(1) 2015 Canadian Unity Fan Fund winner Paul Carreau is a council member of the Federation of Beer. Their latest officially-licensed Star Trek brew is Vulcan Ale.
Federation of Beer announces that Shmaltz Brewing Company of Clifton Park, NY is brewing a new Star Trek-themed beer called Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect, that will be made available on Planet Earth in early October. Under license by CBS Consumer Products, Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect will pay homage to the Star Trek franchise and its legacy, tying into the storyline of The Wrath of Khan as well as Shmaltz’s own brand of He’brew craft beers.
(2) Camestros Felapton uses photographic evidence to set the record straight in “Tentacled Victorians”.
Rumors that Queen Victoria herself was a squid monster where unfounded. Photographic evidence shows she was an octopus-monster not a squid monster.
(3) Amazon has filed suit against 1,114 fake reviewers who “sell fabricated comments to companies seeking to improve the appeal of their products,” according to the BBC. The lawsuit was filed Friday in Seattle.
The defendants, termed “John Does,” have offered their false review service for as little as $5 on the website Fiverr.com, according to Amazon. The sellers were avoiding getting caught by using different accounts from unique IP addresses.
However, Amazon was able to identify the fake reviewers by conducting an investigation and purchasing some of the fake reviews. Amazon is also working with Fiverr to resolve the issue.
“While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufactures place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand,” Amazon said in its complaint.
Vox Day suggests “More than a few SJWs should be shaking in their shoes” because – why wouldn’t he?
(4) Bri Lopez Donovan reports on the latest conrunners’ convention in “JOFCon 2015 Helps Build the Convention Community” on Twin Cities Geek.
I was fortunate to be a part of the “Disability Access” panel, which was actually more about accessibility in general rather than disability access in particular. I and my fellow panelists, Amanda Tempel and Rachel Kronick, started with brief self-introductions before jumping into the discussion by talking about some pitfalls and how they’ve been addressed in various conventions. One of the problems we talked about was the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms at CONvergence. Amanda mentioned how it had been a problem and a point of discussion for years, and how member engagement really pushed the initiative to create bathrooms that were accessible to those outside of the gender binary. The solution she spoke of was convention runners working with their venues to relabel or re-allocate resources, in this case to relabel the gendered bathrooms of a hotel to make them gender neutral for the duration of the convention.
Another issue tackled was the vetting of panelists. Audience members of this panel brought up the lack of diversity on panels that were covering topics of diversity—for example, no people of color on a panel about race in sci fi, or no folks with autism on a panel about spectrum disorders within geek media. Audience members and panels brainstormed various ways to address this, including vetting panelists by asking why they are interested in being on a particular panel and assessing their answers for issues that could arise.
(5) Kevin Trainor asks “SF Won The Culture Wars A Long Time Ago. Isn’t It Time Fandom Started Acting Like It? on Wombat Rampant.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Is a trend becoming apparent to you? Here, let’s add another ingredient to this mulligan stew. In 1997, while I and my wife at the time were mostly busy trying to raise our kids, the regional SF convention in Minneapolis, Minicon, was in crisis. Attendance had ballooned to over three thousand people, staff turnover and burnout were epidemic, and the fan club nominally responsible for running Minicon, MNSTF, had no real idea whether the con was making money, losing money, or investing it in beaver hat futures on the Medicine Hat Commodities Exchange. The MNSTF Board of Directors, wakened from their dogmatic slumber by all the hooting, hollering, carrying-on, shrieks of horror, and assorted gibbering, actually paid serious attention to various proposals regarding the upcoming Minicon. One proposal, advanced by Minicon veteran Victor Raymond, was to split the baby: have one Minicon dedicated to traditional SF fandom, and another at a different time which would be more of a Gathering of the Clans, a three-ring circus and big ol’ party for media fans, anime fans, BDSM folk, and the other subcultures drawn to SF fandom, where being different wasn’t automatically considered bad. Another proposal, which was the one MNSTF wound up going with, was called the High Resolution Minicon Proposal, and whatever its authors’ original intentions, it was seen by most of Upper Midwest fandom as “Thanks for all the time and money you’ve sunk into Minicon over the years, you fringefans, but we’re tired of you now, and you need to fuck right off.” What became immediately apparent was that the vast majority of Minicon’s attendance and staff had in fact been made up of those “fringefans” for quite some time, and in the years following the implementation of the HRMP, Minicon’s attendance imploded to a low of about 400 people. Meanwhile, those fans who felt snubbed by the HRMP organized three other conventions: Marscon, more focused on media and gaming but still mainly an SF convention; Convergence, essentially Minicon 2.0; and Diversicon, which was ironically even more focused on traditional SF & fantasy but had split from Minicon over the issues of a “dry” consuite and open staff meetings, which Minicon had rejected. So in the end, what Victor had campaigned for happened anyway, but instead of successfully managing the change and remaining the preeminent SF club in the upper Midwest, MNSTF dropped the ball and dwindled into obscurity, which their graying membership seems quite happy with. The same thing, with minor variations, also happened at Boskone and Disclave and other regional conventions, so i think it’s reasonable to draw a few conclusions about SF fandom in general from these examples.
