193 thoughts on “Off On A Comment 8/25”

  1. @Lis Carey:

    No one is allowed to tamper with my favorite book of my childhood, Five Children and It. This is non-negotiable.

    It’s as well I couldn’t figure a way to map five puppy personalities onto the children, then. Er. Sorry?

    I did once perpetrate a small bit of fanfic which posited the children’s own grandchildren inheriting some of the magical gifts they got from the Phoenix, and this causing a bit of trouble at school. I don’t fanfic often, but my brain keeps hanging up on those kids and their adventures and what might come of them.

  2. Coincidentally I was reading about those five kids, the phoenix and the magic carpet while sitting groggily in the Kansas City airport early Sunday morning. I’ve got an E. Nesbit megapack on my phonekindle for moments when I need some comforting, and being awake before dawn counts as one of those moments.

    The idea of a 15 hour flight to Helsinki makes my back pulsate with horror, but I’m looking forward to 2018 in San Jose since it’s close by.

  3. @ Aaron: Exactly. Puppy approval is like my parents’ approval — it’s a moving target, and no matter what you do that they say they want, something else that you didn’t do will immediately become the top priority. Not taking that bait, TYVM, spent too many years living with it not to recognize what’s going on.

    Re Stirling’s alt-history: I was never able to get into the Nantucket books, and bounced HARD off Conquistador due to asshole protagonist + racism. But the Changed World series — ALL of it — is fabulous and on my list of Desert Island Books; it’s one of the things I buy in hardcover because I can’t wait for the paperback version. And The Peshawar Lancers is outstanding; I wish he’d write another novel in that timeline.

  4. Camestros Felapton on August 25, 2016 at 3:37 pm said:

    I had a feeling it would be North American because Australian possums look far too cute but I know New Zealand has a thriving possum export business*

    *{they are invasive species in New Zealand}

    My wife bought me possum fur nipple warmers* from New Zealand.

    *TMI

  7. My wife bought me possum fur nipple warmers* from New Zealand.

    LOL. That’s exactly the right amount of information. It will form the basis of my mental picture of you forevermore.

  9. Camestros Felapton on August 25, 2016 at 3:37 pm said:

    I had a feeling it would be North American because Australian possums look far too cute but I know New Zealand has a thriving possum export business*

    *{they are invasive species in New Zealand}

    I have some sock yarn that includes possum fur. It’s lovely yarn (beautiful colors), but having knit a lace scarf for Most-Senior-Aunt in a wool/possum blend, I know that it sheds mightily while it’s being knitted.

  12. @Hampus: I wonder who yelled at his daughter, and why. That seems out of line and not really in line with the demeanor displayed by most of the attendees I ran across. I hope he reported it to the convention.

  13. @Hampus Eckerman:
    My all time favorite alternate history novel is “Guns of the South” by Turtledove, wherein White Supremacists from South Africa steal a time machine and ship large numbers of AK-47’s to Robert E. Lee in 1863.

  14. Well, that gives me a lot more respect for Kate Paulk. Not starting from a high position, but I really have no problem with that.

    I am trying my old email address, since my new one goes to moderation, probably because I’ve used the same name.

  15. I’m glad to see the direction Sad Puppies 5 is going in, as part of SP3-4 I questioned the point of SP telling people how they were voting wrong instead of boosting authors and books that they’ve felt was ignored rather than tens of thousands of words on imagined slights. If they do so, awesome. Thought at this point I question the purpose of keeping the Sad Puppies brand name since it carries a negative association and connection as the water carriers for the Rabid Puppies.

    I’ve doubts that those mentioned as running SP5 can keep from piddling on others considering the extensive blog posts dedicated to doing otherwise rather than building their own niche. It’ll be interesting to see Sad Puppies 5: The EnFifthening. Who will be accused of not really being an American this time?

  16. I suspect it goes to moderation because it’s a post from a “new person” with “new person” being defined by “new email”. And since Our Gracious Host is concentrating more on getting better (as he should!) than releasing things from moderation, it may be a while before posts with your new email show up….

