(1) The stars came out for White House Astronomy Night.
Watch live as the @WhiteHouse hosts #AstronomyNight at 7pm ET. Here's what to expect: https://t.co/3B56ANr3oe pic.twitter.com/MCnBJRjbNi
— NASA (@NASA) October 19, 2015
Why are moon rocks tastier than earth rocks? Because they're meteor! #astronomynight pic.twitter.com/ZYKV96MZT3
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) October 19, 2015
This #AstronomyNight, @POTUS called the @Space_Station! See our Tumblr blog for a breakdown: https://t.co/MYIV9j822y pic.twitter.com/GSWGOvzqHK
— NASA (@NASA) October 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/NerdyWonka/status/656273938650021890
(2) New interview with Liu Cixin conducted by Yang Yang for China Daily.
When, in a telephone interview, China Daily reminds him of that comment, he replies: “It’s not a joke. Aliens may arrive at any time. When it happens, everything, social and economic reform, educational problems, international conflicts or poverty, will become much less important, compared with the alien crisis.”
Big countries such as China and international organizations such as the United Nations need to be ready for such an eventuality, he says.
“It does not necessarily involve a lot of money and human resources. But we should prepare, in the fields of politics, military, society and so on. The government should organize some people to do related research and preparations for the long term.”
Unfortunately, he says, “no country seems to have done this kind of thing”.
In the postscript for the English version of The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, Liu Cixin says: “I’ve always felt that extraterrestrial intelligence will be the greatest source of uncertainty for humanity’s future. Other great shifts, such as and ecological disasters, have a certain progression and built-in adjustment periods, but contact between mankind and aliens can occur at any time. Perhaps in 10,000 years the starry sky that mankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent, but perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit. … The appearance of this Other, or mere knowledge of its existence, will impact our civilization in unpredictable ways.”
(3) Bob Byrne’s “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Tying in the BBC Sherlock Special” at Black Gate has a lot of good information.
Back in July, what seems to be the most popular ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ post appeared here at Black Gate. I looked at what I think went wrong with season three of the BBC’s Sherlock. I included the just-released ninety-second, ‘first look’ video for the upcoming Special, to be aired around Christmas. And I pointed out it seemed to be full of the “Look how clever we are” bits that I lamented in my post.
Now, just about everyone, including myself, loves that the Special is set in Victorian times; unlike the episodes in the first three seasons. Cumberbatch and Freeman would be given their first (and quite likely, only) opportunities to play Holmes and Watson in the Doyle mold. I view it as a chance for the show to get back on track and reclaim the multitude of fans it lost during season three.
(4) Brad Torgersen, in a comment on Kevin Trainor’s blog, now says:
I had multiple conduits for suggestions, and the comments section was just one conduit.
But he doesn’t identify what those sources for the majority of slated Sad Puppy 3 fiction were.
(5) Francis W. Porreto does not approve – “Really Quickies: From The Garbage Heap” at Bastion of Liberty.
If you’d like a gander at “how the other side emotes,” take a look at this post at this hard-to-describe site, particularly the comments that follow commenter “alauda’s” citation of this bit of dark foreboding. These past two days a fair amount of traffic has come here from there.
Note the complete lack of rational analysis. Note the immediate and unconditional willingness to condemn me, as if the scenario I wrote about were something I actually want to happen.
(6) Alyssa Rosenberg, while commenting on “The downside of cultural fragmentation” in the Washington Post, touches on a familiar topic —
Debates over what kinds of books, movies, television shows, comics and video games get awards are often a proxy way of debating what our cultural values ought to be. The alternative slates that attempted to wrest control of Hugo nominations were based on the idea that awards voters had over-prioritized identity politics over the quality of writing and plotting; GamerGate erroneously asserts that there’s a movement afoot to ban or stop the production of video games with certain themes or images. While I don’t agree with the premises of either of those two cultural movements, I do think left cultural criticism has sometimes asserted political litmus tests for art in recent years, and that elements of the right, spurred by the sometime success of this approach, have fallen into the same patterns (for a good example, see the suggestions that the action movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” was anti-male).
