Jay Maynard has proposed “An Award for SF Storytelling” in a post on Black Gate, essentially the anti-Hugos, copying many of the existing Hugo categories and rules but purified of the tendencies Maynard disapproves.
The rationale for the (insert name here) Awards is simple. Over time, the Hugo voters have considered other factors than the most fundamental when evaluating a work. They have chosen works based on their political emphasis, or the race or nationality of the author, or other criteria aside from that which defines SF/F. Attempts to turn the Hugo Awards back to the foundations of SF/F have been met with derision and outright hatred. Despite their previous claims to the contrary, the Hugo Awards voters and others now say that the Hugos represent the World Science Fiction Society’s choices, not those of fandom at large.
The Novelette category would be eliminated, with short fiction receiving just two awards in the new system. There would be no editor or semiprozine categories. On the other side of the ledger, there would be a new YA Story category – one category for all lengths.
- Best Novel – Written SF/F stories of 50,000 words or more in length.
- Best Novella – Written SF/F stories between 5,000 and 50,000 words in length.
- Best Short Story – Written SF/F stories 5,000 words in length or shorter.
- Best Young Adult Story – Written SF/F stories of any length intended to be accessible to and enjoyed by SF/F fans under 18 years of age.
- Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience of over 90 minutes in length.
- Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience in 90 minutes or less.
- Best Graphic Story – Works of graphic art, with or without accompanying text, that tell an SF/F story.
- Best Related Work – Any nonfiction or fiction work that is not itself a work of SF/F storytelling, but serves to advance the SF/F storyteller’s art.
Although he would make a logical ally for a new set of sf awards, none of Eric Flint’s suggestions for adjusting the novel category have been adopted — not that there’s anything keeping them from being considered in a later draft.
In the nominating phase, Maynard will implement the 4/6 and E Pluribus Hugo proposals given first passage at Sasquan. Then comes a most interesting twist — the finalists will be screened by a Judging Committee.
The judges shall evaluate each work solely by its storytelling. The judges may disqualify any work they find to have an emphasis on other than telling a good SF/F story. They may disqualify no more than three nominees in any category. The disqualified nominees will be replaced by reprocessing the nominating ballots from the beginning as though those nominees had never been submitted; the judges may not disqualify the replacement nominees. This power is expected to be used very sparingly, as the awards are intended to reflect the choices of fandom at large….
The Judging Committee shall consist of no more than five members. They shall be chosen by the Foundation Board of Directors, and selected for their knowledge of the fields of science fiction and fantasy and their commitment to uphold the ideals of the (insert name here) Awards. They may serve as long as they and the Foundation Board of Directors wish.
The final ballot will be voted on by the Single Transferable Vote method (which some traditionalists like to call “the Australian Ballot”).
Unlike the Hugo Awards, there will be no provision for No Award. (Take that, WSFSians!)
The awards will be administered by a nonprofit corporation with a 501(c)(3) tax exemption.
The voter eligibility rules seem difficult to reconcile with Maynard’s goal of truly representing all of fandom. To become an eligible voter for Maynard’s awards, a person must be vouched for by one or more existing eligible voters with sufficient status. A voter must have a “trust level of 1 or greater” —
When first registering to vote, a person’s trust level is 0. An existing eligible voter whose trust level is 3 or greater may raise or lower the trust level of up to three other people by 1 each, and this number rises by 1 with each additional trust level until a maximum of a trust level of 10 is reached. The undersigned, as well as prior recipients of a (insert name here) Award and current and past members of the Foundation Board of Directors and Judging Committee, may raise or lower the trust level of any person by 1. A voter may not raise the trust level of anyone who raised his own, nor of anyone in the chain of trust leading back to those holding unlimited trusting privileges.
What could be more welcoming?
Maynard still needs a name for his proposed awards, though he did express a preference:
Part of me wants to name it after Terry Pratchett and have the award be a silver asterisk on a nice mahogany base or some such, just to throw the asterisks back in David Gerrold’s face, but not only do I not know how Sir Terry would take it, the name would get people away from thinking about SF as well. I also want this to not be a Puppy thing, and that would detract from that.
Yes, it might. Have any successful awards been built on a revenge platform?
