(1) HORNING IN. Another rhino run starring Jim Mowatt — “New Year Parkrun Rhino Running at Temple Newsam House”
We set off past the glorious Elizabethan mansion and out through the formal gardens. Down the long hill, left at the motorway and curl back along the edge of the woods until we are once again struggling up the hill toward the house. Twice around we go and the second time we are curved around the hill a little until we burst out into the finish funnel. I queue to be scanned behind the girl in the orange tee shirt. I’d finished before her at Woodhouse Moor but she was really pleased to finish in front of me here at Temple Newsam. “I couldn’t be beaten by a rhino twice in one day” she said.
(2) CARRIE FISHER. James H. Burns writes: “Considering that I was never particularly a fan of Carrie Fisher as an actress, I am finding myself becoming quite a fan of her mind!” Burns had just read “Carrie Fisher shuts down the ageist haters as only Carrie Fisher can” on Salon.
She soon followed up with a more direct command, saying, “Please stop debating about whether OR not aged well. unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My BODY hasn’t aged as well as I have. Blow us.” It’s been favorited over 35 thousand times — and still going.
(3) FIRST AMENDMENT. Has he been listening to Fisher, too? George Lucas definitely spoke freely on the Charlie Rose show broadcast on December 25:
At one point he said that filmmakers in the Soviet Union had more freedom than their counterparts in Hollywood, who, he maintained, “have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.”
Mr. Lucas appeared particularly unhappy with the direction the “Star Wars” franchise has taken since he sold the rights to it, along with Lucasfilm, his company, to Disney for $4 billion. He compared the sale to a breakup and a divorce.
“These are my kids. All the Star Wars films,” he said. “I love them, I created them, I’m very intimately involved in them.”
He added, trailing off with a laugh: “And I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and. …”
(4) BABYLON 5.1. Blastr’s headline runs a little ahead of the facts – “Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016” – in that he hasn’t finished a script and he doesn’t have a commitment from a studio to produce the movie.
Thanks to some shrewd negotiating, Straczynski actually owns the film rights to the franchise — so he isn’t beholden to getting a particular studio to sign on. But he is apparently hoping Warner Bros. (the studio that produced the original series) might be interested once the script is complete. You know, assuming it’s good.
If Warner Bros. doesn’t bite, Straczynski apparently aims to finance the film through his own Studio JMS, though that might be a tall order to bankroll an $80-100 million sci-fi epic. But considering the franchise’s name cachet with genre fans — not to mention the fact that studios are mining just about any brand they can get their hands on these days — you’d think someone would be interested in co-producing.
(5) MARSHAL BURNS. Ken Burns the documentarian was this year’s Rose Parade Grand Marshal, prompting an exchange between John King Tarpinian and Phil Nichols:
[Tarpinian] The documentarian is this year’s Rose Parade grand marshal. They keep taking about his “moving” stills as having been groundbreaking, calling it Ken Burns effect. Now his documentaries are very well done and quite enjoyable however when I saw the first one this moving-still effect reminded me of Icarus Montgolfier Wright. I’m thinking Ray Bradbury and George Clayton Johnson’s contribution to this effect was a bit earlier.
[Nichols] Good point, jkt! In fact, the technique had been used prior to ICARUS, most famously in a Canadian documentary called CITY OF GOLD (1957). In the UK, it has only recently become known as the Ken Burns effect. We have our own Ken (Ken Morse) who did similar work for the BBC for decades. We used to call it “movement in stills”, until the American influence became irresistible.
(6) STAR WARS SPOILERS. Beware spoilers in Alex Ross’ fine discussion of “Listening to Star Wars” at The New Yorker.
