The Dogcatcher In The Rye 6/17

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aka The Summer of our Manufactured Discontent

In today’s roundup: Sarah A. Hoyt, Vox Day, David Gerrold, Steven Brust, John Scalzi, Peter Grant, Laura J. Mixon, Laura Resnick, Spacefaring Kitten, Chris Gerrib, David Gerrold, Adam-Troy Castro, Lis Carey, Larry Correia, Brad Johnson and mysterious others. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Nigel and DMS.)

Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt

“Fun House Mirrors” – June 17

But I’ve been on a slow simmer since the Irene Gallo comments, and that was brought to a boil yesterday.

Why yesterday, you ask?

Because the hypocritical scum (I apologize to any scum I might have offended) who runs file 770 has been gleefully linking anything of mine that even uses the letters H-u-g- and o in the same paragraph, but yesterday I wrote about his hypocrisy in taking a sentence of mine out of context and linking it with a clever-daft punchline of the “Hydrophobia that falls on you from nowhere” to imply I was homophobic.

Did he link yesterday’s post? Are you kidding? Even though he’s fairly sure his blinded followers will rarely click through, he couldn’t afford to explode his narrative. He’d on the flimsiest of “evidence” – i.e. my refusal to go into details on same sex marriage and other accommodations for more “exotic” orientations in a post to which it wasn’t even incidental – declared me homophobic, and he couldn’t risk the narrative being exploded.

I confess that when my Baen colleagues were making fun of file 770 and going on about “Mike Glyer, Fifty Hugos” (the number of nominations he’d had) I thought they were being a little mean. After all, the man was just well-intentioned and blinkered, and believed the narrative.

Guys, I was wrong, you were right. He’s not deceived, but he willfully deceives. He is not a useful idiot, but one who would seek to make idiots out of others. He’s not the sheep, but the judasgoat.

Why does that matter to me? Why do I get so upset if it’s not true? Isn’t it an axiom (at least on the left side of politics) that you only get upset if it’s secretly true?

[I reminded Sarah A. Hoyt the roundup titles are a trope, not a comment on the writers quoted. She did not take me up on my offer to run another excerpt, so I can only commend the entire post to you — “Dispatches From Another World” – June 12.]

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“Updates” – June 17

Since many of you have been asking, no, no one has received any response from anyone at Tor Books or Macmillan. We know at least some of the emails have been read by the recipients. Be patient, we have to give Macmillan time to investigate the situation and discover for themselves just how dysfunctional and unprofessional their U.S. subsidiary is. Remember that Julie Crisp, Editorial Director of Tor UK, left the company “following a review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing” in May, and her public behavior was unobjectionable in comparison with that of Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Also, Jagi has asked that when you send her your pictures of your Tor books, please tell her what state or country you are from. She’s received them from 65 people to date.

David Gerrold in a comment on Facebook – June 17

So, Vox Day has declared a boycott of Tor Books.

I expect this will be as effective as the Baptist boycott of Disney World.

Peter Grant on Bayou Renaissance Man

“The blindness of the ideologically bound” – June 17

And so, when Ms. Gallo accused me – me – of being ‘unrepentantly racist’ purely because I happened to support the Sad Puppy cause, that was the last straw.  I’d heard that lie from SJW’s before, of course, and been able to get over it . . . but lies like that are like the Chinese water torture.  Sooner or later, something’s going to snap.  Her accusations were, to me, unforgivable;  and since she’s never seen fit to retract them, they still are.  Since her employer has seen fit to allow her, and others like her, to pontificate about something of which they apparently know absolutely nothing, to make false accusations and toss denigrations around like confetti, doing so on company time and using company computers and networks . . . that employer is complicit in the whole mess.  Hence my outrage against Tor.  Hence the boycott for which I will call on Friday if Tor and its holding company, Macmillan, don’t act against those responsible.

I won’t take this any more.  I know I’m far from the only Puppy supporter who’s had enough of the SJW’s lies and slanders and libels.  They want a war?  They can have one.