Let’s fast forward a few years. By now, everyone is familiar with the Sad Puppies story: Larry Correia noticed a drop in Worldcon attendance correlating with an increase in Hugo Awards to works of SF that weren’t terribly successful in the marketplace, but were written by the Right People and tended to have the Right Characters expressing the Right Views. Over the next two years, he tested the hypothesis, encouraging his readers and friends to join Worldcon and vote. Membership numbers at Worldcon increased, votes for the Hugo increased, and in the third year of Sad Puppies, when massive numbers of people bought supporting memberships and nominated works by John Wright, Tom Kratman, Michael Williamson, and other authors considered “badthinkers” by defenders of the existing order – the same people, mind you, who had encouraged Larry to go out and get more people to join Worldcon if he felt it wasn’t sufficiently reflective of the SF market- the backlash from people such as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, John Scalzi, David Gerrold, and various unhousebroken employees of Tor Books was vitriolic. The Sad Puppies (and their co-belligerents, the Rabid Puppies led by Vox Day) were libeled as racists, homophobes, neo-Nazis, misogynists and pretty much every politically correct insult in the book. In the end, despite the Puppy Kickers’ hypocritical preaching against the evils of “slate voting”, a bloc of 2500 voters chose “No Award” over any work nominated from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies list – a list, mind you, that SP3 leader Brad Torgersen had not delivered from on high, but instead crowdsourced from anyone who wanted to suggest works worth nominating. Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list was almost identical to the SP list, but as far as anyone knows, it was a list he chose and distributed to the Dread Ilk. This massive “No Award” result, which doubled the number of such from the last ten years, was loudly cheered and celebrated by those in attendance at the Hugo Award banquet; this cheering was encouraged by MC David Gerrold, while thousands of fans around the world were subjected to this display of vile behavior thanks to the Internet.
(6) Meantime, Kevin J. Maroney has his say, “Once More Around the Sun”, at New York Review of Science Fiction.
As I’m sure you know by now if you have even the faintest scintilla in the Hugo Awards, the “No Awards for Slates” option won out in this year’s Hugo final voting. This is the approach I advocated in my previous editorials, excluding the Puppy finalists not on grounds of quality or lack thereof, nor on the politics or personal foibles of the people running either of the Puppy slates. This was entirely a vote against the underhanded tactics that resulted in those finalists reaching the ballot. (The kindest thing that can be said about slate voting in this type of open-ended popular vote is that it is “technically not cheating.” That’s not a kind thing to say at all.) The people who were dragged onto the Puppy ballots without being consulted can be assured that this vote absolutely was not a personal rejection of you but of an unacceptable process.
There are larger issues involved in the Puppy movement that I don’t feel the need to rehash right now, issues of culture war, of reader communities and their protocols, of the powers and perils of our deeply interconnected communications. But at its core, the Puppy fight was about a group of people deciding to “not technically” cheat their way into an award and they were rebuffed, and that much, at least, is good. The Puppies will be back next year. It’s not particularly clear what they hope to accomplish in a fourth bite at the apple they claim is poisoned, but it will certainly be something.
(7) Today in History:
October 18, 1851 — Moby-Dick by Herman Melville was published. Much later, Ray Bradbury turned it into a script for John Huston.