Williams’s wider influence on musical culture can’t be quantified, but it’s surely vast. The brilliant young composer Andrew Norman took up writing music after watching “Star Wars” on video, as William Robin notes in a Times profile. The conductor David Robertson, a disciple of Pierre Boulez and an unabashed Williams fan, told me that some current London Symphony players first became interested in their instruments after encountering “Star Wars.” Robertson, who regularly stages all-Williams concerts with the St. Louis Symphony, observed that professional musicians enjoy playing the scores because they are full of the kinds of intricacies and motivic connections that enliven the classic repertory. “He’s a man singularly fluent in the language of music,” Robertson said. “He’s very unassuming, very humble, but when he talks about music he can be the most interesting professor you’ve ever heard. He’s a deep listener, and that explains his ability to respond to film so acutely.”
(7) 40% PUPPY CONTENT. Brandon Kempner at Chaos Horizon takes his first cut at predicting the 2016 Best Novel Hugo. Pups get 2 spots out of the top 5.
The difficulty in predicting the 2016 Hugo lies in how little information we have: how big will the Rabid Puppies vote be? How will the Sad Puppies 4 operate? How much will the rest of the Hugo vote increase? Will other Hugo voters change their voting habits to stop a Puppy sweep? Will specific authors turn down endorsements and/or nominations?
(8) RETURN TO SENDER. Kate Paulk, in “Offer? What Offer?” at Sad Puppies 4, dismisses Steve Davidson’s reconciliation post for failing to treat with “the management.”
I’ve heard through the Internet (all right, Facebook) that someone who fancies himself a big shot in the field has “offered” to stop claiming Sad Puppies 4 is all things evil in return for a few “reasonable concessions” on our part.
Since the person in question hasn’t bothered to make this offer to me, Sarah Hoyt, or Amanda Green, Sad Puppy supporters can reasonably assume that the so-called offer is not actually genuine.
(9) KNOW JOHN, NO PEACE. John C. Wright deconstructed George R.R. Martin’s reconciliation post in “Peace on Mars, Good Will Toward Puppies” .
…Mr. Martin wills the ends without willing the means. He wishes for a cessation of enmity but does not identify who caused it and why, nor does he offer any apology or concession. Perhaps he is merely wishing for the status quo ante. Perhaps he regards his role in the matter as an entirely innocent one.
Be that as it may, honor demands a courteous response to a courteous overture….
The second group is a parasite on the first. Its sole purpose rests on expropriating the glory and reputation the award in times past painfully and honestly earned in the public esteem, and expending this stored capital profligately on unworthy objects to give them an outward momentary appearance of worth.
For example, the parasites seek to elevate REDSHIRTS to the stature of DUNE by an outward show of praise without the book being as praiseworthy. However, according to the inevitable rules governing such counterfeits, as soon as the public opinion grows aware of the inflation and adjusts its estimates accordingly, the parasites fail, and the original host fails with them.
In this case, failure means the Hugo Award no longer represents to anyone an honest judgment of worth. The boast ‘Hugo Award Winning!’ becomes a leper’s bell rather than a badge of honor, and any undeceived science fiction readers flee it. REDSHIRTS is not elevated to the stature of DUNE, but DUNE sinks.
Perhaps Mr. Martin can see a means whereby the host and the parasite that forever seeks to destroy the host can coexist in peace. I, for one, cannot….
(10) AN INTERVIEW WITH URASIS DRAGON. But once Wright had a look at Steve Davidson’s reaction to Martin, he discovered a new comradely admiration for GRRM, as expressed in “Constant Discord from Imaginary Dragons”.
Good grief. Observe that by kicking up this smokescreen of false reconciliation, Mr. Davidson actually makes it more difficult for any parties wishing for true reconciliation (I believe George RR Martin is one such) to accomplish the task…..
For the sake of any undecided readers toying with the notion that the puppykickers have some sort of valid argument or same vestigial desire for peace, allow me to address Mr. Davidson’s four points in order.
Point One: Please note that in the same column he says ” Anyone can become a member and all members enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other member.”
So, when we Sad Puppies did exactly this, Mr. Davidson uses this as an example of us “scamming the system” and advises us, as a condition of reconciliation, that we stop.