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@Bruce Baugh
I like the idea of puppy brackets as well. I wished the folks over at SP3 had done something as fun as Kyra’s brackets last award season. At least I would have better understood what kind of books they were advocating for rather than TB and BT reading lists.
Re: Jay’s proposal
I think the gatekeeping aspect as well as the ‘anti-hugos’ categories will doom this award. He would be better off celebrating differences from the Hugos. It’s free. Nominate anything you like. New and different categories. More media, more games, include tumblr and fan recaps of media. Make the award fun and drop the bitterness.
I know I’m late to the party on this one, but to me there’s always been a very clear distinction between sci-fi and fantasy: Sci-fi is intended to be explicable, fantasy is not. In Doctor Who, for example, the sonic screwdriver is a science-fiction device even though it has a wide enough variety of features and uses as to be a magic wand for all intents and purposes, because it is presented as a device that was designed, built, and operates according to understandable principles. We don’t understand them, and they’re never explained, but the characters behave as though it could be understood with sufficient study. (Note that science-fiction can still do things that are impossible, even that are not internally consistent–it’s just that ultimately, the operating principle behind these rules is merely unknown, not unknowable.)
Whereas in Harry Potter, wands have fairly specific, limited and consistent capabilities…but they function due to a purely totemic connection with a magical creature. They are not intended to be “understood”; they work on a symbolic level. That’s fantasy. (Note that fantasy can still have internally consistent and logical rules–it’s just that ultimately, the operating principle behind these rules is an unknowable force, not simply an unknown one.)
The only weirdness that stands out here is the original ‘Star Wars’, where the Jedi are very explicitly fantasy characters who have magic powers, while everything else is sci-fi. Lucas later changed that, of course, but that may be why fans hated midichlorians so much. They liked the Jedi as fantasy intruders into a sci-fi universe.
Thus I refute Clarke.
The Nuggies.
Simeon Beresford on September 12, 2015 at 8:29 pm said:
1. Drink your tea.
2. Always wear gloves.
3. Raise an eyebrow.
4. While it’s fun to have many bodies, it may lead to (a) loneliness if you lose them or (b) multiple personalities in conflict if you have too many.
5. Be nice to your ship.
I intend to apply all of this to my life as far as possible, starting with getting my car the repairs it needs.
Man, I hate to see Jay collapse into melancholy. Depression sucks. I would prefer nobody ever suffer it, no matter who they are. But…in a better-managed nation, help for his depression would be readily available, but (as I was reminded re-reading that 2010 thread from Whatever) he fears and loathes the idea of it and actively supports people in power trying to stop it from happening here. I think this is itself a symptom of depression, being exploited by bad people for wicked ends, but I know I couldn’t convince him of it. And depression is not a license to say cruel and untrue things about me, my friends, our fellow fans, and works we enjoy.
Now you tell me. People always suck the fun out of being depressed.*
*Suffering from depression for 40 years (started at 8). Therapy and drugs help. As does surviving a life threatening accident (not recommended).
Tasha: It’s always something, innit?
🙂
With all due respect, OF COURSE the pronoun thing in Ancillary Justice is not message-neutral. Let’s not be naive. Maybe Leckie chose it because if she had chose to use only the male pronouns nobody would have realised there was something going on with the Raadch and gender, but that in itself, that realisation, is a deeply political act. And rightly so. That is why the book went for me from great adventure and revenge space opera to one of those books that happen once every decade.
Leckie built a universe she was interested in, or maybe it grew out the stories, but it’s a universe with colonialism, and violence made on the bodies of the conquered, and uncertain identity, and where the body politic is torn apart by divergences in policy. That’s WHY she’s a great writer. And the pronoun thing reminds you of it every sentence.
In a sense it’s the opposite of the Lock-in issue with gender. For the Puppies, though, it is the same thing. To challenge the default that the protagonist is a Manly Male or a Spunky Female, that is in itself message fic. It is what drew me to science fiction from the beginning: reading things that made me think about how the world around me was.
He was only a boy from the Outer Planets who had never been to Trantor before.
I will make my report as if I told a story because I was told on my homeworld a long time ago that Truth is a matter of the Imagination.
All this happened, more or less.