October 18, 1976 — Burnt Offerings, from Dark Shadows‘ Dan Curtis, opens in theaters.
(8) The Superheroes in Gotham exhibit at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library will be open through February 21, 2016.
Superheroes in Gotham will tell the story of the birth of comic book superheroes in New York City; the leap of comic book superheroes from the page into radio, television, and film; the role of fandom, including the yearly mega event known as New York Comic Con; and the ways in which comic book superheroes, created in the late 1930s through the 1960s, have inspired and influenced the work of contemporary comic book artists, cartoonists, and painters in New York City.
Michael Powell reviews the exhibit for the New York Times.
The curators found in a private collection the Pow! Bam! Wham! Pop Art-era Batmobile and put it in the lobby. They mounted the Penguin’s umbrella and Catwoman’s hot unitard upstairs, along with Action Comics No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) and art originals of the singular Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man.
The exhibition focuses on comic book founding fathers. They were predominantly Jewish kids — with a few Italians and the occasional wayward Protestant mixed in — from the Bronx, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. And in the 1930s and ’40s, they created a world.
Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn), a creator of Batman, and Will Eisner, a son of Jewish immigrants and the creator of the Spirit, attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, as did the wisenheimer bard Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), who created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk and many more.
(9) Christopher Lloyd told The Hollywood Reporter he’d be glad to do Back to the Future: Part IV if somebody reunited the whole gang. “Doc” also says he’d like to toss out the first pitch if the Chicago Cubs get to the 2015 World Series, as predicted in Back to the Future: Part II.
(10) Book trailers by SFWA Members are collected here on YouTube.
(11) Brian Z. lays that pistol down in a comment on File 770.
Meet me in the thread, pixel, pixel
Puppies all around, pooping, pooping
Tear those puppies down, scrolling, scrolling
Droppings in the ground where flowers grow
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy people laughing
Filers all around, love them, love them
Never make amends, dish it, dish it
There’s still time to cry, crappy, crappy
Save an unkind word for tomorrow’s whine
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans…
(12) J-Grizz scores one for the home team.
Pixel pixel little scrolls
God Stalk! Brackets, maybe trolls
Reading comprehension’s bad
Perhaps that’s why they are so sad
Pixel pixel little scroll
Filking’s just the way we roll
(13) Yipes.
I bought a $10 hat. Fear me. pic.twitter.com/BuKDNHiFQF
— Simon Bisson (@sbisson) October 18, 2015
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
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I’ve seen more than one software company die that way.
I agree. One of the things I’m doing is writing about the books I read in my journal, and I do my best to describe that. It isn’t easy at all! But worth working on.
Thank you, it is nice to know I’m not alone in struggling to express myself about books!
Meredith on October 19, 2015 at 6:00 pm said:
There is a very simple solution to this: Rumtoffle
As fruits, preferably soft fruits such as berries, become ripe, you put a layer down in the bottom of a large airtight container. Cover with good rum. Put a layer of the next harvest of the next fruit down, cover with good rum. Carry on until you’re out of space or fruit. Let sit for a while. Drink. Or pour over ice cream. Or spoon up in conjunction with reading really bad prose.
@ULTRAGOTHA
Does it have to be rum? Could I use one of my ridiculous froofy things like Malibu or Goldshläger (on second thought, probably not something quite that terrifyingly expensive, although the flavour would probably work rather well) or butterscotch schnapps? My taste in alcohol usually runs to the sweet, to the ale, or to the red wine.
ETA: Except Malibu is rum! Problem solved. Ridiculous froofy sweeties coconut flavoured rum to the rescue.
Lydy Nickerson on October 19, 2015 at 4:58 pm said:
I would like to say on behalf of the MInicon HRC that we studied the Boskone communique carefully, and made a completely different set of mistakes.
Oh dear.
I’m used to seeing software companies die by random growth without a clear vision 😉
Meredith, that would be Goldshlägertofle, not Rumtofle.
But that’s no reason to not make it.
If “Ridiculous froofy sweeties coconut flavoured rum” goes well with raspberries, strawberries and peaches, knock yourself out!
> “But is it actually a recommendation?”
I … think so?