Logically, since we cannot cease to do what was never done to begin with, the condition cannot be met. As if one offered peace to a confirmed bachelor on the condition he stop beating his wife.
And Mr. Davidson also uses this to contradict our (accurate) accusation that a small group of inside elite writers and editors over the last fifteen years has been manipulating and dominating the awards secretively, that is, scamming the system.
(11) AMAZING NEGOTIATIONS. Meanwhile, Fandom’s self-appointed Ambassador Plenipotentiary Steve Davidson is experimenting with a unilateral cease-fire, which he calls a “Self-Inflicted Puppy Moratorium”.
I’ve finally whittled my suggestions down to two: 1. leave the current SPIV recommendation list as a pure recommendation list. (It’s almost not a slate – all that needs doing is to drop the associated political rhetoric and the curation down to a “final list” and it will BE a recommendation list) and 2. disassociate SP from RP in a publicly demonstrable way.
I’ll note in passing that BOTH of these suggestions are things that the Sad Puppies are claiming to want to do – or to have already done. It would, therefore, seem to be an easy set of requests to comply with.
As quid pro quo, I offered the following: I would consult and participate in their recommendation list(s) (participate in order to ‘prove’ that I was doing so); I would give serious consideration to any proposal(s) they might make at WSFS business meetings (they’ve called for a Hugo for tie-ins, among other things); I will honor their votes and nominations as being valid participation in the Hugos (in other words, won’t assume it’s all politics and market grab on their part); will continue to keep Amazing as an open source (that it has always been – the ONLY people I’ve ever received a “never coming here again” are those who complain the site is biased against them, which, if they stuck around instead of running for the hills….)
AND – I promised a unilateral moratorium on puppy-related posts for two weeks (starting yesterday) while I awaited their response.
(12) NEW YEAR’S FIREWORKS DISPLAY. Scott Lynch, who for reasons explained in the post felt unable to do so immediately after Sasquan, rang in the New Year with a defense of Patrick Nielsen Hayden against John C. Wright’s characterizations.
…This was especially frustrating in the wake of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, after which the ponderously self-important blowhard John C. Wright publicly accused veteran editor and lifelong fan Patrick Nielsen Hayden of both assaulting Wright’s wife and masterminding the long-term “corruption” of the Hugo Awards, to which the SF/F field largely replied: “Meh.” Now, some of that is certainly due to Wright’s tireless self-marginalization and frothing bigotry, but regardless, I think Patrick deserved better of his friends and colleagues. He deserved to have someone stand up and state plainly what he could not– that John C. Wright talks a big game about truth and courage, but that he is demonstrably full of shit.
I wanted to be that person. I prepared a lengthy post to that effect. And then anxiety did its usual crushing, grinding thing, and days became weeks, which became months. It is now the new year, Hugo chat has started up in earnest, and Wright is once again plying his mealy-mouthed combination of false civility and vicious nonsense on the subject. I have decided to weigh in with a reminder that the narrative Wright wants to push is an absolute full-blown fabrication….
(13) YEAR IN REVIEW. Like on that game show, Lou Antonelli delivers the answer in the form of a question: ”2015? The Year in Review?” at This Way to Texas.
And then, what I would have thought would be be a great thing, being nominated for the Hugo award twice, turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened in my life. But it helped me realize that, in the end, I really only write for myself and friends, and in literature – as in other things in life – trying to please other people is the fast track to misery.
[Thanks to Stephen Burridge, Morris Keesan, Nila Thompson, John King Tarpinian, Zenu, and Bruce Arthurs for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
Update 01/02/2016: Corrected item (8) after readers pointed out Paulk was commenting about Steve Davidson’s reconciliation post, not George R.R. Martin’s.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Nigel: ‘George RR Martin says you’re not a real fan if you get your books from libraries’ was a lovely new wrinkle on the chestnut from the ‘Torgersen’s response’ comment thread.