And now that I am all grown up, I still love stories that make my brain irritated, so that pearls of wisdom might grow. I like not knowing what gender Breq and Anaander Mianaai are. It forces my brain to imagine a third way of thinking about people, a way that is neither male, nor female, nor genderless. I like that it makes me, even me, a feminist since the cradle, stop and question my prejudices all the time. It makes me think of love stories that are not between male or male or male or female or female or female but between old nobility and parvenu, or between human and artificial intelligence. It makes me stop and question the bonds of family when “daughter” does not necessarily mean “female child” and “mother” doesn’t mean “the one who gave birth”. It makes me question the assumptions we have about physical strength when one can be either male of female-bodied but is anyway half machine. And so on.
All of this is political. Of course it is. A lot of great literature is political, sometimes deliberately, sometimes in what it chooses not to address. Dante’s all oeuvre is political because he was a passionate political actor. But Petrarch’s delicate sonnets about courtly love that are really about philosophy are also political because he could not be a political agent any more, Dante’s era having passed. Machiavelli’s The Prince is a treatise in the technique of power, deliberately neutral because he hoped it was his passport to some sort of public role, but so are the Commentaries on the First Decade (!) and so is The Mandragora, in its cheeky defiance of contemporary social and sexual mores.
There are, of course, other ways of being great, but generally it is hard to make something that transcends the ordinary if you don’t engage with the world you live in, and that is political.
So yeah, Ancillary Justice is a great, riveting, affecting adventure book, but it wouldn’t have swept the board of all awards if it wasn’t also something more.
The rules that aim at stopping “message fic” from being considered are a filter to filter out quality, if used honestly, or to filter out points of view you don’t like, if not.
@Anna
+1 to everything you said.
I have not read that book yet but I look forward to feeling that itch as I read it that makes me question my assumptions.
Re: Jay
I don’t have a black gate login so I can’t comment. But Jay is reading here from time to time.
He does seem melancholy. It seems to me he wants to define a safe space of fandom where he will not be excluded or ridiculed. Fandom is large and one can join any group or part of it. I hope he takes a small break and looks for kindred spirits.
The best thing he could do for his awards is not make them reactive Hugo-fixers. Offer something new. New categories. New media. I don’t like the gatekeeping aspect and I think he would be better served by just dropping it.
ETA: Personally I think the Tron costume is fun and daring – I would take it as a badge of honor and not shame.
@Ana: That was eloquent and wise and I can’t gainsay a word of it. What my dispute comes down to is the distinction between “political fiction” and “message fiction.” Over and over I come back to two classic examples of the latter from Larry Niven, “Jigsaw Man” and “Cloak of Anarchy” and how they are not playing the same game as Ancillary Justice, The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere, or even If You Were a Dinosaur My Love. I think it’s a distinction worth making. Others may differ.
I wonder how much there’s a distinction worth making based on how much the characters, or narrator, or some other source of info dump tell you in the story why this or that is bad. The thing I realize is, it wouldn’t work for cases people want to make, on both sides of “is this message fiction or not”.
I agree with both Anna and Jim.
But in my own defense I downplay the use of “she” as after a few pages I adjusted and it didn’t really feel like a big deal to me. I don’t know if that is because I’ve been using they/them since I was a young kid (many fights with teachers). I’ve also been adjusting to so many different pronouns over the last 10 years among my friends that I just shrug and adjust. So while I intellectually understand it was a big deal and political (although done several times before). It didn’t feel like it to me.
I found a lot more message stuff in it, especially in book 2, which struck me much more obviously, pulling me out of the story & I agreed with the message.
@Anna: I thought that the reason that the default gender was female was because they could all bear children. Wasn’t there talk about how anyone could strap on an artificial womb and get pregnant if they wanted to, so they all identified as female because they could (if they chose) carry a child? Maybe I misremembered or misunderstood that, but I thought it was an interesting piece of worldbuilding, defining gender in that fashion. Hopelessly inaccurate, of course–I know many women who can’t have children for one reason or another–but an interesting philosophical point.
@John Seavey: I don’t have the paragraph to hand, but in the famous answer to “How do the Radchaai reproduce?” Breq mentions options that include changing sex, external gestation and probably others. “Like anybody else,” she tells us, which may or may not be true of the various colonized peoples. By implication it probably isn’t. (If it were true that every society in the galaxy availed itself of these options, it’s hard to believe the question would arise.)