(7) After Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories picked apart the Trek-related fanhistory in Kevin Trainor’s post on Wombat Rampant, Dystopic followed with his own critique of what Davidson had to say about Trainor on Declination.
As my readers probably know already, I consider myself somewhere on the Puppy spectrum of the Science Fiction community. There’s quite a bit of difference between the Sad Puppies, who one might call the reformists, and the Rabid Puppies who are mostly of the opinion that Worldcon and the Hugos should be burnt to the ground and set on fire by their own Left-wing, Social Justice proponents.
Either way, though, both camps agree that the existing community is hopelessly corrupt, cliquish, and prone to a particular animus against Conservatives and Libertarians. This prejudice is such that their works are repeatedly voted down from awards, publishers like Tor Books are run by individuals openly hostile to alternate political affiliations, and backroom deals are made to secure nominations for authors based on political backgrounds and special interests.
Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories confirms this for us in a ridiculous post, so loaded up with Strawmen that he might as well be the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Let’s allow him to hang himself with his own rope, shall we?
(8) Workaholics actor Blake Anderson appears in the Halloween episode of The Simpsons:
“Well, you know, we kind of feel a little disrespected by Homer and we show up at his doorstep basically looking for revenge,” Anderson explains. “So it turns into a full onPanic Room situation, where he’s kind of stuck in the attic and looking for him. We’re out for blood for sure.”
In the vein of the Treehouse episodes, Anderson says this one is not necessarily “piss your pants” scary, but, he assures, “me and Nick Kroll definitely brought our creepy to the table for sure.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd_tIn2xsLc
(9) Is this a clue to the future of Game of Thrones?
@livingston_tony Jon Snow from Game of Thrones passed me in Belfast City Airport tonight looks surprisingly healthy
— Tony Livingston (@livingston_tony) October 19, 2015
(10) Today’s Birthday Boys
- October 19, 1903 — Tor Johnson is born Karl Oscar Tore Johansson in Sweden. Especially known for his appearance in Plan 9 From Outer Space, although he had credits in all kinds of things, from the movie musical Carousel to Walter Cronkite’s You Are There nonfiction TV show.
- October 19, 1945 — John Lithgow is born. Acted in Twilight Zone, Third Rock from the Sun, Buckaroo Banzai…
(11) Today’s Birthday Book
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is 62 years old today. Phil Nichols explains:
FAHRENHEIT 451 was deposited for copyright at the Library of Congress on October 19, 1953. Both the first edition hardbound and mass market paperback carry this publication date, although the paperbacks actually reached the market a month earlier.
The McCarthy era’s climate of fear lingered beyond 1953, however; in spite of the book’s initial critical success, the first paperback printing took seven years to sell out.
(12) Diana Pavlac Glyer was very pleasantly surprised to find her forthcoming book Bandersnatch mentioned in a recent Publishers Weekly post, “Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity – 52 Years After His Death”.
Coming in November, Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings (Kent State University Press) by Diana Pavlac Glyer and James A. Owen shows readers how encouragement and criticism made all the difference in books written by the Inklings. A companion coloring book by Owen is expected next spring.
(13) Learn how to make your pumpkin look like a galaxy nebula.
(14) Io9 says “The Glorious Poster For Star Wars The Force Awakens Has A Giant Planet Killer On It”. Almost needless to say, you can also see the full, high resolution poster there.
(15) This collection of “13 Creepy Bits of Bookish Trivia” at BookRiot lives up to its headline. Here’s one of the tamer entries.
- J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, is rumored to have been quite the odd character. However, after his brother died in a skating accident, Barrie would routinely dress up in his dead brother’s clothing in order to ease his mother’s grief. The tragedy of his brother’s death would come to inspire the character of Peter Pan.
