(1) Arthur C. Clarke’s papers came to the Smithsonian Institution earlier this year. Patti Williams, acquisition archivist for the National Air and Space Museum, blogged about the steps in bringing the materials from Sri Lanka to the U.S.
I have been the Museum’s acquisition archivist for almost 26 years, and during that time over 3,200 archival collections have been entrusted to us. Most of these materials have been personally delivered or shipped, but it has sometimes been necessary for me to travel to obtain a collection, whether to California, New York, or South Dakota. Sri Lanka has certainly been the furthest I’ve travelled for a collection.
Martin Collins, a curator for the Space History Department, gave an overview of what’s in Clarke’s papers, accompanied by many photos.
What emerges from a first review of his papers is a deeply thoughtful man shaped by and creatively responding to his time—with World War II and the first decades of the Cold War as critically formative. From his early 20s through the rest of life he possessed a remarkably consistent vision and purpose of what was important to him: to make sense of a world experiencing tremendous advances in science and technology, the result of which, in his view, augured potentially radical changes in the fabric of social and cultural life. In the years after the war, this dynamic seemed especially insistent, making the idea and reality of the “future” a critical problem in need of understanding. Through his career, this challenge led Clarke to advance his three laws of prediction (easily found via an internet search), an attempt to make serious the future as a shared, collective human concern but do so with a light touch.
From this vantage, Clarke’s interest in science fiction, as is evident throughout his papers, was not merely incidental but central: It was his essential tool, perhaps the best one, for sorting through and understanding this condition and educating readers about the time in which they were living.
(2) In a podcast for Creature Features, Walter Murch, writer and director of Return to Oz, “discusses the long genesis of the 1985 fantasy film, how personal a project it was for him, how tumultuous it became at times, and how happy he is with it after 30 years.”
Soundcloud – Pod People Episode 4 – Walter Murch
(3) The PBS documentary about cosplay aired in 2013 can be viewed online.
(4) The Golden Age Site’s post about “New York Comic Book Conventions ~ 1966-1978 ~ The good old days when Comic Shows were about comics” shows many many fans in those days were involved in both comics and sf, inspiring Andrew Porter to comment, “Gosh, there’s my name at the top, along with a bunch of [now] old pharts!”
I also ran off the program — about 250 copies of a single page, as I recall — for Dave Kaler’s NY Comic Convention, held in 1965 at the Hotel Broadway Central (an impressive pile in Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie”) on my Ditto machine.
(5) The University of Oregon Libraries will celebrate the acquisition of the James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) literary papers with a two-day symposium at the Eugene, Oregon campus on December 4-5, 2015.
The acquisition of the Tiptree Papers enriches Special Collections and University Archives’ growing collection of feminist science fiction manuscript collections, which include the Ursula K. Le Guin Papers, the Joanna Russ Papers, the Sally Miller Gearhart Papers, and the Suzette Haden Elgin Papers.
The symposium will kick off with a keynote talk by Julie Phillips, author of the biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon (St. Martins, 2006), and will also feature a panel discussion with other writers who carried on lively and engaging correspondence with Tiptree, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and David Gerrold.
(6) Emily Hughes conducts “Updraft: A Q&A with Fran Wilde” at Suvudu.
SUVUDU: Updraft has some of the most original worldbuilding I’ve ever come across – could you tell us a little bit about your process for creating the details of this city built out of bone towers and its residents?
FRAN WILDE: That’s wonderful to hear! The city of bone towers was born late one night at a writing workshop following many cups of coffee. I realized that I wanted to write a story set in a living city with a focus on engineering and flight. (I wasn’t drinking Red Bull, I swear.)
What emerged from that writing session was a short story that had elements of Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Codex Seraphinianus, China Mieville’s short stories about living cities in Looking for Jake, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as ancestors. The story contained the man-made wings, bridges, and bone towers that exist today, but the characters and conflict were different. After reading it, Gordon Van Gelder of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine wrote me to suggest I look at other high-altitude megastructure stories like Steven Gould’s “Peaches for Mad Molly” and K.W. Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal as well.