Laura J. Mixon

“I stand with Irene Gallo, and I stand with Tor” – June 17

Bullies and abusers rely on the larger community’s desire for comity—our willingness to live and let live—to impose their will and silence dissent. In such a case, it’s incumbent on people with standing in the community to speak up against them, providing a counterweight to their destructive ideas. By speaking when she did, in my view, Irene was doing what other thought leaders in our field like N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, and the Nielsen Haydens have done: guarding the health and well-being of our SFF community by standing up against hate speech.

Some feel the stark terms Irene applied to the Sad and Rabid Puppies movements in her FaceBook post—racist, misogynist, homophobic, neo-nazi—were too harsh and too broadly applied. That she spoke out of turn and had no business criticizing the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaign while promoting a Tor book. They protest that their views are not extreme, and using such terms unfairly maligns them, by lumping them in with someone they don’t support. Some members of the Sad and Rabid Puppy campaigns have indeed distanced themselves from Beale, and perhaps they were initially unaware of just how extreme his views were.

I believe that communities can grow and change. People can learn; viewpoints can shift. I have a seed of hope that someday, through continued dialog and education, we can find a way through this and mend some of the rifts that this conflict has exposed.

But there is no getting around the fact that a misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist, who has spoken approvingly of shootings and acid attacks on women, and of Hitler and the Holocaust, who has called a respected SFF scholar and popular writer an ignorant, “not equally human” savage, stands at the heart of this conflict. Beale’s followers and fellow travelers may not themselves hold all the bigoted views he does, but information on who he is and how he feels about women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others has been widely shared by now. If people are emailing you calling for Irene to be fired, they are unavoidably supporting Beale’s hate-filled agenda.

Laura Resnick on Facebook – June 17

I’m guessing that, for a raft of reasons, Tor and Macmillan will not meet any of these demands, and so it seems likely the Puppies will boycott the biggest publisher in our genre starting on Friday. I’m skeptical that a few hundred people will have an effect on a program the size of Tor, and also skeptical that their numbers will grow. So I’m more concerned about what persons, organizations, or businesses will be the Puppies’ next target. I didn’t think they would stop with the Hugos, and I’m skeptical they’ll stop with Tor, either.

https://twitter.com/tuesdayreviews/status/611230746921963520

Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring Extradimensional Happy Kittens

“Answering Peter Grant” – June 17

Sad Puppy activist Peter Grant was one of the most vocal people pushing for this week’s hatemail campaign directed at Tor….

He says:

I’ll do my best not to stoop to name-calling, with the exception of referring to the other side as ‘social justice warriors’ or SJW’s. I do so only because I have no other name in my vocabulary to adequately or accurately describe them. If anyone can suggest a better, more acceptable alternative, I’ll be grateful.

I replied in the comments that the best alternative would be Happy Kittens. Sadly, it seems like my comment was deleted.

I’d like to rephrase my suggestion here: please drop the SJW and start using Happy Kittens if you insists on having a handle for the people who are critical of Sad Puppies. It’s not offensive. It’s kind of funny in the same way as Sad Puppies. It looks ridiculous in an angry sentence. Plenty of good reasons.

Chris Gerrib on Private Mars Rocket

“Puppy Bites Woman AGAIN, Pictures at 11 !!!!” – June 17

I find a notable fact buried in the piles of puppy-doo.

I’m going to dig said fact out and clean it up for you. I’m doing this because facts have been one thing in short supply in this debate. For the most part, what we get are vague statements that some unnamed person committed some undefined offense sometime during a large event. But now we have a fact.

Per Vox, 765 individual people emailed Tor complaining about Gallo. That sounds like a lot, except, 79,279 people bought a copy of Redshirts in 2013. So, if you take 765 and divide it by 79,279, you get .00964. In other words, less than 1% of the people who bought one book from Tor are complaining. You’d have to magnify that complaint number by an order of magnitude to get anybody’s attention.

David Gerrold in a message on Facebook – June 17

A friend has pointed out to me that any attempt to calm people down is doomed unless everyone involved wants to calm down. He then went on to point out that too often there are individuals who will have a vested interest in escalating the uproar. It increases their visibility — and their illusion (delusion?) of power.