ETA: Cf. the character in Banks’ Player of Games who’s described as male by default who keeps changing his sex because “he just liked being pregnant.”
From the thread on Black Gate, Maynard says:
show me an SFF writing award that’s open to Internet voting from any and all who wish to at a cost of $0.
Revealing that not only is Maynard woefully uninformed about modern genre fiction, he seems not to know much of anything about genre awards. Perhaps I should comment over there to introduce him top the existence of the Locus Award.
The various Pups would be much more likely to take seriously if they weren’t obviously ignorant on the subjects they opine upon.
I don’t remember that bit but I believe you. However, the citizens of the Culture can also all bear children, but they still retain a sense of gender. The Radch don’t. There is a bit when Breq arrives at Omaugh (?) Palace and talks about all the various gender signifiers that would be gender signifiers on other worlds, but aren’t there.
Anna’s explanation is eloquent but I, for one, did not find a message about gender in AJ and AS. (I did find messages about imperialism, class-structure, labour exploitation, racism etc.) Maybe I didn’t see the gender message because I’ve already received it and I would probably find it annoying if that was being offered again. I read Winter’s King and Le Guin’s note about her pronoun choice when I was 13. Then I read The Left Hand of Darkness. Reading them in that order, with Le Guin’s self-criticism, made the point for me. In academic writing today we do our best to not use the masculine as the default gender. Writers who don’t stick to a gender-neutral mode frequently use “she” for the hypothetical person. And I work with multiple languages, some of which gender everything, some gender only pronouns, some gender everything but the pronouns, some don’t really use gender at all. The only points when I thought about gender while reading AJ and AS were when Breq thought about gender.
Obviously, lots of people still default to the masculine. My mother, a strident second-wave feminist, continues to astonish me when I show her examples of my students’ work and she invariably comments on “his” grammar, despite knowing full well that all my students are women!
As has been said before, sufficiently nuanced messages disappear when they fully align with your experience of the world.
(two ns please, Ana is the Spanish version)
Yes, there are cases in which the writer clearly has written a book instead of sending a postcard. I think it comes from constructing your universe to prove a point rather than talking about your point IN that universe. But even so… Banks was explicit in telling everybody who would listen that he had thought up the Culture specifically to be a free-love anarchic socialist SO THERE to Niven+Pournelle. But the stories he ended up telling are no artificial vehicles for a rant. If anything the book where I felt the rants were taking over the plot was Dead Air, which wasn’t SF at all.
(I had to change a tense in there. Now I need to go and have another little weep in a corner.)
The Goodreads Awards don’t cost anything but you do have to join the community. Technically they are not genre specif but they do have a couple genre awards.
I may have told this story already, but what is particularly relevant for me in AJ/AS is that my native language genders much more than the English language does. So much so that when I was translating Banks I had to decide what to do with the Ships and I decided that they were all female (I did ask Banks, well, I TOLD him).
It is not impossible to avoid gendering. In fact, another of Banks’ Italian translators went to heroic length not to gender a character of another of his books, an effort that I thought was laudable but completely misguided. (Spoiler for The Wasp Factory: Orpnhfr gur cebgntbavfg bs Gur Jnfc Snpgbel vf fhowrpgviryl pbaivaprq gung fur’f znyr, fb fur ersref gb urefrys va gur znfphyvar naq gung vf GUR JUBYR CBVAG)
Anyway – the Italian translator for AJ decided that this whole thing of using the feminine consistently was just a stylistic quirk and not important. But not being able to assign a gender to the various characters they decided to… randomly alternate between masculine and feminine. I have NO idea why the simpler solution to use the bloody feminine AS WAS IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT didn’t occur to them. Well no, I sort of suspect I do know, but I don’t even want to go there.
This created the eminently predictable result that the readers were so confused and unable to follow what the hell was going on that they uniformly hated the book. Italian readers of Ancillary Justice (subtitle, because why avoid spoiling something in the title when you can: Breq’s Revenge) are sharply divided between those who read it in English, and rave about it, and those who read it in Italian, and rant about it.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan:
Gah! My apologies. I have no idea how I got that wrong when I’ve been seeing your name for months now.
Thanks for the info about Banks. That’s interesting.
