasi-stream of consciousness prose). I suppose this is a form of suicide, but it was inevitable at that point, and the experimental brain-in-a-jar technology allowed for a closure (both in terms of completing some of her research and even seeing her kids again) that would have otherwise been impossible. I found that touching and effective enough that this was a clear winner in the category.

 

Lis Carey at Lis Carey’s Library

“Galactic Suburbia, presented by Alis, Alex, and Tansy” – June 7

http://galactisuburbia.podbean.com/

Another Best Fancast Hugo nominee.

Speculative fiction, publishing news, and chat. This podcast comes to us from Australia, and as far as I can find, they do not reveal their last names anywhere on their website. That’s a shame, because these are very engaging people, and they mention up coming book launches. (Feel free to enlighten me in comments. Please!)

 

George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog

“Reading” – June 7

I also read LINES OF DEPARTURE by Marko Kloos. This was part of the Hugo ballot as originally announced, one of the books put there by the slates… but Kloos, in an act of singular courage and integrity, withdrew. It was his withdrawal that moved THREE-BODY PROBLEM onto the ballot. This is the second book in a series, and I’ve never read the first. Truth be told, I’d never read anything by Kloos before, but I’m glad I read this. It’s military SF, solidly in the tradition of STARSHIP TROOPERS and THE FOREVER WAR. No, it’s not nearly as good as either of those, but it still hands head and shoulders above most of what passes for military SF today. The enigmatic (and gigantic) alien enemies here are intriguing, but aside from them there’s not a lot of originality here; the similarity to THE FOREVER WAR and its three act structure is striking, but the battle scenes are vivid, and the center section, where the hero returns to Earth and visits his mother, is moving and effective. I have other criticisms, but this is not a formal review, and I don’t have the time or energy to expand on them at this point. Bottom line, this is a good book, but not a great one. It’s way better than most of what the Puppies have put on the Hugo ballot in the other categories, but it’s not nearly as ambitious or original as THREE-BODY PROBLEM. Even so, I read this with pleasure, and I will definitely read the next one. Kloos is talented young writer, and I suspect that his best work is ahead of him. He is also a man of principle. I hope he comes to worldcon; I’d like to meet him.

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519 thoughts on “Houndation 6/7”

  1. If anyone likes delightfully weird anime, I would recommend the OVA of Read Or Die, in which an agent for the Special Operations Division of the British Library must prevent a clone of Ludwig van Beethoven from playing the lost “Death Symphony” which causes anyone who hears it to commit suicide. (Why? Because, um.)

  3. David W.: On the subject of ginned-up persecution, I recalled an exchange back in 2014 between Jay Lake and Brad Torgersen that shines a light on how Torgersen Just. Doesn’t. Get. The. Point., even after repeated efforts by Jay, who is quite clear and reasonable about the whole thing:

    The self-valorizing Christian myth of persecution

    I only learned about Jay Lake’s death a few weeks ago – I’d been out of touch with the SF world for a while before this Puppy business started.

    I’ve loved every single one of Jay’s books that I’ve ever read, and I still have a few more to read. The Green and Mainspring series are absolutely wonderful, and I’d highly recommend them to anybody. I never met the man, but I’m going to miss his excellent writing.

  4. @Kyra: wow that really is bizarre! As for other crazy anime/manga, how about Assassination Classroom? Crazy squid creature blows up 70% of the moon, threatens to do the same to earth… Unless someone can kill him in 1 year! (And he takes control of a class of kids who he tries to teach to assassinate him)

  5. @McJulie,

    I believe Blood of Prokopius’ argument is “Lovecraft’s characters (and no/few others) understand how terrible materialism is. Anything so terrible could not possibly be true.” (Or maybe “Regardless of its truth, we should reject such a terrible conception of the universe.”)

    I’m not saying the argument is a good one, just that it’s the one he makes.

  6. @Jeffro
    Barnes & Noble has a pretty detailed retail sales strategy that determines what actually gets sent to and sold in the stores.