(16) Tonight was the Terry Gilliam talk at the Alex Theatre. Crusading photojournalist John King Tarpinian snapped a picture of the marquee.
(17) Chuck Wendig in “About That Dumb Star Wars Boycott” begins…
Let’s imagine that you are, as you are now, a straight white dude. Except, your world features one significant twist — the SFF pop culture you consume is almost never about you. The faces of the characters do not look like yours. The creators of this media look nothing like you, either. Your experiences are not represented. Your voice? Not there. There exist in these universes no straight white dudes. Okay, maybe one or two. Some thrown in to appease. Sidekicks and bad guys and walk-on parts. Token chips flipped to the center of the table just to make you feel like you get to play, too. Oh, all around you in the real world, you are well-represented. Your family, your friends, the city you live in, the job you work — it’s straight white dude faces up and down the block. But on screen? In books? Inside comic panels and as video game characters? Almost none. Too few. Never the main characters.
It feels isolating, and you say so.
And as a response you’re told, “Hey, take what you get.” They say, can’t you have empathy for someone who doesn’t look like you? Something something humanist, something something equalist. And of course you can have that empathy because you have to, because this is all you know, because the only faces and words and experiences on-screen are someone else’s so, really, what else are you going to do?
Then one day, things start to change. A little, not a lot, but shit, it’s a start — you start to see yourself up there on the screen. Sometimes as a main character. Sometimes behind the words on the page, sometimes behind the camera. A video game avatar here, a protagonist there. And it’s like, WOO HOO, hot hurtling hell, someone is actually thinking about you once in a while. And the moment that happens, wham. A backlash. People online start saying, ugh, this is social justice, ugh, this is diversity forced down our throats, yuck, this is just bullshit pandering quota garbage SJW — and you’re like, whoa, what? Sweet crap, everyone else has been represented on screen since the advent of film. They’ve been on the page since some jerk invented the printing press. But the moment you show up — the moment you get more than a postage stamp-sized bit of acreage in this world that has always been yours but never really been yours, people start throwing a shit-fit. They act like you’re unbalancing everything. Like you just moved into the neighborhood and took a dump in everybody’s marigolds just because you exist visibly.
(18) Amy Sterling Casil recommends The Looking Planet.
During the construction of the universe, a young member of the Cosmos Corps of Engineers decides to break some fundamental laws in the name of self expression.
https://vimeo.com/107659154
[Thanks to Will R., JJ, John King Tarpinian and Amy Sterling Casil for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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Chapter Five is a delusion, a lie, an evil plot! Who has ever seen the real Chapter Five?
I also note that in the comments on the Wombat piece, Torgersen is still whining about how Chicks Dig Time Lords beat Resnick and Malzberg’s Business of Science Fiction in Best Related Work in 2011. The fact that he sees this as evidence of something wrong with the Hugos is actually clear evidence of Brad’s own cluelessness. The fact that a book about the most popular science fiction property that was on television at the time won over a pair of crusty old men talking shop about the business of publishing should have surprised no one. And yet Brad acts like this was one of the greatest miscarriages of award justice ever.
And the really ironic thing is that if Brad gets what he says he wants – participation by those masses of fans he claims that the Hugo voters have ignored in the past – then inside baseball type works like Business of Science Fiction will never win, and works like Chicks Dig Time Lords will dominate the awards forever.
I’m finding something really weird about Bob Byrne’s
I thought season 3 was incredibly well received. And the wiki page says it was the BBC’s most-watched drama in more than a decade? And I loved it immensely, and (self selecting group here) so did almost everyone I know.
Anyone here not a fan of season three? If so, I’d be really curious to hear what you liked about season 1 and 2 that didn’t deliver in 3.
I think the last season did go overboard. It’s not that it did something new and different that was bad, but that tendencies that were kept in check in earlier seasons, or worked in smaller doses in earlier seasons, went unrestrained in season 3.