It is — according to my very wise friend — a kind of ferocious madness that has to reach a peak before it can burn itself out. It cannot be calmed and those… efforts are doomed. It has to be inflamed by those who are enraptured by the heat they can generate and like any addiction, the dosage has to be increased, they can only crave more and more — until the whole thing becomes a bonfire and they are finally, ultimately immolated in the flames.

He might be right.

I’ve seen flame wars online that have destroyed whole forums — and I’ve seen the perpetrators of these flame wars move from forum to forum, leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind them. I cannot think of a single instance where a call for peace was effective. Even Gandhi died by a bullet.

Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – June 17

I have heard more than one person say that they’re dreading Worldcon.

I won’t say that this is what the Sad and Rabid Puppies want as a group, even if I do think it’s what of a couple of the individual standard-bearers want. I will say that it is certainly what a great number of the trolls slamming so-called SJW writers on their behalf want. (And I do think it would tickle Beale the Galactic Zero no end. This is the guy who cheers spree killers, after all.)

Alas, I am not going to Worldcon this year. It would take an unexpected windfall of colossal proportions. Maybe next year, or the year after.

But if I was, “dread it”? To hell with that. I go to have fun, to catch up with old friends, to make new ones, to find treasures in the Dealer’s Room, to talk about my pop-culture obsessions and to hear others talk about my pop-culture obsessions. I’d be going, this year, to see my friend David Gerrold in his Guest of Honor gig and to see him and my friend Tananarive Due nail their Hugo-hosting gig. You think, if attendance was in my cards for me, I would waste more than one millisecond of brain energy on the premise that some no-neck gibberer with a fixation on his own imaginary oppression might say something nasty to me?

Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring Extradimensional Happy Kittens

“Cedar ‘Go Buy A Shooter Bimbo Shirt’ Sanderson” – June 17

Cedar Sanderson is the third member of the Mad Genius Club in this category, and she has produced what is probably the single best blog post in the voters packet I’ve read so far that has actually something do with SFF. In it, she ponders the shortcomings of generic fantasy on the lines of Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland which is a book I should probably read sometime. The text would be stronger if Sanderson had gone into specifics and given some more concrete examples of bad fantasy, but it’s not bad as is.

H.P. on Every Day Should Be Tuesday

“Review of Rat Queens vol. 1: Sass & Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe” – June 17

ratqueens

Each of the four members has her moments, the story is intriguing enough, and the comic is genuinely funny. They’re foul-mouthed, horny, and have a distinct tendency to cause disproportionate property damage. And can drink their rival adventurers under the table as easily as they kill their enemies. They’re joined by a host of cool minor characters, from a long-suffering captain of the town watch who’s sleeping with one of the Rat Queens to the friendly rival adventurer group named the Four Daves (exactly what it says on the tin) to a villainous local merchant to one very annoying town watchman. All in all, it probably has the best combo of awesome female characters around.

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“Best Editor, Long Form — 2015 Hugo Award Nominees” – June 17

[She reviews all five nominees. I excerpted the one that struck me as the most favorable.]

Sheila Gilbert: Ms. Gilbert is, with Betsy Wollheim, Publisher at DAW. Ms. Gilbert did provide both a list of edited works, and sample chapters. Her writers include Seanan McGuire, Julie Czerneda, and Jacey Bedford, and the sample chapters include both science fiction and fantasy. Within the limits of my ability to assess her work as an editor, I’m very impressed. There are also some new works added to my To Be Read list.

Font Folly

“Hugo Ballot Reviews: Graphic Story” – June 17

[Preceded by reviews of all nominees.]

Rat Queens is hands-down the winner of slot number one on my Hugo ballot in this category. And with Zombie Nation at number five, the only thing left up in the air is where how I’m going to rank Saga, Sex Criminals, and Ms. Marvel, because I want all of them and Rat Queens to take home an award, dang it!

Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation

“Somebody sent me a Sad Puppies holster” – June 17

I’ve not been saying much about the Sad Puppies controversy lately, because right now it is out of my hands. Some employees of a publishing house said some pretty outlandish things, and their customers are ticked and writing lots of letters. I’m staying out of that one.

But some author friends had this made for me and sent as a gift. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be identified.