    Getting further into the weeds, B&N hasn’t kept an extensive backlist in the stores for years. It costs overall sales, space, time, and money to keep one or two copies of an older book on those shelves. Compared to what Borders was, B&N has always focused on the new, the bestsellers and the backlist titles with steady regular sales. In addition, they have always offered ship-to-home as part of their sales strategy, and were able to provide a bigger selection in this manner even before they had an online presence.

    When I worked there, B&N very deliberately gave an average of three months to most titles before returning them to their warehouses. They also didn’t generally buy books they they could not return to the publisher. They also rarely if ever paid for books from publishers who would not accept stock returns. (Note that those are also usually small presses). Of course they would also happily sell you these books too, but only if you paid up front. And those books were only returnable for store credit, if you changed your mind.

    So, for all the books you say aren’t in B&N, well the problem you have with them is really with their business model. And, that was just flexible enough that if enough people were buying a small press edition, then they definitely ordered as many copies as they could get their hands on. This is exactly what happened with titles such as 50 Shades of Grey or Eragon. (It might even happen to an older title that caught a smaller wave of popularity, though with the speed of all the other changes in publishing, I wouldn’t want to make a bet on it).

  7. Oh, Read Or Die is a delight. You’ve got to love secret library spies. It’s like Tim Powers, only bubblier.

    I share the general appreciation for Serial Experiments Lain and for Musishi.

    I must digress to manga long enough to recommend Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, or “Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip”, available in a good scanlation (= scanning + translation) here. Jeffro, this is one you should check out, if you like Clifford Simak or Manly Wade Wellman (or the gentleness of many of Cordwainer Smith’s stories, without his exotic milieu). It’s set in the near future, with humanity passing very gently from the Earth. Population is down, seas are up, but there’s been no holocaust or anything.

    The main character is Alpha, a humanoid robot who’s been running a cafe out in the rural boonies ever since her master left her in charge, saying that he might be gone for some time. Alpha tends her cafe, and spends time in the lives of the folks of the vicinity, and travels into Yokohama, and meets and becomes friends with another robot like herself…oh, and doesn’t quite cross paths with the water spirit in the local lake. As humanity passes, a certain reenchantment of the world seems to be underway.

    Later in the series, she goes on an extended walking trip through much of Japan, seeing how the world is adapting to humanity’s retreat, and in at least one staggeringly beautiful instance, seeing how the world misses us. Then she returns home, and life continues on its gentle way. There are no action sequences here, no epic crises, just maturation and the passage of time, and it is one of my favorite works of sf/f ever. It’s not for everybody, but if it’s for you, it’s probably a lot for you, Gentle Reader.

  8. Regarding Anime: I also liked Gantz. A bit too much fan service, but otherwise wonderful. Will have to finish the comic book.

  9. Oh, all right, if we’re going to start doing general anime recommendations, here are some especially sfnal ones:

    Mushishi: I don’t agree at all with characterizing it as the “anti-Lovecraft”; it’s been to some pretty dark places, and Lovecraft had his happy moments. I call it the closest modern equivalent to The Twilight Zone. But it is an amazingly good manga and anime.

    Noein: to your other self: Science fantasy about two alternate futures fighting which of them our timeline will lead to. In one future, the human race lives a wretched post-apocalyptic existence. The other future is much worse…

    Eureka Seven: The setting is kind of Blood Music meets Solaris meets skateboarder culture. With giant robot combat from time to time. 10,000 or so years in the future, humanity is sharing a world with a hostile alien presence. Our heroes are on the run, trying to protect a young woman who may have a connection to the aliens, and in the process discover that both they and their enemies have some serious misconceptions about their world.

    Eureka Seven AO: A follow-on to Eureka Seven set on Earth in the near future, where something similar to the aliens from the first series show up, but… well, massive spoilers. Even better than the first series, but you’ll need to be familiar with Eureka Seven first in order to make head or tail of AO.