So my process from the first draft involved a lot of reading. In the end, when the short story had grown into a novel, and the very spare sketch of bone towers and wings had grown into a world, the process also involved getting into a wind tunnel to go indoor skydiving, and talking to cloud and weather experts about wind shear near steep, high-altitude objects, and to biologists about bone growth. I also researched scarcity societies, high-altitude food production, and cephalopods, among other things.
(7) John Plotz recalls A Wizard of Earthsea in “Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics” on Public Books.
Le Guin’s peculiar gift, though, is to make the ordinary feel as important as the epic: mundane questions about who’s cutting firewood or doing the dishes share space with rune books and miscast spells. Her Earthsea has less in common with Narnia, Hogwarts, and Percy Jackson’s Camp Half-Blood than it does with medieval romances and Icelandic sagas, where dragons and death keep company with fishing yarns, goat-herding woes, and village quarrels.
Plotz also interviewed Le Guin for Public Books in June.
JP: And has it always been clear to you which category your books fall into?
UL: Oh no. When I started it was all mushed up together! My first three novels are kind of science fantasy. Rocannon’s World (1966) is full of Norse myth barely disguised. But I began to realize there was a real difference between these two ways of using the imagination. So I wrote Earthsea and Left Hand of Darkness. From then on I was following two paths.
In Left Hand of Darkness I was using science fiction to come at a problem that I realized was very deep in me and everybody else: what is gender? What gender am I? A question we just hadn’t been asking. Look at all the answers that are coming out now. We have really deconstructed it. We really didn’t even have the word “gender” back then. Just, “What sex are you?” So in some respects we really have come a long way, and in a good direction, I think.
(8) Gregory N. Hullender says, “No one seems to have commented on it yet, but I think the December 2015 Analog is unusually strong. After a really weak year, maybe they’re getting their act together.” He has more to say on Reddit.
(9) Irish children’s laureate Eoin Colfer (“Artemis Fowl”) and illustrator and writer Oliver Jeffers have joined forces to create an imaginary friend.
They decided to collaborate on ‘Imaginary Fred’ due to a chance meeting in New Zealand.
“We were there for the Auckland book festival and we met up at a story slam competition,” Mr Colfer said.
“We were giggling like schoolboys at each other’s stories, and at the end of the night we said let’s do something together.”
‘Imaginary Fred’ tells the story of Fred, who becomes the imaginary friend of Sam, a boy in need of company.
The two embark on a series of adventures together, but when Sam meets Sammi, a girl with an imaginary friend of her own, Fred has to move on from Sam.
The story, unusually, is told from Imaginary Fred’s point of view.
“I like to do that with my books,” said Mr Colfer.
“To take what is often a secondary character and make them the main character because they’re a lot more interesting to me.”
(10) An event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Marion E. Wade Center on October 29 at 7 pm Central time will be livestreamed. The Wade is a focal point of Inklings scholarship. Featured speakers will include the Wade’s former director, Dr. Lyle W. Dorsett, poet Luci Shaw, and Dr. Leland Ryken, who is currently at work on a book length history of the Wade Center. The dedication of the new Bakke Auditorium will be part of this special evening. Watch the proceedings online via WETN.
(11) Bradbury-inspired art! Vroman’s Art on the Stairwall presents George Cwirko-Godycki on November 14 at 2 p.m. at the main store in Pasadena.
Join us as we celebrate our newest Artist on the Stairwell! Illustrator George Cwirko-Godycki presents a limited edition poster show inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury. The show is the first in Vroman’s Artists on Authors series in the stairwell where visionary artists interpret the works of renowned authors. The first 25 attendees will receive a signed catalog of the exhibition that details the process of creating this unique show from start to finish. George is based in San Francisco where he provides concept illustration for the entertainment industry and teaches figure drawing at the Academy of Art University.
(12) Frequent File 770 contributor James H. Burns’ writes about the Tri-State losing a major supermarket chain, Pathmark, in a piece for the Long Island Press.
Ultimately, the neatest feature at Pathmark for a youngster may have been a huge paperback section featuring an amazing array of bestsellers and non-fiction books. Pathmark was where I bought some of my very first books on the history of movies, including, in my monster-loving youth, a biography of Boris Karloff!