I think I’m sticking hard on a 1:1 link between “message fiction” and didactic fiction. Didactic fiction is a real thing, after all. I’m not even saying didactic fiction is automatically bad, but it distinguishes something like “The Jigsaw Man” from “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere”. I think I insist on this distinction because I think what really bothers “Water”‘s critics is that it isn’t about how homophobia is destructive; it assumes homophobia is destructive and then is about themes that assumption opens up for exploration.
I think this is more infuriating than an actual didactic story about the destructiveness of homophobia, because by simply assuming that and getting on with his real business, Chu implicitly removes homophobia’s valence from the realm of the contestable, as polite society has also belatedly done. If you have to write a story about how homophobia is destructive, it’s because the idea that homophobia is just and good remains vital, or at least something to entertain. If you no longer have to write that story, well shit. Game over.
The thread also has “Wild Ape” opining that it is obvious that Worldcon and the Hugos are corrupt despite his inability to actually understand the Worldcon financial reports when he is pointed to them. Why are the Puppies all so very incompetent?
That’s interesting, because I am currently reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I really wanted to like more than I am liking it, and which is going a bit too close to message fic of my tastes precisely because of something like what you’re talking about. I need to finish it before I can talk about it more though. A friend of mine liked it really very very very VERY much so I have to finish it, but I am afraid I am not going to agree with her.
Re: Whether “Chris/Kris” is male or female — depends on which name it’s the diminutive of…
Kristofer – Male
Kristin – Female
Christian – Male
Christiane – Female
Christopher – Male
Christine – Female
Krystal – Female
Krystof – Male
Jim Henley:
Can I trouble you to elaborate on what that esthetic is? Having bounced off a few MFA-type stories, I think I know what you mean, but I’m not certain.
@Jonathan Edelstein: The classic text, David Dooley’s Hudson Review essay, is behind a paywall, alas, and anyway talks more about poetry. (And darnit, all of my poems that the magazine published are behind a paywall too.) The classic workshop poem was satirized by, I think, X.J. Kennedy as:
I look out my window, and I
Am important.
In the stereotypical workshop story:
1. Not much happens.
2. The POV character has a small epiphany – almost the smaller the better.
3. The prose should be skillful, whether in the spare or fulsome style.
Again, that’s the stereotype and to some extent the failure mode. (Sometimes a story in which not much happens and there’s a small epiphany end really hits the spot.)
I’d defend, for example, Isabel Yap’s “Find Me” against charges that it fits the stereotype, and not just because Yap has no MFA. She did go to Clarion, and I believe Clarion is sometimes considered similarly culpable. I exempt it because, while it’s a quiet story, I think quite a lot happens, really. It may or may not be true that “Each of us is fighting a great battle” every day, but Chas in that story certainly is. Contrariwise, Womack’s “Frozen Planet” in the same issue is a lot louder, and has a theoretically more definitive ending, but there’s a lot more mood than drama, and a lot less character development than trauma-indication. It reads kind of like a writing assignment to “Describe a deadly snowscape a la an ill-fated polar expedition.”
@Lori your assuming Chris is a nickname. Something I’m seeing less and less true…
I used to have to bring my birth certificate to school to prove my name was Tasha not Natasha because in the 1970s where I lived you were called by your “legal” name and my mother couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth.
Aaron, I’ve been thinking for some time that that kind of incompetence is a prerequisite to fully joining the Puppies community. Two cases arise:
1. You are numerate, and/or well-informed about the history of sf/f in all its diversity and weirdness (and may well be a long-time participant yourself in one or more relevant fandoms), and/or capable of the empathetic leap to imagine how others make take statements you make, and so on. Sooner or later, you will be dis-fellowshipped from the Puppies, because you will have a conflict between surrounding objective reality and the Puppies’ frame, and they don’t tolerate that kind of challenge.
2. You are innumerate, and/or thoroughly ignorant of genre and fannish history, and/or thoroughly tone-deaf about abrasive language, or whatever. But you know and trust people who can fill in gaps for you, both with information and with useful judgments. You end up with the same conflict as above even though it’s at one remove because you are trusting someone trustworthy in the face of Puppy mistakes, fallacies, and distortions and lies.
Basically, there are reasons Pournelle is all good with them and Silverberg isn’t.
As well as the Locus Awards you also have the David Gemmell Awards which is free to vote in. The Gemmells got around 17,000 voters in the first round and 19,000 voters in the final ballot this year.