  19. Speaking of Nesbit’s original Five Children, I very strongly recommend Kate Saunders, Five Children on the Western Front. As you can guess from the title, it’s a ten-years-later sequel. It is beautifully written and yes, heartbreaking, but there are happy and hopeful things that happen too.

    Interestingly, the central focus of the book (IMO) is not the children growing up and learning to live with loss–although of course that’s an important component–but the redemption of the Psammead. Back when he was a desert sand fairy, he was basically an evil dictator, and he did all kinds of terrible things that he badly needs to atone for if he is going to die in peace as he would now like to do. His stories of the past resonate with what is happening in the present.

    It all works out in the end, in ways that I found deeply satisfying emotionally.

  20. @ The Peshawar Lancers

    This might be a good place to ask this since it came back to my mind after seeing the book named and since a few of you have read it.

    I really liked the book when I read it first and I still think it is Stirling’s best standalone book. However when I talked to my friends about it there seemed to be a bit of a divide about it. Those who had read Flashman and Kim and other books and histories about British India seemed to like it a lot while most of the rest did not.

    So I was wondering if you have read the book and liked it or not if you might mention whether you fit that pattern. I can understand it being of more interest to someone who already liked those types of stories and could spot all the easter eggs but it seems well written enough to me to be fun for anyone who liked adventure stories.

  21. @Bartimaeus: I clicked through from Cora’s round-up to look at Correia’s response to Walter’s criticism of the various Puppy books. I have to wonder if Correia realizes just how juvenile and foolish his “fisking” makes him look.

  22. @Aaron

    I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. In fact, I don’t think that Larry Correia and Dave Freer realise that by pointing out their sales figures, they’re confirming Walter’s argument that it’s just about money for the puppies.

  23. @ Magewolf: I am not in general a reader of Colonial India stuff — no Flashman at all, and only bits and pieces of Kipling. I think that may actually have helped me with The Peshawar Lancers, because I wasn’t going to run up against anything in the “history” part that would bounce me out of the story. And the story itself is great fun, with an engaging plot and a wealth of well-realized characters, including three major female leads* who are all very distinct individuals and very different from each other.

    Content warning: There’s a fair amount of violence and gore, one incident early on which if you squint at it could be described as a fridging, some references to rape, some overt and ugly racism from the bad guys (and a little casual racism from a few minor characters, strongly disapproved by the leads), and a couple of heroic self-sacrifices. But it all fits into the context of the story; there was nothing that struck me as either unnecessary or too much.

    Oh, and there are romance elements in it as well; the 3 main female characters all end up paired off at the end. That doesn’t bother me, but if you don’t want romance cooties in your adventure story… 🙂

    * It’s an ensemble book, written from multiple viewpoints and with at least 8 or 10 characters who merit the term “lead”.

  24. @Cora: There is that. There is also the fact that the entire tone of the “fisking” is about one would expect from a junior high schooler complete with slurs implying that the target is gay.

  27. Signs of the Apossumcalypse: I grew up in Lincoln, NE, during the last days of the Midwest’s American elms. In the last defense against the Dutch elm disease being spread by elm bark beetles, the city elected to spray some sort of insecticide throughout the city one warm spring night. As we children walked to school the next morning, birds, squirrels, raccoons, and possums rained out of the trees, littering the sidewalks and scarring our little minds forever. While I had seen opossums and raccoons lurking and skittering around the neighborhood occasionally, I never realized how many lived there until–well, until they lived there no more. To an elementary school kid, it seemed a preview of the End Times.

    The elm trees died anyway, of course.

  29. Love it or Hate it – the Hugos have been heavily literary SF for several decades.

    Which is why STATION ELEVEN did so well.

    Or to put it another way: if you think what’s been winning the Hugos has been heavily literary — for several decades, yet — your idea of popular fiction is overly limited. Literary SF means something more than “well-written mainstream genre material.”