From its inception in Franklin Square, Pathmark had tried to be unique. At the back of the store was a section invoking the classic Horn and Hardart cafeterias in Manhattan, famous for all the food, sandwiches and cakes and the like, being offered through slots in the wall protected by a glass cover. If you put coins in the apparatus, you could lift the cover and take your treat. Horn and Hardart was famous for the quality of its offerings, and for being a very affordable place for any New Yorker to put together a decent meal. More than one location also became known as a writers’ hangout, with some of the best-known reporters and talent of the era sitting for a long while, sipping their coffee, and enjoying the conversation.
Beginning in the 1970s, Pathmark also had a long running series of television commercials, starring James Karen. Most of us probably presumed he was a Pathmark executive, until he also began popping up as an actor in horror movies like “Poltergeist” and “The Return of the Living Dead.”
(13) Pee Wee Herman’s blog features a gallery of photos of work by the “’Picasso of Pumpkin Carving’ Ray Villafane”.
Until October 31st, the town of Carefree, Arizona is hosting the Enchanted Pumpkin Garden, a one-of-a-kind event conceived by master pumpkin carver Ray Villafane! The Wall Street Journal calls him the “Picasso of pumpkin carving.”
(14) Ray Bradbury is all over the place in this documentary about Charlie Chaplin, first at the 40 second mark
(15) The Nitrate Diva links to “Fear You Can Hear: 31 of the Scariest old Time Radio Episodes for Halloween”
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but, when it comes to the best old-time radio horror, each word is worth a thousand pictures.
By using voices, sound effects, and snippets of music, masters of radio terror turned what could’ve been a disadvantage of the medium—we can’t see what’s happening—into their greatest asset.
Radio writers and actors spawned monsters that the technology of the time couldn’t have realistically portrayed on film. They suggested depravity and gore that screen censorship would’ve banned. And they could manipulate the imagination so that listeners themselves collaborated in the summoning of their worst fears.
In case you can’t tell, I adore old-time ratio (OTR) horror. After countless hours poring over archives of old shows, I’ve selected 31 bloodcurdling episodes, from 1934 all the way up to 1979, for your pleasure.
(16) Oh noes! “William Shatner Isn’t a Huge Fan of the New ‘Star Wars’ Trailer”.
Millions of Star Wars fans may have eagerly devoured the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, due out on December 18, but William Shatner—captain of the starship Enterprise and star of the original Star Trek series—wasn’t among them. “To me there isn’t a controversy,” the actor tells Newsweek. “Star Trek is far superior to Star Wars.”
(17) Would Dr. Sheldon Cooper agree? He certainly has plenty of reason to be happy with Star Trek.
Fans of The Big Bang Theory and Star Trek can rejoice because an upcoming episode the geektastic TV sitcom will feature a guest appearance from the son of Mr. Spock himself, Adam Nimoy! Plus, we have an exclusive first look at the episode, which airs on Thurs., Nov. 5 at 8/7! In “The Spock Resonance,” recurring guest star Wil Wheaton will appear alongside Adam, an accomplished writer and director in real life, who asks Sheldon Cooper to be in a documentary about his beloved father, Leonard.
(18) Natalie Luhrs has a terrific post about “World Fantasy’s Harassment Non-Policy” at Pretty Terrible.
The final progress report from World Fantasy was emailed to members this evening. It included the harassment policy, which is legalistic and is essentially useless. For posterity, here it is…
[Thanks to Bill Menker, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, Bill Burns, James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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I suppose of cons beginning with “World”, that’s true. However Worldcon has much more in common with other fan-run SF&F conventions, so it’s really the professional “World” cons that are the odder ducks out.
> “Have you considered Daryl Gregory’s ‘Afterparty’?”
Haven’t read it — sounds interesting!
My current standard for Hugo Nomination:
Is it one of the top five things I’ve read/watched/listened/etc in the category?
I find this perfectly serviceable. Were I the only one to nominate a work, it won’t get on the ballot. I don’t get paid if something I nominate wins, much less gets on the short list. I nominate the things I like and read the finalists that are chosen.
The IT crowd makes sure everyone is a target for mockery, especially by having the non-tech Jen as part of the team.
Kyra said
Northern Girl is a yes, as stated earlier. Liked it enough to keep it with me all these years, although I haven’t re-read it in a while.