    Read or Die and R.O.D -the- TV: Miniseries and followup full series where the protagonists are extreme bibliophiles with the power of controlling paper and the British Library has a crack special ops team for recovering important books from supervillains.

    Patema Inverted: Closest thing I’ve ever seen to 100% pure sf-fan heroin. After a disastrous experiment leaves some matter, including some humans, acted on by gravity in reverse, two separate communities with opposite gravity exist. The heroine lives underground but wants to see the surface because her older brother disappeared on an expedition to it; there she almost falls into the sky but is helped by a surface dweller and helps make a few cracks in the super-authoritarian surface society in return. The bad guy made my skin crawl like no villain I’ve seen in years.

    Summer Wars: A boy agrees to be a pretend boyfriend at a classmate’s family reunion, and is trapped there when a computer virus starts invading Japan’s infrastructure via a social media network. Then the sprawling family marshals its resources to lead the fight against the virus. Imagine if P. G. Wodehouse and William Gibson had written a collaboration.

  10. @Matt Y

    Now I need to think of circumnavigation titles…..umm, The Other Pup of Phileas Fogg?

  11. @ Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

    Hi, Nicole. Color me a delurker. I’ve been following the Puppy Thing on File 770 since it began, in a general mix of wonder and horror and occasional large guffaws. (Some of the post title suggestions have been truly, deeply funny.)

  12. Petrea, thank you for feeding the beast that craves recommendations!

  13. Anime wise I love Last Exile. Wonderful character designs, a great Miyazaki-like dieselpunk world, and under it all a set of really big SF ideas.

  14. @Standback

    Oh, that’s a great set of reviews. It’s the same reviewer whose dismissal of the fan writer category caused Freer to incoherently froth accusations of libel, isn’t it?

  15. Connor, as long as you’re here, let me say how much fun I had at one of the Last Unicorn tour screening event party things. Once I was done crying, of course, because that movie ALWAYS gets me.

  16. Jeffro: I believe that my Appendix N series demonstrates that fantasy before 1980 was surprisingly diverse. The ideological and spiritual and thematic diversity of those books is positively stunning. It is in stark contrast to what is on the shelf at Barnes & Nobel right now.

    I think you might be missing invention.

    Appendix N’s authors helped create the genre. I’m not sure you’ll find anything like them in current literature, unless you look to where authors are doing something new.

    New is relative. I missed the New Wave by a few years and for me Neuromancer was the New Wave. I’d never seen anything like it before, it completely changed how I saw science fiction. I’m sure it was old news to someone by the time I read it, but it wasn’t to me.

    For fantasy, Peake’s Gormenghast novels (not new), Mythago Wood (not that new, either) and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel have all had that same sort of opening of the ways about them. And, given that I’m coming out of a lean time I’m interested in recommendations along those lines. >_>

    Sarah: I chose Solanin, a single-volume manga by Inio Asano that I highly recommend.

    I went through a long run of reading Battle Angel Alita, Blade of the Immortal and Vagabond a while ago. Solanin was a welcome change of pace. Not that the former aren’t great stories– Vagabond is based on Eiji Yoshikawa’s Mushashi and something else to read.

    Planetes has an excellent manga series. I’m not familiar with the anime, but it sounds as good.

    While not manga, exactly, Elfquest is stupendous and also available online.

  17. Delurking to suggest another anime title “Angel Beats”. While superficially a high school drama, admittedly set in the afterlife, a variety of tricky twists in a quite intricate plot, including one minutes before the end may well merit repeated viewings.

  18. Fourthing (?) the Read Or Die rec, its lovely.

    Erm, stating the bleeding obvious: Studio Ghibli’s stuff.

  19. > “Now I need to think of circumnavigation titles…..umm, The Other Pup of Phileas Fogg?”

    Surely it would be “The Other Dog of Phileas Fogg”?

  20. “I am more interested in telling you what’s right about sff before 1980”

    As a a writer, I’m frustrated and annoyed that somehow nothing I produce as a woman in the 21st century will have the value of stuff produced by white men while I was still a teenager.