@ Ryan H
I thought the pithiest review of Season 3, that combined a view of the season with a view of the general style of certain parts of the BBC’s line up was expressed with the following question about Sherlock: “Who are you?”
@Aaron
Yikes. I see Torgersen is having another one of his epic meltdowns. Thank goodness it’s somewhere where he can’t edit away everyones comments again.
re: no. 7
I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much reality disconnect as Dystopic is spitting out here. It’s just mind-boggling.
Also ticky.
He doesn’t seem to be able to conduct himself online without resorting to childish insults and made-up names.
Are the Puppies just resorting to magical thinking when they keep on banging on that the Hugo Awards (that they totally don’t care about and which are completely irrelevant, by the way) have been destroyed? Personally, I’m not losing any sleep over some awards not being handed out this year. In fact, I’m now more aware of how much good quality work is actually out there and I’m spending more money buying it and more time talking about it.
in #5, the “dark foreboding” Porreto is talking about is this piece, http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2015/08/if-this-goes-on.html, where he writes a short-short about a future where black people who don’t toe the line are either sent to Africa or executed. It’s followed by his comments that he doesn’t want this to happen, but he thinks it will if black people don’t get their act together.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to articulate precisely why this is racist, since the author (in the article talked about in #5) seems shocked that anyone took it that way. In the short-short, a black woman is executed because she’s on welfare and had two illegitimate sons who died in prison. What makes it racist is that the harsh laws in the story only apply to black people.
The rest of the post makes it clear that the author thinks it’s very reasonable to blame all black people for the actions of any black people. He’s very comfortable condemning black people as a group.
Finally, he claims to be upset that people treated it as a description of what he wanted to happen when he meant it to be a warning of what might happen. The problem with that is that his text makes it clear that he considers it a reasonable outcome if blacks don’t learn how to behave. (And his idea of how they should behave includes that they shouldn’t complain about how the police treat them.)
It’s a pity that the term racism has been so overused lately, because this is the real thing.
@Greg
I read that piece, and also came to the conclusion that his ‘dark forboding’ was actually just racist fear mongering assholery of the highest order
As a distraction from Puppy-related nonsense, can anyone recommend me any decent indie or self-published SF or fantasy? I think my tastes are fairly mainstream.
I would like to discover more of this part of the field, but I’ve wasted time on quite poor quality work previously, and I don’t find Amazon reviews particularly reliable for this end of the market (I don’t know whether the 5* reviews are paid for, the authors friends and family, or simply people who don’t read very much).
Bonus points for anything that I can buy in ebook format without using Amazon.
Well, he is a GamerGate-r, so it’s not out of character, at least.
One of the commenters on Porretto’s work says: “Consequently, in spite of fervently wishing Fran’s story could be realized, I believe this is what we will actually face:”
“… they put politics and personal vendetta, ahead of professional and artistic merit.”
Brad Torgersen’s ability to type these words without a hint of self-recognition leaves me awestruck. It appears that he’s going to be pushing falsehoods about what he and the Puppies did forever.
I see from his comment that he’s even trashing EPH, a fair and impartial counting method that has won some support among Puppies.
If anything about his intentions towards the Hugos was honest, he’d recognize that EPH helps the cause of groups that feel locked out of the awards. They have a better chance of getting a few nominees on the ballot under that system.
@Greg Hullander:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands
(Guess the races of the disappeared. Go ahead.)
I was shocked that I hadn’t heard about this until yesterday. I get my news primarily from Google News and knew none of it. I find that very upsetting and curious.
rob_matic: well, there’s Graydon Saunder’s novels “The March North” and sequel “A Succession of Bad Days”. I like them a lot; they’re fantasy, but very much not extruded fantasy product. They’re completely unlike anything I’d read before. They’re available on Google Play.