Melissa Scott: Mighty Good Road has a lesbian couple working salvage. Shadow Man deals with intersex humans and the interaction with worlds that refuse to accept them. The others have been mentioned — Scott has a tendency to populate her worlds with non-binary genders, AIs, and other “outsiders”. Her books were a breath of fresh air in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s…
The Eaton Collection at University of California-Riverside is worth the visit. I did some of my dissertation research there. In addition, the Merril collection in the Toronto Public Library system is a lot of fun, and worth the visit.
Yeah, I definitely go with “is it one of the best books I’ve read this year?” I don’t even always consider “is it likely to win”, because I think good humor is hard, but when done well, looks so easy that most people overlook it for awards. I don’t (think it’s easy or overlook it), so I’m perfectly happy to nominate a humorous easy read, if I think it’s really good. But whenever I do, I always look at it and go “there’s no way this will win.” Which makes me sad, but doesn’t change my opinion that it deserves consideration, even while realizing that many will never give it the consideration it deserves.
I may well end up nominating Tom Holt’s latest, The Good, the Bad, and the Smug, for example. It’s not necessarily his greatest book, but overall, I think he’s about on a par with Pratchett for consistently delivering really great humorous fantasy, and I think this one probably has an edge on Shepherd’s Crown.
Of course, I think Shepherd’s Crown has a better shot at making the ballot (or even winning) because of the sympathy factor, and the fact that it’s the last time Sir Pterry will be eligible, and he’s got a lot more name recognition. But that’s not going to stop me from nominating what I think is best. Mordak, the Goblin King, in TGtBatS is a really outstanding character, and the whole Rumplestiltskin plot is simply brilliant.
SBT:
Who cares? It’s a private event. You can kick anybody out of any private event for anything that doesn’t run afoul of anti-discrimination laws. If I want to hold a con and kick anybody out that uses the word “Jedi”, I can. If I want to hold a con and kick anybody out who doesn’t wear a newspaper sailor hat at all times in public, I can do that, too. And I can certainly kick someone out for, say, persistently bugging someone after being told to stop. Even if it doesn’t rise to the level of legal harassment under local law.
So, you can guarantee that all people who would be fine with asking the concom to keep an eye on someone or to kick them out are also fine with filing actual police reports in what is probably not the area where they live? You can guarantee that the filers of such reports will be treated respectfully by the police? You can guarantee that the district attorney will bother to file charges?
Wow. You have a lot of power in New York State. I hope you use this power only for good.
First, a Hugo nominee shouldn’t have serious problems with it. No “Writer 101” type of mistakes, and no systematic problems that destroy suspension of disbelief.
It has to actually be a story. Some problem at the beginning gets resolved by the end. And it has to actually have an end!
It ought to be a complete story. If it’s part of a series, it should work fine even if you haven’t read the series.
It shouldn’t leave loose ends. Everything in the story should be there for a purpose. It should work like a fine Swiss watch, with all the parts working together. That also means it should have more to it than just one simple story line. You’re likely to want to flip back through it to appreciate the details.
Finally, it should be moving. It should have an impact on you. It’s hard to start reading another story immediately after finishing something award-worthy because your mind isn’t done with it yet. You tend to think about it days afterwards. It is not “forgettable.”
None of this makes it a classic, but I do think that all the classics meet essentially all the criteria above.
@nightengale:
I haven’t seen BBT, but for me The IT Crowd transcends the “ha ha nerds” genre for several reasons:
First, there aren’t really any “normal” straight-man (in the comedy sense) roles– the staple of so many lazy comedy sketches where one person acts really weird and the other person just patiently stares at them like “huh, you’re kind of weird.” The show takes place in an absurd world where the mainstream consists of, basically, venal children and/or madmen who don’t deserve any credit for being (or at least looking) normal. Jen is the closest thing to a straight-man, but in the very first scene of the series we see her being spectacularly dishonest in an attempt to impress her bizarre boss, and when she meets Roy and Moss her concern isn’t really “why are these guys so weird”, she’s totally focused on covering up her own inappropriateness as an authority figure. And the show treats the mainstream as its own subculture whose shibboleths are no less arbitrary than Moss’s (e.g. the gag where the guys learn to simulate being football fans by repeating generic complaints that could apply to any team).