    I mean, I love me some Robert Silverberg and I just reread Shadrach in the Furnace with huge pleasure, but his dystopic future run from Ulan Bator is set in 2012! (presciently with a pope called Benedict) Are we supposed to only stick with books whose long distant future is now in our past? Books exploring space before we even landed on that moon? Speculations about inventions and the solar systems which we have now researched in glorious details and found the speculations can’t hold a patch on the amazing reality?

    Are we to endlessly glorify war and military porn when our world is in the middle of world war 3?

    And are we really supposed to have our tastes defined by someone who thinks Hitler is a role model for race relations?

    I want stuff that talks to me about our world, the science we have now, the knowledge we have now and are seeking. I’m not going to get that from the Golden Age, and I’m not going to see much about the person I am in those books either.

    I’ve read a lot of the classic books of SFF, and they were good. But they’re not *enough*. Bugger the nutty nuggets. Give me real food, and give me new books that explore where we are now, and where we can be, knowing what we know now.

  21. Oh, another anime rec: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

    Charming sci fi romance with a YAish feel. 🙂

  22. On Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. It’s actually part of a sprawling multimedia franchise. While it’s the only anime, there are also manga, audio dramas and two live-action movies as well.

    The first volume of the Manga was released in the west by Dark Horse in the 90s, and the live-action movies have also made their way over.

  24. Oh, yes, seconding Last Exile! But don’t bother with the followup series Fam, the Silver Wing. I’m afraid it’s not very good.

    Makoto says:

    While not manga, exactly, Elfquest is stupendous and also available online.

    For those who don’t know, Elfquest is famously the first US comic to be strongly influenced by manga. I call it the thing that introduced me to manga before I knew what manga was.

    If we’re going to start in on fantasy recommendations…

    The Eccentric Family: Semi-comical urban fantasy where tanuki (racoon dogs that can shapechange) and tengu (crow-like creatures) mix with humans in modern Osaka. A murder mystery of sorts, in that everyone already knows who killed the patriarch of the titular tanuki family, but how he got into that situation is what needs to be figured out. Also, beautiful art the whole time.

    Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit: A hired fighter becomes the bodyguard to a fugitive prince who has been inhabited by something that some believe is a demon, and others believe is essential to the very continuation of the kingdom. Even more gorgeous artwork than The Eccentric Family. Also recommended to connoisseurs of interesting fictional ecology.

    Otogi Zoshi: The first half is swords and sorcery and action in medieval Japan as a band of heroes based on semi-historical figures run around collecting magic talismans to try to foil a plan that would cause a catastrophe. In the second half, everyone (including minor characters) has been reincarnated in modern Tokyo, and it turns into a very different, more relaxed show where the heroes delve into the history of Tokyo. But they find themselves drawn into the events of a thousand years previously, because the repercussions are still unfolding…

    Kyousougiga: Mixes Alice and Wonderland with a traditional Japanese setting in a whacked-out alternate-dimension version of Kyoto. Skip “episode 0” because it’s actually a long trailer, skip the last episode because it’s a clip show, but do watch and enjoy everything in between, including the best filler episode ever.

    Princess Tutu: A magical-girl show set in a European fairytale town, where the heroine is a ballet student who is really an enchanted duck, and somewhere a prince, a princess, and the evil raven who tried to keep them apart are hidden by an enchantment. Lots of ballet references, and not just the light and fluffy stuff. There are episodes named for Giselle, La Sylphide, and The Dying Swan, for instance…

  25. How has nobody mentioned Ranma ½ yet? I have issues with the anime (the music, mainly), but the manga seldom fails to crack me up.