If you occasionally like to read a book where idealism, mercy, and love are all ground up in the gears of necessity and then repeatedly crushed, sprayed with acid, and lit on fire, then you might like this one.
On the pro side, it’s as unflinching a takedown of the politics of colonialism as I’ve ever seen, and a brutal examination of the question of whether the ends ever justify the means, looking at an end of unquestionable importance which is only ultimately achievable by means of gut-wrenching awfulness. On the con side, some of the world-building and early set-up feels more geared towards making a point than creating a convincing situation. This is mostly regarding the villains of the piece, but also to some extent the characterization of the main character.
It’s the first book in quite a while that I’ve read and my reaction was, “I liked this, but I’m not sure I can bear to read the sequels.” It’s definitely high up in my list of 2015 books I’ve read so far, but I’m undecided as to whether that’s a “good” or a “great” yet; I have to think more about how serious a problem the cons were.
@ULTRAGOTHA
I’ve been doctoring Dr Pepper with it and that is, the can informs me, a fruit flavoured drink, so maybe? Not that I have ever tasted a fruit or combination of fruits that tasted like Dr Pepper.
@Beth in MA and @Laura Resnick:
Interesting to read your conversation, particularly
because I’ve been meaning to write about my most recent reads and have been fighting with the words. I’ve always had trouble expressing more than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it” and trying to say why. Moreso if I’m trying not to spoil people! 🙂
That said, 2015 reads ahoy!
“Binti” by Nnedi Okorafor: I was disappointed in this one as it seemed to hinge on multiple astonishing coincidences. One enormous coincidence? I probably won’t even notice, and if I do will shrug it off as needs of the story. But I counted four huge ones in “Binti” which led to me finishing the ebook and saying “well wasn’t that convenient”. Okorafor’s Book of Phoenix has slid a couple of notches down my TBR list after reading this.
“Slow Bullets” by Alastair Reynolds: I think Jim Henley described it as “an ebook on Kindle by Alastair Reynolds”. Mine was the dead-tree version from the library, but I agree that Reynolds didn’t exactly break new ground in this. That being said, I liked the main character and the story well enough.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro: some people will probably find this book slow and tedious. Not I. It’s kind of a fable set in post-Arthurian Britain. I thought it was a quiet and deliberate meditation on life and love and memory and human nature. And very sad.
The Library on Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: not quiet at all. This book exploded my brain and I had to take a reading break of a day or two to chew it over. I thought the mystery of the book was introduced and revealed very well, and for all the hideous violence there was still a very strong sense of compassion.
Just finished The Just City by Jo Walton, and still need to ponder it. I will look for The Philosopher Kings though, to see how the story progresses.
Next in the queue are The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, and “The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps” by Kai Ashante Wilson.
We proud Scullions at File770 will not be swayed in our determination to drink whatever floats our boats, ignoring completely any petty quibbles about whether Malibu drinking should be confined to Majorca; we have no truck with attempts to gatekeep our beverages of choice.
I myself have decided to try a mixture of Jack Daniels honey bourbon and Grand Marnier, to relieve, if not my headache, then the irritation of having a hangover without having done anything to deserve it…
Petréa Mitchell on October 19, 2015 at 2:57 pm said:
Lis Carey on October 19, 2015 at 3:19 pm said:
Thanks for the corrections. Certainly explains some things. I was away at university and out of the U.S. through most of that era when all those changes were going on. (As for the partying, well, underage relatives had stories of going to Boskone, going to parties and filking, then hanging out and napping overnight in the film room. So, that was probably a very valid issue).
By the time I got back around to Boskone it was in Springfield and I guess myths and legends had sprouted like weeds.
Meredith, I think Dr Pepper is prune flavored, or at least prunes have been wafted in its general direction. Or not, it’s evidently 32 flavors of … something.
This weekend a friend of ours made a Dr Pepper and Kahlua cocktail for my wife. I did not indulge.
Stevie on October 19, 2015 at 5:20 pm said:
Hendricks vs. Netherlands small batch gins. No contest, small batch gins win hands down. 😉
Paul Weimer: Your comment about “voice of God” reminded me of a bit of trivia — a large number of names include a particle that references the deity in the language of origin.