Second, if one wanted to get all academic about it one could argue that the show posits “nerd” as a socially constructed role that doesn’t have much to do with personality. Moss is obviously an unusual person; but Roy is very close to being a “regular guy”, it’s just that he’s a bit more slovenly and hostile than most of his fellow employees because he’s socially isolated, and he’s socially isolated because they put him in a basement because he knows some things about computers. And Roy, unlike the innocent Moss, is aware of his pariah status and overcompensates for it in ways that make him a fairly terrible person at times.
Third, “ha ha nerds” comedy often tries to soften the mockery by, after laughing about the nerds’ obscure knowledge, having that knowledge save the day somehow (usually in some implausible way that makes it clear the writers have no idea what they’re talking about) so the message is that it’s a good thing these weirdos are around because we couldn’t be expected to know this stuff. In The IT Crowd, although these guys do have a lot of obscure knowledge, it’s almost completely going to waste; most of what they do at their job could be done by anyone who pays any attention to the basics of the tools they’re using, it’s just that no one does. So it’s sort of the reverse of a competence fantasy: knowing how to do things doesn’t get you anywhere, but maybe you can at least learn to enjoy it for its own sake.
Fourth, Richard Ayoade is an angel and could make paint drying funny.
I try and avoid setting an impossibly high bar in recommending and/or nominating works; if I were to ask Is this as good as Lord of Light or Downbelow Station then the answer is almost inevitably going to be no, so I don’t ask that question.
Equally, I try to retain the purpose of No Award in mind, since otherwise the Hugo would lose its value. This leaves me with the good enough ground, where I may well recommend something which isn’t a personal favourite but nevertheless merits consideration because of the strength of the writing and of the ideas.
Needless to say, if it involves revising the geography of central London for no good reason I will gasp in disbelief if the work wins a Hugo…
Greg Hullender said,
but… Omelas?
I’m not sure that “Some problem at the beginning gets resolved by the end” describes “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” or “Aye, and Gommorah,” either, to name a couple more stories that are commonly spoken of as classics.
As a privately run organisation the WFC can manage their harrassment policy however they want. There is no obligation to follow local legal definitions and they are going to get in trouble with their own policy if it is considered discrimantory.
The con I help run has a code of conduct with paragraphs on Harrassment and Complaints and Breaches of the code. It includes this line:
It is a condition of membership that you acknowledge you will abide by the full Code of Conduct. If you fail to and refuse to be guided by the committee member dealing with the issue, we would have no problem calling the police since as far as we are concerned your actions constitute a breach of the peace.
I basically agree with all Greg’s criteria, except that I’m more accepting than him of stories that aren’t really in the genre, instead being meta stories about people who read or create in the genre, or about the ways that SFF ideas work.
The requirement to be a stand-alone work makes it a bit hard to find graphic stories.
BTW, there are two avenues for complaint:
The World Fantasy Board licenses the convention to an operating committee (usually a local convention running organization that already has some sort of business infrastructure to operate under). They set some rules on the licensees. Rules surrounding codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies are pretty weak. If you want to see some movement on this, you should contact the World Fantasy Board. But you may have to do some searching to get contact information for individual board members.
As I mentioned, the conventions themselves are licensed to a local conrunning organization. In the case of 2015, I’ve been told it’s operating under the auspices of LASTSFA (The Latham-Albany-Schenectady-Troy Science Fiction Association). So they’re where your lobbying efforts should go to fix next weekend.
BBT takes the piss out of non-nerds on a regular basis. Most noticable, of course, is Penny, the “actress” who takes drink orders and announces the special of the day for a living, and has stereotypically bad taste in men. Her on-again-off-again boyfriend in the early days who is a total dumb-jock stereotype. Sheldon’s mom, who is the total ignorant bible-thumping hick. Etc.
The IT Crowd also has plenty of people non-nerds who are there just to make fun of the nerds. The girls on the fifth floor, for example.
No, aside from the fact that one is fully of British-style humor, while the other is full of American-style humor, I don’t really see a lot to choose between these two shows. Of course, I much prefer British-style humor myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to try to claim that one show is offensive while the other isn’t. I think that if one is offensive, then the other has to be as well, but I don’t personally find either one offensive.
@Haven’t read it — sounds interesting.