  26. Lorcan, thanks for the Jin-Roh info!

    Ann, I agree, a lot. I live here, well into the 21st century, with this world that is so much better than it used to be in some ways, frustratingly unchanged in some, and much worse in others (even when what’s changed is just my knowledge of truths there all along). I want fiction that builds out from here in all directions. I’ll be 50 this year, and the classic three “if” story generators – “what if”, “if only”, and “if this goes on” – no matter mean a lot to me, most of the time, applied to the time of my birth, and decades earlier. The world’s moved on, and a lot of the answers aren’t very timeless. (Some are, but every few years, more fall by the wayside.) I need and want those questions asked about now.

    I’ve been loving The Goblin Emperor in part because it feels like it speaks to my time, an age with so many bullies enthroned and so much violent destruction glorified as wisdom. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Dick Cheney are not the wise sages I was led to expect by advocates of protecting the Western tradition like Anderson and Pournelle. Maia is the leader I dream of, and I’ve realized that he and his ilk will necessarily be outsiders like Maia is.

    Likewise with other work that’s doing what some Quakers call “speaking to my condition”.

  27. Rev. Bob, some of my trans friends find Ranma pretty stressful in playing a hard part of their condition for laughs. Not all, but it seems fairly common.

  28. @Jeffro

    On Appendix N,

    It is always surprising when I look over the list and see what is on the list and what isn’t. There are a number of writers / books which I wouldn’t have chosen (either then or now). There are a number of books which I would have done – the Jirel Of Joiry stories for example, or Earthsea, or Forgotten Beasts of Eld, or ER Eddison’s work, even Avram Davidson. I would be interested in seeing an article (but not on Castalia) on what you would have chosen (and which would have been possible at the time)

    Also are you going to compare and contrast the Appendix N stuff with Page B62 in Moldvay Basic D&D (which also gave an inspirational reading list)?

    Finally what do you think about Appendix E (the D&D 5e equivalent)?

    Lots of questions from me – but I hope you will find them of enough interest to consider them and reply.

  29. Whym’s link is a great example of Brad Torgersen’s ability to miss the point. Over and over Jay Lake patiently tried to open Torgersen’s eyes to the limited thing that concerned him — government endorsement of religion — but Torgersen kept responding as if Lake sought to ban all members of the public from religious speech in public spaces. He manipulated the discussion to play up the idea Christians are being persecuted.

    Also in that discussion, did anyone else find it insensitive when Torgersen said to Lake, “I ache for your medical trials, and the gradual dimming of your candle on this Earth”? There are a lot of ways to express sympathy and solidarity with someone in a serious cancer battle without telling them their candle is “dimming.”

  31. So a little while ago, John Scalzi broke into my home, accompanied by Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and a happy puppy.

    All four of them were wearing official “SJW Secret Leftist Cabal: Tor Division” t-shirts. (iThe outfit looked particularly fetching on the puppy–FETCHING on the PUPPY, get it? get it? get it? (sounds like “Voice of God”).)

    They tied me to a chair made entirely of the shattered dreams of sad and rabid writers cruelly robbed of their rightful Campbell and Hugo Awards. Then they found my credit card, called Amazon, and proceeded to FORCE ME to buy books published by Tor! The inhumanity of it, man! The cruelty! Book after book, by writers like Cixin Liu, Terry Goodkind, Orson Scott Card, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Hayden (no relation), Mary Robinette Kowal! They forced me to buy their ENTIRE line of Dune books, as well as all other Anderson books they publish. They made me buy ALL of the Wheel of Time! Pointing a point rocketship trophy at my vulnerable throat, they DEMANDED I agree to buy all of Scalzi’s novels!

    They concluded this foul play by toasting each other with Sadly Rabid Puppy skulls which they filled with the blood of conservative military sf writers. And when they were done forcing me to buy Tor book, they boarded the SJW-mobile and fled back to their liberal leftist East Coast cabal-HQ bunker in the Flat Iron building. TRUE STORY.

  32. >> How has nobody mentioned Ranma ½ yet? I have issues with the anime (the music, mainly), but the manga seldom fails to crack me up.>>

    Any of Rumiko Takahashi’s romantic comedies are great.