The ‘Star Wars’ trailer looks gorgeous. I’m so glad that they’ve released all the trailers without spoiling anything significant in the story, and I’m actually cautiously optimistic about this one. I’ve still more or less entirely given over my movie fandom allegiance to Marvel at this point, but my heart is big enough for everyone who wants to make good stuff. 🙂
@Dawn Incognito, I’m aware of Homan Square, but I listen to Chicago Public Radio. Which may be the only media outlet that’s actually covered it in any depth at all. Or at all, period.
@ Greg Hullender:
There’s even more than that. Porretto says that he doesn’t want his scenario to happen, but the protagonist, with whom the reader is obviously expected to sympathize, is one of the people who’s making it happen. The same character, confronted with a person for whom he is temporarily responsible and who must choose deportation or death, doesn’t tell her that death is the alternative to exile, because he believes it would be “kinder.” He deprived her of the ability to make a meaningful choice, which is a violation of nearly any Western ethical system, and he’s fine with that. We also see his inner monologue in which he ruminates about how the great majority of African-Americans aren’t really guilty, they’re just parasites.
Again, this is the good guy of Porretto’s story – the character with whom we’re supposed to sympathize. It’s almost as if the hero were an SS officer in a death camp who’s all broken up about what he has to do (oh wait, that’s been done, and the Rabids defended that too).
Turning to the rationale of the story, the points range from true but wildly out of context to exaggerated to ridiculous (the New Black Panther Party has what, a few hundred members at the outside?), and they also assume that all the social issues in the African-American population are due to the moral failings of black people and have nothing at all to do with the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, redline-enforced ghettoization, continuing bias in education and employment, etc., etc. Why, if the blacks would just buck up and take responsibility for themselves, then everything would be fine!
Even beyond that, Porretto’s points all build up to the notion that if a race war breaks out in the future and results in a genocide of African-Americans, it will be their fault. I’m Jewish – you may have figured it out from the last name – and I’ve read a lot of anti-Semitic propaganda over the years. A good deal of it justifies genocidal violence against Jews (either envisioned or in progress) by claiming that the Jews are at war with humanity, and that they did this or that evil deed. The Jews started it – they made us, or will make us, kill them! It’s still out there, and I occasionally see screeds threatening that if Jews don’t stop doing X (usually some variation on “supporting Israel”), the good people of the world will enact a second holocaust and they’ll deserve it. So yeah, I tend to consider this sort of rhetoric both racist and dangerous, and it’s exactly the kind of ill-disguised fantasy in which Porretto is indulging.
Alauda was too kind.
@rob_matic
Novels, or anything? The Hugo recs sheet lists publishers, and has a fair number of self-pub/small pub novels listed. It’s an interesting thought, although I’ve not got anywhere with my main novels list let alone branching out.
Brad Torgersen’s ability to type these words without a hint of self-recognition leaves me awestruck. It appears that he’s going to be pushing falsehoods about what he and the Puppies did forever.
Brad does very badly when people question his made-up version of history. He seems to expect that everyone will agree with him, and becomes quite discombobulated when they do not, reaching almost immediately for the made up insults and whining. That’s probably why these days he rarely appears outside of spaces that are curated to be friendly to the Pups.
Like, say File 770. He doesn’t come here because knows his bullshit won’t sell to anyone but his true believers, and fears the criticism that he will receive if he tries. He’s terrified and hiding.
@Aaron
He appears to have done a runner from that unsafe-space now.
—–
Today’s acquisitions:
Twelve Tomorrows, a new collection from the MIT Tech review edited by Bruce Sterling
Envy of Angels by Matt Wallace, a Tor novella. It appears to be about a restaurant dedicated to serving supernatural creatures – both as patrons and courses.
Thank you, they sound interesting. Sample duly obtained.
Novels, or novellas I suppose. I feel like I am already overloaded with short fiction from Uncanny, Lightspeed, anthologies etc.
Thanks for the recs sheet, I didn’t know that there was a resource which showed publisher as well.