  30. Redshirts was very literary. NOT. A total lack of knowledge about what’s won the Hugo and familiarity with the work itself helps when one is talking about history. I’m exaggerating – simply reading the blurbs and a few 2, 3, & 4 star reviews should give one an idea about how literary a book was/is. The more familiar one is with each Hugo finalist the less foolish one looks when pontificating on changes to the type of books which have “always” one. It’s also a good idea to revisit the books you read as a kid to see how accurate you memory is.

  31. Okay, I think that I’ve finally figured it out: every time I edit a post to remove a typo, it goes to moderation and, in the absence of OGH, the Blessed Glyer, never returns. So, calling on the spirits of Pohl and Campbell, I swear to not edit this post. Here’s what I tried to post earlier:

    Signs of the Apossumcalypse: I grew up in Lincoln, NE, during the last days of the Midwest’s American elms. In the last defense against the Dutch elm disease being spread by elm bark beetles, the city elected to spray some sort of insecticide throughout the city one warm spring night. As we children walked to school the next morning, birds, squirrels, raccoons, and possums rained out of the trees, littering the sidewalks and scarring our little minds forever. While I had seen opossums and raccoons lurking and skittering around the neighborhood occasionally, I never realized how many lived there until–well, until they lived there no more. To an elementary school kid, it seemed a preview of the End Times.

    The elm trees died anyway, of course.

  32. The more familiar one is with each Hugo finalist the less foolish one looks when pontificating on changes to the type of books which have “always” one.

    So very often Puppy commentators display complete ignorance about the history of the Hugos specifically, and genre fiction in general. This complete ignorance is one of the most predictable things about the Pups.

  33. @Hal Winslow’s Old Buddy, that’s a very vivid story and now I will probably have nightmares. Really vivid nightmares.

    I used to live in a second story apartment with three cats who insisted they were not indoor animals except at night, so I put a board from my balcony to a neighboring fence. Pretty soon, possums came to visit and (not at all coincidentally) eat cat food. They were very well mannered and got along with my cats. The cats and possums also made common cause against the neighborhood raccoons, chasing them off nightly until the raccoons moved on. Also, baby possums are impossibly cute.

  34. @Lee

    Re speaking English, I was chatting with the guy running the San Juan NASFIC bid, and he mentioned that he’d had people saying they wouldn’t be going because they don’t speak Spanish.

    Funny. I stopped by to specifically ask if any of the programming would be in Spanish because I think that there should be some. A focus on Latin American SF writers would be great, too.

  36. One of the blog posts that Cora links to (Digital Reader) is absolutely hilarious, in that the post’s author talks about how incredibly influential SP4 was in the Hugos this year — and he’s absolutely serious.

    I guess he missed the part where half of the SP4 suggestions came from Filers, and that there were a lot more other Filers voicing opinions similar to theirs here on File770. 😀

  37. I used to see possums in our subdivision outside of Santa Barbara (at the west end of Goleta, backed up against farmland). They tended to walk around much like pointy-headed cats (with all the cat attitude). I like any animal with hands (possums, apes and monkeys, geckos), so possums is okay with me.

    Now that I’m back in the ‘aina, no marsupials for me (though there are feral wallabies on Oahu, in Kalihi Valley)… but I still have my lizard collection, spread far and wide around the island. And chickens, Soooooo many chickens.

    I know its been said, but I want to add my vote for “Comment in Moominland” in honor of Helsinki.

  38. I think Darren’s list is the darkest timeline/alternate universe “Five Children and It”.

    If the idea of Sad Puppies going forward is to highlight neat things and ignore the Hugos, why keep the “Sad” moniker? Unless, of course, it’s a marketing term for MGC and they don’t care if it makes any sense or not, plus too much work to change it. They ought to be “Happy Puppies”. Keeps the doggie branding, but shows they’re looking for stuff that pleases them. And who doesn’t like happy puppies? With the smiles and the wagging tails and the chubby tummies, woof.

    @lauowolf: I see Puppies have fallen deeper into delusion, since California Worldcons are on average the highest-attended. You could look it up if you were interested in facts and history. And people are very excited about Helsinki.