I think this is more infuriating than an actual didactic story about the destructiveness of homophobia, because by simply assuming that and getting on with his real business, Chu implicitly removes homophobia’s valence from the realm of the contestable, as polite society has also belatedly done. If you have to write a story about how homophobia is destructive, it’s because the idea that homophobia is just and good remains vital, or at least something to entertain. If you no longer have to write that story, well shit. Game over.
This was one of the things BioWare’s treatment of POV in DragonAge Origins did, in a very subtle way. The POV character doesn’t speak. All the decisions are voiced, insomuch as they are voiced, in the player’s mind. So one ends up internalising the worldview, and some of the worldview is accepting of things like homosexual behavior. I think that’ a big part of why many people dislike it.
Aaron, I’ve been thinking for some time that that kind of incompetence is a prerequisite to fully joining the Puppies community.
I think that is true. The problem the Pups have is that their narrative seems to be based upon a denial of reality as it relates to pretty much everything. They don’t know or understand the history of genre fiction, of genre fiction awards, or even things like basic finances. They operate, almost entirely, in a fictional world bounded by their own ignorance and the collection of conspiracy theories they have glommed onto.
Anyone who is competent will be peeled away from the Puppy movement by the fact that they can see that the Puppy narrative is based entirely on bullshit. In short, knowledge and being a Puppy are essentially mutually exclusive. The ironic element is, of course, that so many Pups worship competence porn when so many of them are completely incompetent.
Trying to count them up, I think I know more women called Chris than men.
I have a feeling that a bunch of past or potential Puppies peel off the way Jim and I did from libertarianism – very specific corners came loose, and then another, and it just escalated. But for people who turn out to be open to leaving, a single significant failure of the doctrine can be the beginning of the end.
I do feel sorry for Jay Maynard. His basic concept has rather been co-opted by Cat Valente’s interesting idea about execution, and I can quite understand it if he feels unable to move past the bad feelings that’s caused to get involved again. I don’t think I’d feel good about that, either.
Which is not to say that Valente is at fault: She has every right to keep her idea for herself, and to feel annoyed at the remark about message fiction. But Maynard has every right to feel upset that his concept is now being used by someone else, too. I hope that he can later feel able to get involved in supporting Valente’s idea. I think it would be nice to have him as part of it, since it might never have got thought of at all without him.
I also hope he can leave out the insults to the Hugo’s and Hugo voters in future… Accidental shooting in foot, ouch.
I thought “Mountain” was one of the weaker stories in Liu Cixin’s collection. The most interesting part, the alien visitors’ home background (hints of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World and Greg Egan’s Incandescence there) was told rather than shown, whereas the stuff we were shown suffered from the Hollywood failing of prioritising spectacle over a solid foundation, leaving the reader’s “Wow!” quickly followed by “hang on, though – it wouldn’t work like that”. The stories where he puts his characters firmly in the foreground, such as “With Her Eyes” and “Sun of China”, work much better. What I did like was the way all the stories interconnect – “The Wandering Earth” and “The Micro-Age” both start from the same problem, characters from one story reappear unexpectedly in another, themes are re-examined – at one point the author and one of his colleagues appear as characters. The overall effect is a bit like one of Zoran Zivkovic’s mosaic novels as written by a pulp writer circa 1940.
Meredith
Jay has been commenting on Scalzi’s Whatever, and I think it’s fair to say that he has not covered himself in glory; there is a genuine problem in that a group of people (including though not confined to Puppidum) feel perfectly entitled to be exceedingly rude about, and to, individuals and members of groups, but lunge for the smelling salts whilst clutching their pearls with both the other hand and the gripping hand, for extra difficulty points, when people respond in a similar vein.
Jay is an excellent example, and, whilst I really don’t want anyone to become upset it seems, in fairness, that I am just as entitled to become upset as Jay and the myriads of people bewailing their treatment are, and expect them to stop upsetting me.
I think sauce for the goose comes into it, but it’s late so I’m not breaking out the thesaurus for this one. Essentially the complaints consist of ‘Why won’t you lie down so I can kick you”, and I don’t like being kicked.
I appreciate that some people enjoy being kicked, and I have absolutely no problem with consenting adults engaging in kicking/ being kicked, but I don’t like being kicked myself so I sure as Hell have no intention of lying down quietly so they can kick me.