I’m also open to suggestions from previous years.
During the WSFS business meeting, Ron Oakes helped defeat a proposal to recommend that Hugo voting software be open source by saying he’d make the software available for inspection upon request.
I made a request in email six weeks ago but didn’t hear back from him, so I asked about it again today.
At some point before the next Hugos, I hope to inspect the software and documentation and write an analysis of it.
And the racist stupidity continues:
“Racists Urge Boycott of ‘Star Wars”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/19/racists-urge-boycott-of-star-wars-episode-vii-over-black-lead-and-most-of-them-love-trump.html
@Ryan H – To be fair, my issues with the BBC Sherlock started with Reichenbach.
I mean seriously. A criminal genius and that was his plan? It’s as bad as the rushed ending for Seven.
The 3rd season, while perfectly bland, did nothing to reduce the ire I felt towards Moffatt for his sloppy writing.
Oh, I certainly noticed that.
His “extended edition” of the story has a scene tacked on the end in which his wife knows what’s going on and she approves of what he’s doing. Whoop de doo.
“… can anyone recommend me any decent indie or self-published SF or fantasy? I think my tastes are fairly mainstream.”
Andrea K Höst is self-published, and I really like what I’ve read of her work. Here’s her website:
http://www.andreakhost.com
I’ve got stuff from a number of small and indie presses around the place; I’ll poke around for other stuff that would appeal to a fan of mainstream SFF. 🙂
Oh, and of course there’s Heather Rose Jones, who is published by the small press Bella Books. But I’m guessing you already knew about her.
After a (very) cursory scan – is ANYONE on that boycott Star Wars thing actually talking about, y’know, boycotting Star Wars? Either it was a prank, or the racists got crowded out by the people clowning them, but it’s an oddly modern phenomenon when you can’t get any racists all up in your racist hashtag.
Wendig’s blog post is a good one but I really wonder if it will get through at all to those who need it most. You can explain how basic empathy works all day long in however many metaphors or small words you want but if a person lacks the ability or prefers to keep it turned off when they find themselves challenged, it’s still not going to get through.
Whether it’s a bad trolling attempt or not dumb boycott is dumb.
The trailer for Star Wars was awesome though. Was worried that it was going to give away too much of the plot but they handled it perfectly. I’ve been cautious about getting my hopes up after the prequels but I can’t help it, I’m all aboard the VII hype train now.
And of course Torgersen got suggestions for other sources. We know that because Correia said what those sources were, other members of his small holier-than-though obnoxious reactionary clique of writers. Mike Z has said that Brad approached him for work to put on the slate as well, a couple of others mentioned he had reached out to them for work to include. Nepotism at its finest.
White House Astronomy night looks like fun. It seems like people are getting more interested in space again, but maybe that’s just the Internet delivering nerd content to nerds more effectively.
Regarding (6) — I do think elements on the right have borrowed left-leaning cultural criticism, but a lot of the time it seems to come down to borrowing terminology and slogans without seeming to understand them. (And also without seeming to understand why they don’t automatically work the same way in reverse.)
(17) — yeah, pretty much. All-white casts is something that, once I started to notice it, really started to bother me. There was a time when things could have been different, too. One of the things that makes movies and TV of the 70s look different isn’t just earth tones — it’s also an approach to casting that results in more mixed-race casts.
@Lauowolf
I noticed that too — the framing idea that the natural state of things is for these works to win awards. That’s one of the weirder things that has seemed to be a consistent puppy attitude (pupitude?) — that there is something inevitable about winning an award, and that to not win one is a grave injustice. Remember that guy who thought “No Award” robbed John C. Wright of the five Hugos he was due — in spite of only being nominated in three categories, and in spite of never being first after No Award in any category?
I suppose it might be related to the puppy genesis (pupgenesis?) being, ultimately, Larry Correia’s disgruntlement at having been nominated for an award he didn’t get. The notion of awards as entitlements is part of their DNA.