(Afterparty)
It really is- I tend to refer to it as “The Neuromancer of neuropharmacology.” Except honestly, better written.
godstalk
I was a casual watcher of BBT, and then someone pointed out how much Leonard’s pursuit of Penny fell into the Nice Guy trope. The very next episode I watched had a classic example (I think he was lamenting about how doing her laundry hadn’t gotten him any closer to a date) and after that nearly everything in it rubbed me the wrong way. (Sort of like how I enjoyed CSI: Miami until a certain SNL skit mocked it, and afterwards I couldn’t take the show seriously.)
I found The IT Crowd hilarious. Possibly because the situations were so much more exaggerated than BBT, that they came off as character archetypes to me instead of as real people. Possibly because the basic joke of “have you tried turning it off, and on again?” is so very true and remains relevant to my daily life.
ETA: It might be that the distinctly British humor also helped me to perceive it as not making fun of people-similar-to-me.
@Melvin Yeah, I probably wouldn’t have voted for “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” on the grounds that it isn’t actually a story. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad piece of work, of course.
@Andy H.
I just reread “Aye and Gomorrah,” and it does have a story. The narrator wants an experience with a frelk. He/she meets one, they talk, and he/she is satisfied, even though they didn’t do anything. (It’s clearly a metaphor for a person in the military considering a same-sex experience. Read “The Thin Red Line” and you’ll see the parallel.) In more literary stories, the conflict and action often involve change in the narrator’s mind–not in the world. I’m okay with that.
@Vasha You’re right. These rules are only useful for the four “text fiction” categories. I’d be curious what thoughts you (or anyone) has on how to do the same for graphic novels. I think some of the rules would apply, but obviously it needs something about the art itself.
My general rule for hugo-worthiness is if it is something I could recommend to someone who doesn’t necessarily like that sort of thing. For ex, if it has vampires, but would still be something I could recommend to someone who otherwise dislikes vampire stories. Generally, the things that fit this criteria are well-done and do something new or different with the usual tropes. For me to nominate it, it needs to be that AND something I enjoyed reading. I rarely fill all the slots on my ballot, even in the novels.
With respect to Hugo nomination criteria, I think that a story needs to be definitely a science fiction or fantasy story, not some other kind of story with just a hint of the fantastic or marginal genre trappings of some kind. Judging by some recent winners and nominees, my views on this are relatively strict. Talking about prose fiction here, the main categories I’m interested in.
I actually think only nominating stand-alone works is a good idea in graphic stories too; it makes things difficult, not impossible. I’ve only found about ten possibly-qualifying works so far this year, read most of them, and would nominate four (one is a short story). And I’m okay with the idea of nominating an entire limited series the year it concludes.
@Eli
Heartily agree with much of your post. Unfortunately IT Crowd often seems to hit too close to home for me to enjoy fully as my work often seems just as dysfunctional (lost count of the times I’ve muttered “I work in a Dilbert cartoon) and I’m not Richard Ayoade.
I use a very simple point-based system for determining what stories I feel are Hugo-worthy.
Basic qualification: Is the main character clearly based on me?
(This one is very stringent; for example, so far I have only read about 30 novels published in 2015 which meet the basic requirement.)
Does the main character based on me have only a single minor and inconsequential flaw (e.g. “clumsy”) which is trumped up in the narrative as if it were actually a major obstacle to overcome (“Once again I cursed my clumsiness!”) although it never seems to cause any serious difficulties?
1 point.
Does the main character based on me have only “flaws” which are actually positive traits (e.g., “I am too generous and forgiving!”)?
2 points.
Does the main character based on me have no discernable flaws at all?
3 points.
Is the main character based on me talented to the point of being not just the best person in the world at their chosen profession, whatever it may be, but also the best person in the world at any other skill they may ever happen to seriously undertake?
2 points.
(Note that I would allow up to a few months of training before they become the best in the world at a new skill without taking away points here.)
Is the main character based on me deeply loved by not just by their principle love interest, but by ANY AND ALL non-evil characters?
2 points.
Is the main character based on me deeply loved by the main villain, either in a twisted way or in a way that redeems the villain at the end?
1 point.
Is the main character based on me only disliked by characters who are temporarily jealous of the main character’s perfection but are eventually brought around to love them?