Things get worse when people decide they know better than you do how you think, or at least should think; Scalzi has decimated that one at Whatever re Jay, as well as putting together, in a separate post, a possible award structure a great deal more practical than Jay’s.
And It has the great advantage of not whining about wrong books and wrong fans …
I don’t understand why anyone should feel sorry for him. Nothing bad has happened to him.
He proposed an idea, hundreds of comments were posted in response and during the discussion Cat Valente had another idea.
One idea doesn’t negate the other. Maynard can do his thing and Valente can do hers. Fans can support both. Or neither.
The pity party Maynard is throwing for himself about Valente at Black Gate doesn’t suggest to me that he’s serious about starting a new award. People who succeed with audacious ideas can’t be so quick to sink into discouragement.
Fin Fahey: And now from Maynard: But why is it that I’m always the bad guy?”
It’s nice that he’s asking the question. Unfortunately, I think he means it rhetorically, and I don’t think he’s actually looking for answers.
I’ve read a number of his posts over on GRRM’s blog, and he repeatedly spouts accusations of Tor and Scalzi secretly controlling the Hugos and other wild conspiracy theories, insisting that they are TRUE FACTS.
In the comments on his Black Gate post alone, he repeatedly takes nasty jabs at Worldcon members and anyone who likes things he doesn’t like.
Here you go, Jay: The reason you end up “always the bad guy” is because you behave very badly online. You continually post wild, obvious untruths and wonder why you have no credibility. You post nasty remarks about other fans and their preferences, and you wonder why they criticize what you say. You propose an award to counter the Hugos, which you claim are controlled and run by an insider clique and are exclusionary for not allowing every SFF fan in the world to vote for free — then propose a new awards program which will be controlled and run by an insider clique and allow only those SFF fans who are friends with the insiders to vote.
It’d be really nice if Jay would take these things on board, recognize how his behavior triggers the responses he receives, and make some positive changes. But I don’t expect the above to make the slightest dent, because it is not what Jay wants to hear.
@Bruce Baugh:
A nomination in 2016 for Best Fan Writer comes to mind as a possibility.
I do feel sorry for Jay Maynard. His basic concept has rather been co-opted by Cat Valente’s interesting idea about execution, and I can quite understand it if he feels unable to move past the bad feelings that’s caused to get involved again.
He had an idea for an award. Cat had a different idea. I don’t see how this means Jay’s concept has been co-opted. Given that Jay;s original idea was a terrible mess and had no chance of ever actually being implemented, I don’t see any reason for him to feel bad that someone came up with a completely different, better idea as a result.
Jay is, like all Pups, nothing but a whiner at heart, and if it wasn’t for Cat, he would have found something else to whine about.
@ Jim Henley: Got it, thanks. Would be interested in reading your poetry.
Meredith on September 13, 2015 at 4:11 pm said:
I do feel sorry for Jay Maynard. His basic concept has rather been co-opted by Cat Valente’s interesting idea about execution, and I can quite understand it if he feels unable to move past the bad feelings that’s caused to get involved again. I don’t think I’d feel good about that, either.
Which is not to say that Valente is at fault: She has every right to keep her idea for herself, and to feel annoyed at the remark about message fiction. But Maynard has every right to feel upset that his concept is now being used by someone else, too. I hope that he can later feel able to get involved in supporting Valente’s idea. I think it would be nice to have him as part of it, since it might never have got thought of at all without him.
I also hope he can leave out the insults to the Hugo’s and Hugo voters in future… Accidental shooting in foot, ouch.
“…Maynard has every right to feel upset that his concept is now being used by someone else, too.”
I wouldn’t waste much compassion on JM here, since I don’t see how Maynard’s concept is being used in any way by CV.
I mean, except for them both proposing new awards.
JM’s proposal begins: “the core question to be answered when evaluating a work in the genre: “Does it tell a good story?”
He then proceeds to list he categories he would award, which are simply the Hugo.
That is, JM’s idea is to mirror the Hugo in nominating entire works, and his particular focus is on the total storyline.
Cat’s categories (hmm.. that’s a good title) focus instead on nuts-and-bolts of writing, with no ideological requirements.