Sad Puppy 1911 Holster Right Hand

Sad Puppy 1911 Holster Right Hand

https://twitter.com/Cherokee_Viking/status/611347536373157888

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1,023 thoughts on “The Dogcatcher In The Rye 6/17”

  1. I don’t know if you guys know much about Atlanta in the late summer, but it is hot. And I mean, that heavy kind of heat that just saps it all out of you, right? So DragonCon takes place over a bunch of hotels with some elevated walkways connecting a couple of them, but nothing but sidewalk connecting others.

    Well, in the middle of Saturday, I mean, you know right in the middle of the hottest time of it, I stagger into the food court and find the one last available bench that doesn’t have a mass of humanity sitting on it and I stake my claim and declare to myself that I’m not going to move for thirty minutes.

    So then this older dude comes over and asks if he can share the bench. Well, you know, when you’ve finally managed to actually find an open spot in the midst of the tens of thousands, your immediate reaction to a request like that is annoyance, but I offer the most polite nod I can, which was relatively short and, I’m sure, irritated.

    Well, the old dude and I sit there on the bench for about ten minutes and sweat. It’s not a very big bench, mind you, just large enough for the both of us to sit in uncomfortably close proximity. And then it dawns on me that he’s Peter David.

    Well, I wasn’t sure what to do. I mean, I hadn’t exactly been welcoming and he was obviously as wiped out by the heat as I was and probably was in no mood to have the large, sweaty guy next to him suddenly start doing the ‘fan’ thing, so I finally just got up and said, “Hey, it was, uh, nice to meet you.” He sort of nodded and looked grateful to have the bench to himself.

    But I did get to sweat next to Peter David for about 15 minutes.

  2. The only cats of mine who don’t/didn’t know their own names were the ones who went deaf. Which is a sadly common ailment in elderly kitties. My Kismet is 16 this year, and her favorite passtime is sticking her head into the metal water bowl and meowing as loudly as she can. For 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch. I figure she’s earned her entertainment with 16 years of service as a lapwarmer but lordy. She’s hugely loud for only being 5 pounds.

  3. @Sweet

    Yeah, Roger Zelazny was one of nature’s gentlemen. I got the chance to spend some time with him at a writer’s conference when I was just a teenager – the man was patient and pleasant and never once talked down to a geeky kid. Thirty-plus years later and he’s still one of my role models.

  4. May Tree: I find myself wondering if STV defeats slate voting, though.

    I think, if anything, it institutionalizes it. STV is designed so the overall effect of a general election with political parties is that the proportion of candidates elected over all constituencies is close too the overall proportion of support for those parties.

    So if there was a Whovian Party, a Trekkie Party, a GRRM Party and a Browncoat Party then across all the different categories the proportion of nominees would match the proportions of the 4 parties overall even if a given group was stronger in one category than another. It doesn’t really match how the slates have worked or how the categories work. So in all it might cause more problems than it would solve.

  5. And speaking of Greer Gilman, I don’t think her way-too-small output has appeared here in any book recommendation posts. Highly literary, the farthest thing in the world from “invisible” or “transparent” prose, but well worth the effort of reading, perhaps with an OED close at hand.

  6. It’s a mystery novel, and the “detective” is a flock of sheep.

    I’ve read plenty of books where the cat solves the mystery, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen herbivores in the starring role before!

  7. Animal POVs: I’ve just finished the epic battle of catching up with the thread, and I’m fairly sure that no one has mentioned Dogsbody, by Diana Wynne Jones.

  8. GSLamb :

    We discussed the finer points of tea brewing and argued Asian vs British teas before I left for my panel.

    Halfway through the panel, the same nice gentleman walked in. With the crowd’s reaction, I finally realized he was Sir Pterry.

    I had a similar experience discussing beer varieties with Dr. Demento at a folk festival. Didn’t know who he was until a while later when he appeared on stage as the MC for the evening.

  9. I hope I’m not the only here who looked at “How to tell if you’re in a Gothic novel” and automatically thought about where Northanger Abbey fell on each chart.