    Trans people who would prefer to avoid manga can still have her MAISON IKKOKU and ONE-POUND GOSPEL…

  33. Laura: Oh, the HUMANITY! Will no one think of the children? Whelps? Something like that?

    Well done!

  34. rcade: “There are a lot of ways to express sympathy and solidarity with someone in a serious cancer battle without telling them their candle is ‘dimming.'”

    I’m surprised that bothers you, though inasmuch as it does let me suggest it probably didn’t bother Jay, who was being amazingly transparent and candid about his cancer fight.

  35. Of course in terms of anime, I’ve always argued that the Patlabor2 movie (same director as GITS 1 and 2) was the best film about 9/11 even though it was made in ’93.
    Also by the same director the movie Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer is one of his first forays into the nature of reality.

    “The Place Promised in Our Early Days” is also a splendid alternate universe movie that follows the splendid Voices of a Distant Star

    Finally “The Wings of Honnêamise” is one of the best exercises in making an alternate world which is perfectly askew of expectations.

  36. andyl:

    It’s doubtful that Avram Davidson would have made it into Appendix N since Gygax had a declared aversion to him. Back in the early 60s when Avram Davidson was editing the Magazine of F&SF he ran a letter column. One issue included a short letter from a young Gary Gygax expressing his dissatisfaction with Avram Davidson’s tastes and declaring he would no longer be purchasing the magazine.

  37. @andyl,

    Oh my, those are absolutely wonderful questions. Thank you.

    “It is always surprising when I look over the list and see what is on the list and what isn’t. There are a number of writers / books which I wouldn’t have chosen (either then or now). There are a number of books which I would have done – the Jirel Of Joiry stories for example, or Earthsea, or Forgotten Beasts of Eld, or ER Eddison’s work, even Avram Davidson. I would be interested in seeing an article (but not on Castalia) on what you would have chosen (and which would have been possible at the time)”

    I will not stop once I complete the initial run of 42 retrospectives– there is much more to explore. I can tell you that there is a consensus within the game blogging community (that is old school role-playing, not pick up artistry, by the way) that C. L. Moore and Ursala K. Le Guin are not only done a disservice by being left of the list, but that people have actually improved their tabletop gaming with Earthsea. They are high on my priority list to look into. However… I have to say that I will not be easily distracted from my pursuit of more fiction by Leigh Brackett. She is easily among my favorite Appendix N authors and I really would like to track down lots more of her stuff. Finally, (yes, there’s a theme here), I do want to investigate more Andre Norton to see how applicable her work is to Traveller gaming. (Although I admit, Piper and Tubb probably had more influence on the game rules than she did… nevertheless, she is still a big deal.)

    “Also are you going to compare and contrast the Appendix N stuff with Page B62 in Moldvay Basic D&D (which also gave an inspirational reading list)?”

    I believe that James Maliszewski has already done this far better than I can:

    https://www.blackgate.com/2013/10/22/inspiration-and-emulation-tolkien-and-gygax/

    “Finally what do you think about Appendix E (the D&D 5e equivalent)?”

    Wayne Rossi has done an admirable job of weighing in on this question here:

    http://initiativeone.blogspot.com/2015/02/appendices-e-and-n.html

    “Lots of questions from me – but I hope you will find them of enough interest to consider them and reply.”

    Thank you so much. This sort of discussion is something I get a great deal of enjoyment from.

  38. Connor Cochran — Is there ANY possibility of the soundtrack for The Last Unicorn ever being released? If there is, I want it.

    (I realize that this may be impossible, and it may have to remain on my want list like the soundtrack to Brother Sun, Sister Moon.)

  39. Re: the SJW-mobile – tell me it’s not a black Prius with a license plate that says SAVN RTH? Cuz if it is, I stole it and it’s sitting in my driveway. 😀

  40. What kind of person think’s that an international publishing company’s fiction policy is set by someone in the art department?

  41. Will McLean: “What kind of person think’s that an international publishing company’s fiction policy is set by someone in the art department?”