@JJ
This reminds me of a recurring theme among the “Men’s Rights” types covered on We Hunted the Mammoth — men fantasizing about women being lonely because they only wanted to date creeps and now all the “nice guys” have gone their own way, women being lonely because the men have all discovered anime sex robots, women being lonely because of course no real man wants to date a feminist/chubbo/woman with purple hair, women being lonely (and without means) because all those men with their great male paychecks have decided to stop supporting their lazy gold-digging selves (but of course, also, there’s no pay gap).
The puppies aren’t going anywhere. If they did bugger off and form their own convention, their small numbers and relative lack of influence would immediately become apparent. Plus, they would have nowhere to direct their incessant need to complain, except at each other, and that would probably end badly.
@Hampus
Was that something happening in Sweden? Because in the US, that was a phenomenon closely associated with evangelical religious beliefs, with the completely imaginary epidemic of “Satanic ritual abuse.” I would have described it as a right wing phenomenon, because the religious types driving it were very much from the conservative fundamentalist wing. But I suppose some of the child welfare advocates who eventually got sucked in were probably from the left.
@Marxkcd
Nope. He’s just abandoned that subthread. He’s still trying to….something? I dunno.
I certainly don’t think it’s laughing though.
This reminds me of a recurring theme among the “Men’s Rights” types covered on We Hunted the Mammoth
Can we please get a “Pups going their own way” movement?
More small press/self-published books:
Broken Wings, by L-J Baker. Excellent. Small press (Bold Strokes Books).
Twixt, by Sarah Diemer. Quite good. Self-published.
I would be more impressed with Torgersen if he would just admit that making a list of popular works turned out to be really hard to do, so he constructed one using suggestions from one or two people rather than reading them himself. He should apologize to his own side for letting them down so badly. Rather than picking good stories they could stand behind, he ended up with a list full of trash that was hard to defend and which went down to crushing defeat at least in part (if not mostly) because of its poor quality. (I’m speaking specifically about the three short-fiction categories here.)
@Dawn Incognito:
While this is really bad, I hesitate to characterize a detention of a few hours or even 2-3 days as “disappearing” someone. As far as I can tell from that article, there’s no suggestion that any of the detainees are actually never heard from again (which is what DID happen in e.g. the South American flavor of disappearing people).
@rob_matic: “As a distraction from Puppy-related nonsense, can anyone recommend me any decent indie or self-published SF or fantasy? I think my tastes are fairly mainstream.”
I thoroughly enjoyed all six of the Saving Mars books (Cidney Swanson), and the second (and third) books in Julia Crane’s “IFICS” trilogy are still high in my TBR queue, after how much I enjoyed Freak of Nature. I’ve already recommended the Limbus, Inc. anthologies, and – oh, here’s a lesbian superhero novella I liked (romantic, not explicit), for those here who are into that. Alex Shvartsman’s Unidentified Funny Objects anthologies are also quite fun.
That covers most of the indie SFF I’ve read in the past couple of years, but my reading quantity HAS suffered a bit in that time. I’ve read about 160 books in that time, which is about what I read in just the previous year.
Nigel –
There’s a couple, but they appear mostly to be sockpuppet/troll accounts where they say dumb shit and then laugh that people get mad at it, then they do it again. Which is worth pitying, though on the other hand it also does things like inadvertently raise discussion/awareness about what they were trolling. So I guess thanks 4chan for inspiring a diversity discussion while simultaneously making the idea of boycotting something for not having enough white characters a joke.
So Torgersen reads the comments here today, gets angry, uses a comment to a LiveJournal blog to respond to us …
… and then gets mad that some of us are posting comments on the LiveJournal where he’s commenting.
I know this explanation is too simple for a person who sees conspiracies in his breakfast cereal, but people are commenting on that journal for the same reason he did: They saw a discussion that interested them enough to contribute.