1 point.
Is the main character based on me only disliked by characters who are utterly, contemptibly, inarguably, irredeemably EVIL to the point that they also probably hate puppies and ice cream?
1 point.
Then I tally it up, and any story that gets 15 or more points gets nominated for a Hugo. Easy!
Kyra: This is a work of genius. (See, I’m Hugo qualified already!)
@Kyra
That’s interesting, but kind of…complicated. 😉
I tend to use the “Holy shit” criteria for Hugo nominations, as in “Holy shit, that was good.” The story needn’t have a happy ending for me to say that; see, for example, The Fifth Season and The Traitor Baru Cormorant, both of which will most likely be on my list.
Kyra: hmm, I’m tempted to adopt your criteria. The problem is that I’m not sure I know you well enough to judge how well a character represents you. 😀
I tend to be wary of award-worthy criteria that put too much weight on how central the work is to the SFF category (however one defines that). A lot of truly excellent writing (as well as a lot of truly awful writing — Sturgeon’s Law) skirts the edges of categories or straddles them awkwardly. If one starts with a presumption that “to be worthy of an award for category X, a story must be a good example of category X” (“good example” in the sense that a robin is a better example of bird than a penguin is), then you’ve created vast swathes of story-space that by definition cannot be award-worthy in any category, no matter how good the story itself is.
Kyra: so, basically a work with Marissa Amber Flores Picard, except more like you?
@StephenFromOttawa and @Heather Rose Jones
I tend to be pretty generous as far as whether I’ll consider a piece to be speculative fiction or not. I’m okay if it has any speculative element at all, unless it’s really, really superficial.
There are two “not really SF” stories I’ve seen so far this year that were really painful to leave out.
“Acres of Perhaps” is a really, really strong story that meets all my criteria for being award-worthy except that it’s a story a guy who used to do an SF show–but everything in the story is real-world. It’s a story about SF, but it isn’t SF itself.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/acres-of-perhaps-by-will-ludwigsen.html
“Ghosts of the Savannah” is another one that meets all my criteria, but it’s “prehistorical fiction,” not SF.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/ghosts-of-savannah-by-m-bennardo.html
I’ve also excluded stories where what appeared to be something supernatural turned out to be hallucinations. None of those was good enough to meet the bar, though.
I suspect that there will be strong opposition to Kyra’s methodology on the grounds that it involves mathematics; after all, it is exactly this sort of elitist approach which has gate-keepered magnificent works from the praise they so richly deserve.
Should we not look for a more inclusive model? People create those things called apps all the time; is it too much to expect that someone comes up with a suitable thingamajig? We could feed the work in one end and the app could tell us whether we should read it, and if so, what we should grade it. It seems a small step to a better future, though on File 770 future isn’t quite as predictable as it used to be….
A Kyra-based main character… I’m imagining one of those fairy tale situations where a young woman encounters strangers on the road, and must offer them the perfect book rec, tailored precisely to their interests, or be cursed. As she gets each one right, she earns magic items which will allow her to enter the library located on top of the unclimbable mountain of glass.
Honestly, I love when characters refer to other books in their world. The archives in the Steerswoman series, the speculative essays in The Dagger and The Coin series (just finished book 2), the popular romance series in Black Jewels, Corambis had one…
> “Honestly, I love when characters refer to other books in their world.”
Have you read Sunshine, by Robin McKinley? There are parts of that I think you would get a real kick out of …
@Greg: Although I’m okay with including stories like “Acres of Perhaps”, I struggled with seeing what led Sofia Samatar’s story “Those” to be published in Uncanny. An allusion to the ant-movie Them, perhaps? Something about the colonial imagination linking “natives” and giant insect stories? The connection seemed awfully tenuous although it’s a good story (albeit one I felt I wasn’t qualified to fully understand).
@Viverrine
Honestly, I love when characters refer to other books in their world.
Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer series does just that. In the back of each book, there’s a list of publications–both real in our world and made up for his–that he mentions. In fact, the heroine (mild spoiler) is drawn by magic out of one of those made-up books.