I don’t see how this focus on specific story components – beginnings, ends, villains, and the like, conflicts with JM’s Acme brand Hugo – best novel, best short story, etc.
If JM is interested in producing HugoLite for the Baen’ Bar crowd, no one is stopping him, but his imagined award is quite different from what CV proposes.
Further, since I don’t personally know any puppies, and JM apparently thinks my taste sucks, I’m pretty much a zero trust kind of person in the elaborate eligibility system he’s working on.
(And if I’d snuck in somehow, he’s also setting up a procedure for weeding me out after the fact!)
So, if I’m available to toss ideas to CV, that is not something she took away from him, since he’s already explicitly rejected me.
And I suspect pretty much all the people offering to assist CV are also people JM’s careful gatekeeping has pointedly made not welcome.
So she isn’t poaching any support from his project that he had not already rejected.
So what exactly is his complaint, except that she has something shiny and new in mind, and all he’s offering is a sour grape Hugo knockoff?
@Jonathan Edelstein: That would make you a member of a select minority indeed. 😉
Bruce Baugh on September 13, 2015 at 3:51 pm said:
I think that’s how a lot of people peel off from fundamentalist religion, too. It might be a feature of any belief system that’s too rigid to respond intelligently to empirical data — you know, where it’s impossible for anyone to say something like “well, that didn’t work, maybe our theories were wrong” and still be considered part of the group.
@Stevie
Exactly my feeling.
That is, JM’s idea is to mirror the Hugo in nominating entire works, and his particular focus is on the total storyline.
Almost every part of Maynard’s “idea” is borrowed from somewhere else.
The categories? Taken from the Hugos.
The nominations process? Taken from E Pluribus Hugo
The process for voting on winners? Instant Runoff Voting, taken from the Hugos, just with “No Award” removed.
The “trust” system? Also borrowed from elsewhere.
The only thing that’s “new” in his award are the gatekeeping judges and the notion that it is for books that meet the incredibly vaguely defined criteria of “storytelling”. It is a bit rich for Maynard to complain someone else “stole” his idea for an award, since his was mostly built of concepts he “stole” from other places.
By “basic concept” I meant “award specifically for storytelling over the many, many other considerations that go into other awards”, if that helps.
I do think Maynard’s been, well, not great in his behaviour, but I don’t think it costs me anything to see genuine pain and acknowledge it, either. I’m also familiar enough with depression to know that he might not be able to see outside himself well enough right now. I hope he finds some joy elsewhere if he can’t bring himself to either continue with his own ideas or help with Valente’s (since he said he has some experience with things like setting up a charitable organisation).
Meredith: Let me preface this by repeating that I wish Jay well, and that it’s because of years of interacting with him pretty pleasantly about sf and its fandoms and about Usenet and its administration, back when.
I dunno if you looked at all at the link someone had to the 2010 post at John Scalzi’s blog where Jay flounced off. It was in the immediate wake of a mid-term election here in the US which left the prospects for Obama’s Affordable Care Act worse than they already were, a point at which a lot of us felt pretty sure it was doomed. (It wasn’t. But it took some more months of wrangling.) Jay was posting about how this was a good thing, because government-supplied medical care is actually a trap and does harm to everyone in the long run, and the only actually viable course of action is to unleash the free market and let it work its wonders. He supported this with reference to an outright lying report from a libertarian think tank, and simply didn’t engage at all with the realities of what health care costs and provides everywhere else in the developed world, nor with the realities of how many people were getting denied care here, nor anything else. He knew it was bad because he knows all government intervention in society must be bad, and so that’s all there is to it.
So, for instance, if he had his way, there’d be no help available for him right now with his depression, as opposed to the limited help there is, unless someone in the private sector saw their way to make a buck off him for it. Likewise, he would prefer that a bunch of us – like me – suffer and die rather than get a kind of help he knows must be bad, rather than waiting patiently for someone to see the bucks opportunities in us.
And then he wondered why people get unhappy and/or mad at him.
Same kind of deal here. In fact it’s precisely the same pattern. He’s okay with wishing all kinds of ill on others and saying all kinds of awful things about their motives and morals, and then gets baffled, again and again.
@Bruce Baugh
I did, but I was trying not to bring it into a separate conversation. My views on socialised healthcare are very NHS-flavoured. He does seem to be very fond of shooting himself in the foot, though…