    Nice of Kate to think that all the people who got up early-ish and skipped hours of other programming were poor, deluded fools who were hypmotized by evil SJW’s. Now who’s being elitist? I read all the liveblogs of the Business Meetings and didn’t see anything about political positions, but I guess I wasn’t wearing my Puppy Decoder Glasses. Are people automatically SJW if they aren’t constantly virtue-signaling their support for Jesus, guns, the GOP, and nutty nuggets?

    Still, if Teddy wants to go away entirely (I’m not wishing him on the Dragon Awards, even if they didn’t ever bother to send me the voting link), or join up with the rumored upcoming Breitbart/Trump Media Empire, or just sit around counting his remittance money, whatever. (<– heh)

    Hampus: is still in the US, it's Didelphis virginiana, from which the Aussie version stole its name. Also still amazed you can’t find animal bones and mummified critters in the land of the Vikings. Sic transit gloria badass. The stupidity of possums is why they’re the classic roadkill.

    A FOAF had a cat who had a particular meow that meant “rat”. One day the cat gave this meow louder and longer. Yep, possum.

    Yeah, “Redshirts” was super-literary. “Cat Pictures, Please” even more so. And gosh, the artsy-fartsiness of “Star Wars” and “Avengers”.

  39. Cally, yes, your theory matches the facts, and is the reason I tried using my old email address.

    One thing that annoyed me about the Business Meeting (to bring back an old topic) was that the SaAs kept bringing the microphone to perfectly able-bodied people who should have walked to the front.

    Such a service is for people who can’t do it, or who can’t do it quickly, or who can’t do it without pain. I could be mistaken in some cases, but there were others where I was pretty sure. And there’s the rub, of course: they can’t tell by looking at someone who’s having severe pain exacerbated by walking and who’s just too damn lazy to walk to the front.

  40. Hey, if it makes the SPs happy to think they had an influence this year, and their opinions were respected, well, great! It’s no more ridiculous of a claim than many others that various of the puppy ilk have made, and it’s a claim that might actually lead towards mending fences and allowing us all to get back to celebrating the genre of SF together.

  41. @ Cheryl S.
    Apologies for the nightmare–suggest that you just count those baby possums and revel in their undeniable cuteness as a remedy!

  43. Cora: I’m pretty sure Nate Hoffelder isn’t a puppy, which is why I found his post a bit surprising.

    No, he may be Puppy-sympathetic, but it seems pretty clear that he’s not a Puppy — he just hasn’t read widely enough on the internet to realize that the correlation of the SP4 list to the Hugo Finalists was effect, not cause.

  45. Re: The Peshawar Lancers
    Enjoyed it immensely, and have also enjoyed lots of Flashman and North West Frontier pulp. (Could say the same of my mother as well).
    I suspect that some of the people who didn’t like it (probably not all) are coming to the style cold.

  46. E Nesbit and SF: it shouldn’t be forgotten that Mike Moorcock appropriated the Bastables in his fiction.

  48. A comment Hoffelder makes later in that thread:

    I’m arguing that this year the SP list isn’t what everyone is saying it is. I think it’s been co-opted, not defeated.

    I don’t think he’s particularly Puppy-sympathetic, I think he’s trying to be non-partisan. And it’s true – both the SP and RP movements were much more successful this year than last. This year, both the SP recommendation list and the RP slate had excellent nominees who were award-worthy, and who either won or made it above No Award. The usual poison pills got their NAs, but that’s to be expected. There were also some worthy but more obscure/new nominees who got screwed because their only association in most peoples’ minds was inextricably linked with the smell of incontinent dogs. That sucks, but it’s nobody’s fault but the Puppies.

    If the Puppies keep recommending works a whole lot of people like, they will be able to declare victory and retire to their kennels, satisfied at a job well done. To that I say, “Who’s the good boy? Who? Who? YOU ARE! You’re the good boy!”

  49. Kevin Hogan on August 25, 2016 at 12:03 pm said:
    Are we only making plans suggested by Nigel?

    We only want what’s best for him.

    Peter J on August 25, 2016 at 3:00 pm said:
    All these title suggestions should reassure Mike (as if it were needed) that he still lives in the love of the comment people.

    *golf clap*

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