On BBT vs The IT Crowd — I think they both have a similar strength (pretty funny, as sitcoms go) and a similar weakness (stereotypical sex roles). I mean, the first BBT I ever saw seemed to be all about how Leonard and his friends were nerds and therefore boys who were undateable, while Penny, being a girl, was hot and bad at math. Meanwhile the first IT Crowd I ever saw was about how Jen (the female and therefore non-nerd cast member) was wearing cute shoes that were way too small. Yes, it was funny. But… it was a woman… suffering for her vanity… in contrast to her nerdy male co-workers who of course didn’t understand why anybody would do such a thing.
BBT eventually improved a bit by introducing female scientist characters as regular cast members. However, the idea that nerdiness by default belongs to dudes is still baked in there pretty hard.
But, heck, it’s baked in everywhere. Even nerds talking to other nerds frequently fall into a predictable joke cycle about how (for example) installing a Darth Vader showerhead will prevent you (a dude) from having sex with a woman by showing her you’re a nerd, because obviously she won’t like that, because any woman you might bring home isn’t going to be a nerd herself who will coo over your Darth Vader showerhead.
My Hugo criteria are kinda vague, actually. “Do I want to see this win a Hugo? Yes? Okay then!” A certain “wow” factor is definitely part of it, but I couldn’t define in any general sense where that “wow” is going to come from. Original idea? Stunning execution? Lyrical writing? Resonant themes? Vivid setting? Compelling characters? All of those and more, but not really according to any formula.
The book that annoyed me for perhaps the most ridiculous reason ever. My copy has some recipes at the end. Not quite sure why. And quite nice some of them look. But there isn’t one for cinnamon buns, which given how central they are to the narrative, is a crazy omission.
Lydy Nickerson: This reads like people who don’t want to deal with the complexities of harassment, and so are retreating to a judicial cosplay blanket-fort.
May I bake you a batch of virtual cookies for having written that sentence? Or offer you a jar of homemade spiced applesauce? That was beautiful.
And thanks for offering a more expert perspective! Even if it just makes me angrier…
That WFC policy is…words fail, or more correctly the words that come to me are all bleep-worthy. I agree with Lydy that it’s a cover for “don’t like this, don’t wanna deal with it, put our collective heads in an orifice and it will go away”. They might as well say that any behavior short of illegal will be tolerated!
@Kyra,
I have read Sunshine. I remember really liking it, but being somewhat dismayed by where it ended. I didn’t feel the story had been fully wrapped up. McKinley is one of those authors whose books sound perfect for my tastes, but who I usually bounce off of when I try them; Sunshine being a notable exception.
@redheadedfemme,
The Libriomancer series is somewhere in the middle of my TBR stack.
P.S. But I’m not saying that “Those” doesn’t “belong”. I’m no arbiter, and besides, like Heather Rose Jones says, edge cases are inevitable and worthwhile.
@LunarG: Mmm, cookies.
Kyra, I will Nth the recommendation for Afterparty. I nominated it for a Hugo last year, and have blathered about it before… It has the designer drug that gives you a religious experience, and an OD gives you your own, personal Jesus (or other culturally appropriate religious icon). It also has the best drug-running gang ever portrayed, in my opinion. 😉
Viverrine on October 27, 2015 at 4:25 pm said:
I would play the hell out of that game.
McJulie: My Hugo criteria are kinda vague, actually. “Do I want to see this win a Hugo? Yes? Okay then!” A certain “wow” factor is definitely part of it, but I couldn’t define in any general sense where that “wow” is going to come from.
I’m of the same mind as Justice Stewart: “I’ll know it when I read it”.
“1) I’m trying to decide if Elizabeth Lynn’s The Northern Girl should go on it, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read it. I’m trying to remember (1) if it qualifies, even loosely ”
As a lesbian novel? Absafragadamnlutely.
Hmm… I disagree about a need for Hugo-worthy stories to be clearly centered in the genre. I think one of the things the Hugo’s should do is recognize and reward innovation and boundary pushing. If there aren’t stories on the shortlist that are stirring up arguments about what a SFF story is or should be, we’re playing it too safe.
@Stevie,
One could probably pick up the model used by Relativity Media to predict blockbusters and green light its projects now for about $1.35 at the bankruptcy sale, and then rejigger it to predict Hugo award-winning literature.
Of course that didn’t turn out so hot for Ryan Kavanaugh.
Silly But True