The answer to all of your questions, Lurking Brad, is that your screw-you-SJWs ballot-stuffing campaign left us Hugo voters with no good choices for how to respond. So we took the least worst choice, which was to reject all slate candidates as a rejection of bloc voting.
You can keep calling yourself the victor in the war you declared, but it won’t make you the winner. That effort on your part is as futile as telling people to be nicer in fandom while you’re calling them chorfs and chorfholes and whatever insipid grade school taunt you invent next.
We rejected all slate candidates because we hate slates. We drafted and got initial passage of EPH because we hate slates.
We don’t reject right-wing authors. This site’s comments are full of recommendations of them. We don’t reject right-wing fans. When one shows up here talking great SF/F books, it’s party time.
We hate slates.
@Rev. Bob
I can’t speak to the Saving Mars books myself, but my daughter thinks they’re the best things since sliced bread.
@snowcrash
Yup, I spoke too soon. He was obviously just taking a short break before diving back in to repeatedly not say say anything.
@Nigel
There appear to have been a few actual racists involved when it got started, but they didn’t get much traction. At this point I think they’re vastly outnumbered by the ones who are pointing and laughing instead.
@McJulie
My impression is that this was a bipartisan phenomenon, with strong support from liberals, based on the conviction that the victim’s testimony should be taken at face value in most cases. Given the perennial bias in society toward taking the perpetrator’s word over the victim’s, I believe there were very sound reasons to start believing the victims, but in the process, people did not reflect on the limits of what testimony should be believed, on the way the testimony was obtained, and on what evidence should be demanded for some of the testimony.
As for the Satanic angle, one does not have to believe in Satan in order to believe that there are people worshipping him and engaging in all sort of atrocities in the process. I don’t have to believe in Jesus in order to believe that there are children being beaten to death in his name.
JJ : [To David Langford] “Sir, I hope you will allow me the honor of purchasing you a beverage at the next con we both attend… WHEREUPON I WILL ATTEMPT TO SAY SOMETHING CLEVER ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SPRAY IT, AS YOU JUST CAUSED ME TO SPRAY MINE…”
You should be nice to Dave Langford, because if you’re not he may stuff you through a hole precisely 1.9 centimeters wide.
re: Sherlock
Season one was transcendent, then it began to unravel in a serious way. I watched 20 mins of S3 Ep 1, and never went back.
Perhaps if they spent more time playfully, and intelligently interrogating the canon and transposing it to today, working through more of the catalogue, while gently and slowly swerving, it might have been better from my perspective.
He didn’t take advice from others to fill gaps in his own reading. He filled the slate with a bunch of people with personal or professional ties to himself.
As a distraction from Puppy-related nonsense, can anyone recommend me any decent indie or self-published SF or fantasy?
I just got a copy of a book named Greenwood by Alexandra Greisinger to review. I haven’t read it yet, but I know it exists. I have lots of indie books that have been sent to me to review, and I’m still working my way through them. I can’t say any have stuck out as being particularly memorable this year, but then again, I’m behind on my reading.
For indie/self-published stuff, I recently enjoyed Jen Foehner Wells’ Fluency, a near-future SF novel that starts out with a Rama-like premise but moves into space opera. It’s a bit potboilery but fun. I like a lot of MCA Hogarth’s work, too. (AFAIK she was a prime mover behind the SFWA’s recent shift to qualify self-published work, and is also slightly famous for being the author Games Workshop threatened action against because they claimed ownership of “space marine.”)
@RDF
And 1.11 meters deep?
@Microtherion
Reading the Gruniard’s piece suggests no records of those detained there were kept so there’s no way to know if anyone fell down the stairs and landed badly.
Of course it took intervention by the UK Supreme Court to force Police Scotland to provide access to legal representation at all, up until then they could lean on you for up to six hours without one. Though unlike the rest of the UK you still had an unqualified right to remain silent.