  10. Did I forget to mention that in the Harry Harrison Eden trilogy the “aliens” are dinosaurs? Well they are dinosaurs.

  11. So if there was a Whovian Party, a Trekkie Party, a GRRM Party and a Browncoat Party then across all the different categories the proportion of nominees would match the proportions of the 4 parties overall even if a given group was stronger in one category than another. It doesn’t really match how the slates have worked or how the categories work. So in all it might cause more problems than it would solve.

    Yeah, that’s kind of the impression I got. And it would not be a good thing, although the idea of trying to divide fandom up into political parties based on primary interest and then creating a Fannish Parliament out of the results is oddly intriguing and amusing to me. Would we put all Lit SFF fans in one party — The Bookers — up against all the media fen of various stripes? Or would the Bookers only be a fragile fractious coalition constantly threatening to splinter around which Stephen King book was the best? (“Before I vote for you, I want a clear answer, Candidate: What’s your stance on TOMMYKNOCKERS?!”)

  12. Stories with an alien POV: last year’s A Darkling Sea by James Cambias, one of the books the Puppies kept from a shot at the Hugo, has several PsOV, including an alien so alien it reminded me of Mission of Gravity.

  14. MickyFinn on June 18, 2015 at 6:49 pm said:
    Animal POVs: I’ve just finished the epic battle of catching up with the thread, and I’m fairly sure that no one has mentioned Dogsbody, by Diana Wynne Jones.

    No one has. That’s a good one, but a heartbreaker.

  15. Doctor Science on June 18, 2015 at 6:52 pm said:
    I hope I’m not the only here who looked at “How to tell if you’re in a Gothic novel” and automatically thought about where Northanger Abbey fell on each chart.

    But of course, they aren’t including parodies (although I think Gormenghast is a bit borderline there …).

    Yeah, I checked too.

  16. Doctor Science: I’ve been wondering about how the Cambias book was. Thanks! I’ve been marginally acquainted with Jim for a long time, and hoping he’d be another out of the old net relegating scene to do well at prose.

  17. @stevie-You mentioned Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming by Zelazny and Sheckley. Your comment didn’t indicate whether or not you know this, but they did three books together. The other two were If At Faust You Don’t Succeed and A Farce To Be Reckoned With, both of which are wonderful.

  18. *muse* I think @Idontknow may have dinged an interesting point, on the “when everything settles down” front.

    Namely–oh, well, place your bets, people! How do you see this going AFTER the Hugos?

    For my nickel–huge flare up the week after Hugo night, as Puppies howl (with triumph or rage, I do not presume to guess); VD releases the screenshot he’s been sitting on for eighteen months where somebody says something casually that can, with the proper squint through a glass smoked in manticore tears, be construed to be uncomplimentary/about Hugo rigging/whatever; Paulk vows that they will fight again/triumph again/hold the last hill against the SJWs; people who discover they were knocked off the ballot will write More In Sorrow Than In Anger posts/I Don’t Want To Deal With This posts/All Puppies Are Dead To Me Forever Although Not Literally Because That Wasn’t A Death Threat WTF Is Wrong With You People posts; GRRM does a wrapup; Eric Flint does a wrapup; Torgersen does a wrapup; Hoyt does something that tries to be a wrapup but gets sidetracked into screaming at Alinsky; Making Light does a wrapup; File770 does the meta-wrapup; two or three people come out on File770 or Making Light or Torgersen’s blog claiming that they were actually secret agents for the other side all along and it was TOTALLY A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT YOU GUYS AND YOU FELL FOR IT; JCW says something that would be insulting if it had fewer adjectives to cushion the blow; and it all generally trickles away into nothingness until roughly next February.

    February I see foundering on the fact that Paulk is not as well known as Torgersen, although that may vary depending on whether they eat No Award at the Hugos.

  19. Had to go a day early on book buying, because I was actually in a store. Black Ice by an author is hadn’t heard of. Wish me luck in the reading.

  20. Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” Like… is the link there supposed to be vaguely-but-too-vague-to-take-offense threatening or just… what?

  21. @Lis Carey wrt “Sucker Punch”:

    My problem with it is that it appears to be the only piece of SF by someone nominated for the Campbell – I look on that as an award for a new writer’s body of work. Is that really all there is by him?