(This was not an argument, just a resonant chord…)
Not enough people have seen this on Twitter, so I share it with all of you.
https://twitter.com/ULTRAGOTHA/status/656228365322420224
@ULTRAGOTHA
I have eaten prunes and they don’t taste like Dr Pepper, either. Wafting them nearby sounds about right!
I think coconut sweets rum ought to work with some sorts of fruit, and I’m willing to experiment to find out which ones…
(In a responsible manner which doesn’t end up with me combining my very strong painkillers with alcohol in a way that would not end well for me. I’m willing to cautiously experiment, in small quantities.)
I read this as your list of 2,015 books, and I was (briefly) awed that you were sufficiently organized that you actually knew the number of works in your TBR pile.
As I keep records, I know how many unread books I currently own: 7,099.
Meredith: I thought the request to keep applause for the end of the nominee list was very thoughtful. I think its a shame that most Puppies would rather focus on slights real or imagined than appreciate moments like that.
I think part of the problem is that Gerrold saved them from facing a near-complete lack of applause (or worse yet, booing) when Puppy nominees’ names were read aloud. If the first Puppy category announcement had been allowed to proceed with responses after each name, it would have been brought home to them that asking people to hold applause until the end of the list was a HUGE kindness to the Puppies.
I think that even during the ceremony the Puppy supporters in the audience still had no real understanding of what a tiny group they actually were. (Although even the final vote totals released after the ceremony still don’t seem to have sunk in to them as indicative of a large majority condemnation of Puppy actions.)
Eve: thank you also to whoever recommended Sanderson’s Emperor of Souls – I’m two-thirds of the way through. So far no 2015 novellas measure up.
I know — I’m kind of using it as a standard in judging novellas — and it’s a hard, hard act to follow.
Or K.J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy. Which will explain, in great detail, the precise composition and function of the gears, and the type of acid, and its effect.
Lauowolf: I read this as your list of 2,015 books, and I was (briefly) awed that you were sufficiently organized that you actually knew the number of works in your TBR pile.
Too funny. The actual list is around 800 — but a lot of those are just first-of-a-series and there are lots of others which just haven’t been put on the list yet, so 2,015 is probably a lot closer to the real number.
Since I started hanging out on File770, Mount File770 has been growing by 2 or 3 books for every one I read. I am, sadly, fully expecting to die before I ever come close to demolishing the mountain — or even getting it down to a hill-sized monstrosity.
@ Tom Galloway:
No, doesn’t sound rude.
It was a convergence of several factors, none of them common reasons people start writing at all, never mind choosing a particular genre to write in.
I was working in Sicily in the late 1980s, where my hours weren’t long, and I lived in an apartment with no phone or TV (and certainly no internet), and I don’t do crafts. So when I was at home, I had a lot of time on my hands. After a while, I wanted to do something more engaged than reading.
I had also recently read a book called How To Write A Romance and Get It Published by Kathryn Falk (founder of Romantic Times Magazine). Acquired because on my last trip to the US, a friend had kept telling me I should try this. And I thought that writing a short book about two likeable people who fall in love might be something I could do. So using Falk’s book as my guide, I started writing.
Since I had been raised in a writer’s house, I knew that perseverance and hard work are what separate the women from the girls. So I figured if I wrote 6 books, maybe I would sell one–and that would enable me to pay off my debts (which was another factor in my starting to write: I was looking for a timepass that might generate some income).
That was the whole plan. As it happened, once I started writing, I really enjoyed it, which is part of how I wound up in this life. The other part is that I soon started selling those books and was able to make a living at writing, which is what I’ve been doing ever since–though I wasn’t very well-suited to romance and left the genre after about 14 books (written as Laura Leone).
I hope I don’t have that many: at an average rate of 2+ a week, and planning to live to 100, I wouldn’t have a chance of reading them all and that would make me sad. And new ones keep coming out all the time…
Lin –
My profoundly atheist father’s idea of heaven is the place where you’ve read all the books and know all the answers.
As pretty much a complete outsider to the Minicon scene, I will only note that I attended three or four Minicons in the early 2000’s and greatly enjoyed them all. Yes, they were small, but in some ways that improved the experience for me.
For those who haven’t been following the old threads: the comics bracket is now over, with Calvin and Hobbes beating XKCD in a landslide to claim the championship.