    Stan Lee?

    (Just kidding.)

  43. “Don’t buy anything made by TOR. Not pamphlets. Not novels, not audiobooks. Not even if it’s free. ”
    -Jonathan LaForce

    How do I buy something that’s free?

  44. @ Ann Somerville:
    This. A thousand times this.

    I’m pretty impartial in terms of the time period when works were published, although I tend not to read stuff that came out before 1950. I’m just as excited to pick up and and read Harry Harrison’s Deathworld as James L. Cambias’ A Darkling Sea. To put it another way, I’ve got mountains of books by prolific authors like Niven, Cherryh, Dickson, Poul Anderson, McCaffrey, Zelazny, Norton, Silverberg, and Moorcock to read, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that keep me from enjoying new stuff.

  45. @ Lori Coulson

    As it happens, we are working on a new remastered (and COMPLETE) soundtrack release right now, and hope to have it out before the end of the year. There’s a hell of a story that goes with the old German edition, by the way. It was flagrantly illegal: the man who made the deal with the German record label never controlled the rights in the first place!

  46. Whym

    My personal view is that I have a lot of books from old favourites which bears an uncanny resemblance to yours, but that doesn’t stop me reading and enjoying new stuff as well.

  47. @Bruce Baugh: “Rev. Bob, some of my trans friends find Ranma pretty stressful in playing a hard part of their condition for laughs. Not all, but it seems fairly common.”

    Not to minimize their reactions, but…

    The parts I find funny are (a) that Ranma and the other afflicted characters transform under certain known conditions and (b) the more generic “wacky escapades” that result from one member of the cast getting transformed and being thrust into a situation where that becomes awkward due to their associates not knowing about the shift. Whether that’s girl-Ranma, panda-Genma, pig-Ryu, or anyone else, those two elements remain the same. Half-controlled transformations are funny, whatever the alternate form happens to be, and there’s a certain parallel there to the humor that can be constructed around anyone with a secret identity.

    In short, I don’t find it transphobic because many of the same gags that hit Ranma also hit every other transformed character, modified to fit their specific alternate form. Ranma gets gender problems, Ryu gets cute-pig problems, Genma gets to whack people with big signs to communicate. I found Ranma’s reactions to his gender-related predicaments to ring true; if I were cursed in the same fashion, I’d probably have quite similar reactions. If anything, I appreciated how the manga tackled that awkwardness; it felt authentic to me.

    Well, authentic aside from the bizarre types of martial arts, of course. That’s just its own special kind of fun.

  48. I’ve been rereading old favourites as a palate cleanser inbetween Hugo ballot Puppy crap. I suppose it would be more economical to work on 2015 works for nominations next year, but after reading things by most of the Puppies I just want something soothing. I think it’ll be Damia by Anne McCaffrey next. I have a longstanding desire to cosplay in one of the gorgeous costumes from the covers of the Talents books. 🙂

  49. Petréa Mitchell: For those who don’t know, Elfquest is famously the first US comic to be strongly influenced by manga. I call it the thing that introduced me to manga before I knew what manga was.

    The same! I read Elfquest in its Starblaze incarnation and along with Rock & Rule it paved the way for Akira. I was ready!

    If I had to weigh them, Elfquest was the greatest influence. There was nothing in the world short of breaking and entering that would stop me from reading those books. I was one determined kid.

    For anime, I really enjoyed 12 Kingdoms. It’s built from a number of common anime and manga tropes, but Fuyumi Ono fit them together in a novel way. I loved the orderly setting, the way a ruler’s nature was physically reflected in their kingdom, the wild spiritual ecology and the various twists to Youko’s story. Much like Maia, she walks into a real mess and much is expected of her.

    I have the first two volumes of the novel, but lost track of them after Tokypop imploded. Hm–

  50. @Kyra

    “Surely it would be “The Other Dog of Phileas Fogg”?”

    This is why I don’t contribute many title ideas – I miss even the easiest openings!

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