  22. I bet on “more of the same” for a while.

    Assuming here that the Puppies’ slates do very badly on the final ballot, as I expect, then they’ll be outraged about that. Assuming that one or more measures intended to restrict the power of slates pass at the business meetings, as I expect, then they’ll be outraged about that. if they don’t get all the firings and successful boycotts they’ve been demanding, ditto. So the ringleaders will keep on doing about what they’ve been doing, and their followers will keep following, by and large.

  23. The future of the SPs? They will never rest, never give in, until their righteous crusade is–squirrel!.

    Really, though, once the rules are tweaked to make slating less effective, the Puppies will be a non-issue. There’s just too little substance behind their complaints for them to amount to much of anything. And the world of scifi always has some new “scandal” or another to distract.

  24. I’m struggling to reverse-engineer why anybody thought the No Award Showdown was

    (a) a good idea at all

    (b) a good enough idea that it was worth introducing such an additional level of complexity into an already multi-stage count.

    Can anyone enlighten me?

  25. two or three people come out on File770 or Making Light or Torgersen’s blog claiming that they were actually secret agents for the other side all along and it was TOTALLY A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT YOU GUYS AND YOU FELL FOR IT

    I’ll bet five pounds Brian Z. turns out to be either JJ or Brad T.

  26. Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” Like… is the link there supposed to be vaguely-but-too-vague-to-take-offense threatening or just… what?

    That did occur to me too. After all, “disgruntled white man goes on shooting spree” is hardly an unknown circumstance, especially in the US. But everyone just seemed to take in their stride, so perhaps it’s perfectly innocuous after all.

  27. Let’s riff on some Pink Floyd albums

    The Puppy at the Gates of Dawn
    The Bark Side of the Moon
    Delicate Hound of Thunder

  28. two or three people come out on File770 or Making Light or Torgersen’s blog claiming that they were actually secret agents for the other side all along and it was TOTALLY A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT YOU GUYS AND YOU FELL FOR IT

    So… David Myers?

  29. May Tree: E Pluribus Hugo will no doubt make it to Our Gracious Host’s links in the next few days, as it’s about to be submitted to the Business Meeting. STV in nominations wouldn’t stop slates taking over all the nomination slots, but E Pluribus Hugo will, whether Sad/Rabid Puppy slates or Happy Kitten slates.

  30. @Gabriel F
    I seem to be recalling that from a thread on monster hunter blog back in April – someone offered to do it for Larry. Perhaps my memory is faulty but that is my recollection.

  31. @ Iain

    As someone living in the US with plenty of relatives on both the pro-gun and no-gun sides of things… very rarely does an American dude bring up his gun for no reason. Which is why I wondered. It seems some oddly-placed product placement.

  32. MAY! Are we going to have a Tommyknockers fight again? We already destroyed one thread!

    The conflict between the pro-Tommies and the anti-Knockers has long been a wedge issue in our multinational elections, Gabriel, as you well know. All candidates will have to take a stand or be accused of waffling. They will also have to state a firm position on “Which was better, Ancillary Justice or Ancillary Sword? NO FLIP FLOPPING!” and “The 3BP vs. TGE issue: which matters more, great characters or great ideas?!”

    Tough questions, all. The official debates should be very lively. We are hoping to get Michael Glyer as our moderator as we feel his extensive experience will be required to keep things from potentially coming to blows and/or thrown podiums (podia?) on the debate floor.

  33. @JohnFromGR: I stopped listening to the Sad Puppies after The Final Pup, when Correia left the group.

    …But does that make VD the Puppies’ Syd Barrett?

  34. If the Puppies are comprehensively No-Awarded, and an anti-slate amendment passes, then I would expect an extinction burst, with the Puppies yapping louder and harder than ever until everyone else just stops bothering with them.

  36. @Gabriel F.:

    Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” Like… is the link there supposed to be vaguely-but-too-vague-to-take-offense threatening or just… what?

    I don’t think it’s even remotely intended to be threatening.