I just finished The Fifth Season and really enjoyed it. There was a lovely moment in there, where a single well-placed word made clear in a moment of blinding revelation just how exactly the three narrative strands related to one another. (Well, maybe not that blinding: what turned out to be the case was certainly a hypothesis I’d already entertained. Still, it was cool.) I just wish that somebody had warned me that it ends in midair: Jemisin’s previous trilogy and duology had been much more self-contained in their individual volumes, so I wasn’t expected this one to be a first third.
I will second Jim Henley’s request that we stop it with the RequiresHoyt. I have a really viscerally negative reaction to the nicknames the puppies use for TNH, Scalzi , Mary Robinette Kowal, and others. It isn’t offense, just more of a “seriously, who over the age of 13 does that?,” and it isn’t any prettier over here.
I have more patience for deflation of ridiculous self-assumed monikers, and there are reasons for the resident anagram, and I do understand trying to avoid coming up on an ego search…
@JJ
Yes, but if the hosts had let it go on for longer then they would have been blamed for that instead. Victim sweaters, all the way down…
The theories for how The Puppies Are A Majority Really seem to be:
Puppy votes may have been thrown out. This one seems to have largely been forgotten since, as a nice change, the terrible maths the theory was based on seem to have been accepted as being terrible by the Puppies. Much sweeping under rug followed.
The people who voted for non-Puppy candidates or No Award are either evil slate-voting Truefen SJWs or never existed and were false votes, probably organised by Tor because why not blame Tor? Obviously Truefen can’t be a majority because that would kill whole swathes of Puppy myth and fake people aren’t a majority either.
Fun books are obviously a majority fandom thing. Hugo voters don’t like fun books and Puppies do, so Puppies are the majority. The subjective nature of fun is a lie made up by SJWs to cover-up the true reasons for reading not-fun books, obviously.
There you go, Puppy-logic’d away. The true majority slash underdog continues its rhetoric untroubled by facts or actual logic. (PS. @Heather, all statements slightly exaggerated for affect but entirely based in actual Puppy statements. I promise I’m not doing the Puppies must think x therefore they’re stupid thing. 🙂 )
Also, I am apparently a fake person, as a first-time well-informed voter who didn’t like slates but did read the works – and decided I didn’t like most of them. I am not impressed by this.
My reaction isn’t visceral, but it’s certainly very negative. Every time I see Puppies using their various “clever” nicknames and “witty” acronyms, I invariably think, “THIS is how you choose to present yourself as a professional? And an adult? In public? Seriously? THIS is how you want to be seen and identified?”
Oh my, I have a connection with history. I was one of the projectionists at the Boskone at the Copley Marriott, though I don’t remember showing any XXX films. I left at around midnight/1:00am and returned the next morning, seeing as I lived locally at the time. I remember four things:
– meeting someone from hotel security about 11:30 pm on the first night. He asked me when we would stop showing films, and seemed very surprised when I said that we were more or less continuous through the weekend. Oops.
– hearing a group of fans on the Saturday morning, plotting a costumed run out into the Copley Place Mall (home of many upscale stores, including a Tiffanys) to “freak out the mundanes”
– I was wandering through the lobby around suppertime on Saturday. There were a group of fans discussing Star Trek vs Star Wars in the lobby. As I passed, I asked, “Hey, would the Millenium Falcon fit the hangar deck on the Enterprise?”, listened for a bit and left to get a sandwich. Came back 20 minutes later, the argument was still going on 🙂
– a much-requested short film/music “video” was “Fish Heads”! By the end of the con, I hated that damn bit of film.
I think this was the con that burned me out on conventions for a long time.
Especially the Mary Three Names one. I mean… really? You couldn’t even come up with something clever? Literally the only thing you could think of, as a group of professional writers, is saying har har your pen name includes your middle name? That’s what you went with? Not only are you childishly slapping insulting nicknames on people you’re also really bad at coming up with them?
Surely they could have done something riffing off, I don’t know, the buying of ‘scholarships’, (theoretical) vote manipulation and Kowal’s history as a pro puppeteer. Anything would have been better than ‘lol you have a middle name’.