    I think Correia has been deliberately easing himself out of the Puppy Wars, but felt it would be ungenerous not to publicly thank his anonymous benefactors for their lovely parting gift. So he made the post and included as little on-topic content as he felt he could get away with without betraying his friends.

    No matter how he feels privately now – my guess is “conflicted”, and worried about his own image – Correia’s not going to come out and turn on the ELoE. He probably doesn’t want to turn on them, even though he may well think Brad’s taken the whole thing a bit far. Because while I think Torgersen, Hoyt and VD are bad-to-reprehensible human beings, they are, regardless, Correia’s buds. And it’s hard to publicly break with your buds.

    People I love were on the wrong side of Racefail. We never discussed it. So I can’t cast stones here. But “I am not wading into the Tor thing” is as close to “Uh, guys?” as one is likely to come.

  37. Delicate Hound of Thunder

    Well, now I am totally embarrassed not to have thought of “A Hound of Thunder” by Ray Barkbury long before this.

  39. Gabriel F –

    Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” Like… is the link there supposed to be vaguely-but-too-vague-to-take-offense threatening or just… what?

    Eh, I wouldn’t read much into it. The gun holsters were brought up about a month or two ago and he’s a gun store owner if I remember right. He’s just showing off his new toy.

  40. Gabriel:
    >> Can someone explain to me why Larry felt the need to say “I haven’t talked about Puppies much, but here’s a gun holster that friends who want to be anonymous gave me.” >>

    It’s got the Sad Puppy logo on it. So it’s Puppy-related, and thus the Puppy reference was an intro.

    He hasn’t talked about the Puppies much since things blew the hell up (possibly because he sees well enough where the wind is blowing), but the holster is kind of a cool gift and the sort of thing one should probably acknowledge publicly, since it likely came from blog followers.

    And that’s probably all there is to it.

  42. Let’s riff on some Pink Floyd albums

    The Puppy at the Gates of Dawn
    The Bark Side of the Moon
    Delicate Hound of Thunder

    The Final Pup

    A Saucerful of Kibble

    Atom Heart Puppy

    Delicate Sound of Yapping

    Ummapuppa

  43. @idontknow — Your Dragoncon/Peter David story was awesome. 🙂 Thanks for sharing it.

  44. Stevie: Amelia Peabody and Vicki Bliss FTW! (I wasn’t too happy with the last VB, trying to be all contemporary).

    I had a whole bunch of the ones you mentioned but some slipped away over the years (moves, darn it). I’m thinking of adding some back in e book form in future (just got the Dorothy Dunnett Lymond chronicles).

    We’ll be doing our last big move in six or seven years, and are trying to clear out a lot of stuff so we don’t have to pack it up and ship cross country when we retire.

  46. I hate insomnia; it’s 3.30 am over the pond.

    On the other hand it’s good to see you are diligently doing your duty to repel boarders on the good ship File770; I think you’ve got them bang to rights.

    At the risk of flouncing I propose to watch Due South to while away the hours until Morpheus has a slot in his schedule; the one where they sing. And have horses!

  47. Gabriel F: Coffee would be wonderful! But at least now there is the internet — which has been a great boon for those of us living in isolated places far from fandom! It was great fun advising the student sff group for a while, but a bit too much work, and not enough wanting to sit around and read and talk about books, alas! (They did get me onto FB though since they never read their campus email).

    *raises virtual cup*

  48. MRC:

    I pretty much completely agree with you about 3BP, especially:

    Vg srryf yvxr gjb frcnengr abiryf jbira gbtrgure: gurer’f n Uhtb jbegul fgbel srnghevat Lr Jrawvr, naq ubj naq jul n uhzna pbhyq or oebhtug gb gur cbvag jurer fur orgenlf nyy bs uhznavgl. Naq gurer’f n fgbel nobhg n fpvragvfg naq n pbc gung V’q chg orybj Ab Njneq. Gur birenyy obbx vfa’g onq, ohg qhr gb gur vapbafvfgrapl vg’f abg va gur fnzr yrnthr va zl zvaq nf NF be GTR.

    I so resent having only 3 really IMHO Hugo-worthy books to judge among, instead of those 3 plus 2 others — Annihilation and Lock-In are my bets.

  50. Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pup

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