I seem to recall one Puppy challenged Wright’s disrespectful deliberate refusal to use one of the Nielsen Hayden’s names – was that Williamson? I thought that was a decent thing to do and I appreciated it, especially when such challenges happen so rarely.
@Kyra
RE: The Traitor
I think you’ve hit the nail on why I feel so conflicted about recommending the book. It’s good. It’s *really* good. But I have absolutely no desire to re-read it, because gods it was just so crushing. Gb rkcrevrapr lbhat Oneh ntnva jvgu gur sberxabjyrqtr bs jung fur qbrf (abg jung unccarf gb ure – guvf vf vzcbegnag) ng gur raq… V qba’g guvax V pbhyq orne gung.
In all honesty though, I think I kinda expected it. When I read the excerpts on Tor.com, my intial impressions where:
– Hey, the protagonist is pretty neat.
– It’s all going to end in tears isn’t it?
What I think I didn’t quite grasp was that those tears would be mine.
“Especially the Mary Three Names one. I mean… really?”
Indeed.
Do the Puppies also ridicule Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough for using three names?
@Rev Bob
“In the event that I’ve taken a public stance which I no longer agree with, all I can responsibly say is that, when confronted with new information, I would rather change my mind than delude myself. At heart, I’m a scientist. That generally means I regard all statements of fact as if they had “unless proven otherwise” appended. :)”
This is my internal image of myself, too. I’ve literally done a couple of 180s in my life when I realized I’d been using unreliable data to make decisions.
Did you ever consider or want to be a scientist? I’m a big fan of all science, especially biology and geology/geoscience. I ended up in quality/manufacturing engineering, which is as close as I got.
I actually had one of those interminable personality profile tests that were administered at companies I worked for in the 80s-90s come back with the designation ‘Scientist’…on a green card suitable for display on a wall! ;-p
Using your middle name is completely ridiculous. Using your middle initials de rigueur… 😉
I think the most ridiculous thing about the whole Mary Three Names thing was that (IIRC) Alice Maria da Silva Marques
de Almeida came up with it.
Having said that, I’m one of those whose not particulalrly fond of the RequiresHoyt thing. Seems a bridge too far, especially when she serves up such low-hanging fruit on a regular basis.
Having just heard it, gotta say I love Kate the Impala though (sorry, come up with a ridiculous nickname, it’s fair game then (yes, this from someone calling thmselves snowcrash)).
@Simon Bisson
“As a journalist I have to work a lot with PR folk, and as much as we joke about them, the truth is that PR is hard, it’s not something that can be done by volunteers. It requires a continual relationship building exercise with your audience, so you can tailor releases and news appropriately. It needs a deep knowledge of journalists’ audiences to ensure the message gets sent out. I’ve been asked to do PR for people and every time I say no…
Oh, and Crisis PR? Those guys really earn the big bucks. And they deserve every penny.”
My son ended up in PR, never set out to be though (now runs his own small, niche company with a partner). Their profession is often sneered at, but very necessary in today’s world. Whenever a person or company has a disaster to manage he’s always ranting about the 3 T’s…Tell it early, Tell it all, Tell it yourself. That’s not their specialty, but they have vigorously advised clients to do it in the past (and been ignored to bad effect).
So, in usual PupSpeak, telling people not to boo equals ordering them to cheer. And weren’t the Pups the ones who were booing? Asking for applause to be held till the end is standard awards procedure. Of course Pups don’t get around to seeing many awards ceremonies 😉 being as they rarely get nominated, and since they’d never deign to watch any entertainment awards — those are just FULL of sodomites and that’s contagious in Puppyworld!
The Silent Puppy Majority remains resolutely silent. Maybe people really DON’T like badly-written ideological stories?
I guess I’m lucky that I got into Worldcon and started voting before TNH became Queen and Dictator For Life? (Ooh, a check of her Wikipedia page reveals she was excommunicated from the Mormons for supporting the ERA. That makes her a bad person in PupThink.)
Mark-kitteh: In a world with Puppies, I’m afraid it’s true.
Cat: V ershfr gb pbafvqre n jbeyq jvgubhg n Xngfh.
Cheryl: I bounced off JS&MN very hard (haated), but loved “Watchmaker”.
Simon, dot iz an epic hat indeed.
@David Goldfarb
Would it be alright if I pulled together a list of everything people answered for Q3?
@Meredith
“@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Yes, I have bought and given away two copies already.
The last time you gave a gushing rec it worked out rather well for me, so… *nudges book up to the summit of Mount File770*”
Oh, DO. Finished the Watchmaker a couple of days ago and loved it. It went directly to my Hugo list. Highly recommended.
I’ve been reading shorts before starting another novel and plan to post recent reading with some comments soon.
I finally read Daughter of Mystery! and loved it. Then I opened The Mystic Marriage, and couldn’t read it — literally was physically unable to, because the text of the latter is set a font size smaller than the former, and it’s too small for my agéd eyes. Nook ahoy, I guess — though in fact I’m thinking of getting a Kobo (which won’t have the dings my Nook screen does) and then rooting it, so I can read Mobis and Epubs at will! mwa-ha-ha-ha
I’m at the beginning of The Dark Forest, and it’s good to know that it speeds up later, because I’m quite confused right now. I’ve got Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix here in the pile, and I want to know: will I be traumatized? I’m not up for being traumatized at present, and I had to bail out of Who Fears Death due to FGM.
I think my favorite meme out of the file is Paulik’s Tavern.
ETA: Not a fan of assigning nicknames to others that they don’t choose themselves; though I also don’t use TB preferred name because it’s ridiculous.
@Beth in MA
“Thank you, it is nice to know I’m not alone in struggling to express myself about books!”
Me, too! Not sure I can be organized or disciplined enough to actually do a journal though. I can barely keep track of what’s been read and what’s on the Hugo list. I’m in awe. 🙂
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan and Lurkertype, thank you. I will approach The Watchmaker with far less trepidation now, although there still will be some, because I’ve had a bad run lately.
@Kyra If you occasionally like to read a book where idealism, mercy, and love are all ground up in the gears of necessity and then repeatedly crushed, sprayed with acid, and lit on fire, then you might like this one.
I’m definitely in the camp of not being able to always explain why or why I do not like a book. It is particularly frustrating when I can see enormous strengths, particularly in the writing, and still can’t wade through to the end. In this case, I think you’ve identified why I’ve ground to a halt with The Traitor Baru Cormorant: I very much don’t like it when those things happen, in life or in my reading. Thanks for that.
No current reading done lately – I am going to be in a pinch when nominating time comes up.
I have been catching up on some TV and enjoying some SF programming. I really loved the Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell mini-series and I am currently watching season 1 of Dark Matter and enjoying it.
@Junego: I will be very interested to hear your thoughts on short fiction. I have one thing to share at the moment: Someone in these comments mentioned Omenana magazine, and I have been enjoying it a whole lot, almost all the stories.
I had to use another page to de-ROT the Seveneves discussion, so I lost the thing I wanted to quote.
Indeed. The concept has been developed as a movie, as a game, and as a few other things before he chucked it and wrote the thing that didn’t require collaborators: a book.
____________
I loved the book. It is on my nominations list, and I don’t see it leaving.
There are a couple of things going on that I feel are underappreciated: the first part of the book is written from the perspective of the far-future people. It’s the scenes from the Epic, the effective religious text of the space people. This is the story being told in church, not just ‘a story’.
The second is a note about characterisation that follows from the first part: we’re not seeing the characters through an unbiased narrator, so the ‘bad guys’ have aspersions cast upon them, and the narrative only shows where they interact with the ‘good guys’. Bs pbhefr, V’z nffhzvat gung guvf vf gur Rcvp nf-gbyq ol “Oyhr”, abg “Erq”. Gurer’f n jubyr ‘abgure obbx gurer…
As a physicist, I loved most of the science. It was well within my tolerance levels for fiction (as was Gravity, for that matter). The infodumps, the worldbuilding: they really were part of the point. I also enjoyed seeing the particular technologies that the early book had show up in evolved forms later, and the societal evolutions of the distinct populations.
@Meredith: Knock yourself out.
@Vasha
re: Omenana
Thanks for the rec. I bookmarked the site when it was mentioned previously, but hadn’t investigated yet. Looks like it’ll move up closer to the top of the Pile.
The great thing about the puppy theory of secret Tor press releases is that press releases, rather fundamentally, are not secret!!!!