Then there was the claim from one Puppy that the Pups represent the “center” of fandom. Also their repeated claims that the Puppy campaigns started out with the motivation to get more people involved in the Hugo Awards (rather than to get Larry and their other buddies awards, which is how it really started). Oh, and the usual claims about how SFF as a genre is dying, the Hugo Awards (despite dramatically increasing their participation in the last 10 years) are dying, and Worldcon (despite increasing its participation in the last 10 years) is also dying.
They’ve also repeatedly insisted that the people who voted No Award did not read the Pup entries — despite many, many detailed comments and reviews on those stories written here and everywhere else on the internet.
And I’m still laughing at the person who claimed that the 2,500 horrible No Awarders are not going to be able to earn back Scalzi’s advance from Tor with only 2,500 book purchases. (Because, of course, each of those 2,500 “drones” has already bought 600 copies of his books, in order to make Scalzi’s total sales numbers what they are today.)
No, logic and facts have very little to do with the Puppy world.
@Zenu
This reminds me of True Believer by Eric Hoffer. In order to sustain the belief in the movement they must refute facts and rely on belief rather than reason. And of course, there does not need to be a god, but Devils are always required – hello Tor/Scalzi 🙂
I am less sanguine about EPH as a comphrensive solution. It will help wholesale slating but will not prevent block voting from dominating especially given the indiosyncratic and diffuse nature of individual nominations. I do however support it.
@JJ
Yes, I think so as well.
Many of their puppy-related posts are not constructive or engaging but provocative and hit generating. It’s seems to be about promoting a personal brand rather than fannish activity to me at this point.
That’s such a beautiful example of Bealean Dialectical Aristotlianism.
Here’s the story of someone named Kate P
Who was lining up three very scheming girls
All of them had lies they told to each other
They gathered nuts like squirrels
Here’s the story of a man named Bradley
In a tizzy he had brought his friends on board
They were three men voting all together
Yet there was no award
Till the one day when this Kate P met this fellow
And they made up some social justice war
Most of all they hated Scalzi
That’s the way they all became Sad Puppies 4.
We shall not cease from Hugo seeking
And the end of all our nominating
Will be to arrive where we started
And No Award the place for the first time.
Oh, hai, paulcarp! Nice to see you again.
That was brilliant. 😀
Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
Here is the thing. I’m as much as for smacking down on bad behaviour as anyone else. But this was a post from Antonelli on a very bad year that cost both him and his wife financially. It was also a post that did not attack anyone else.
It was a post about the Hugos without lashing out. Without putting blame on others. A post only about how the experience left him feeling miserable. And I think it is ok to write those posts without getting snarky comments back.
If it had been the usual puppy nonsense with attacking absolutely everyone else, yes, then snark would have been appropriate. But I don’t like attacking people when they’re down.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
I really, really hate this demonizing of others as if they didn’t have real feelings. Torgersen and Antonelli are wearing their feelings on their sleaves.
It is their facts I don’t trust.
Hampus Eckerman: It was a post about the Hugos without lashing out. Without putting blame on others.
But it was also a post which completely failed to take personal responsibility for the fact that he himself had a great deal to do with creating the situation which “turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened in my life”.
I do sympathize for his and his wife’s job situations. A lot of people are going through that (I went through it a few years ago), and it’s very, very hard.
But him playing the victim card with the whole Hugo situation has gotten very, very old, and I have zero sympathy for him on that.
Not to mention, as was pointed out above, he gets to put a very undeserved “Hugo-nominated author” on everything he does for the rest of his life. There are people who did deserve to be able to do that, who may never get to do that, in part because of him.
So no. No sympathy here.
JJ:
No, he did not take responsibility, but he also did not attack anyone. So why not let it be then? Why should we pour more gasoline on the fire when he did not?
This was not “playing the victim”. This was just about telling about a bad year and setting his goal posts lower for next year. Writing for fun and friends, not for awards. Which I myself am very happy with.
We do not have to feel sympathy. But we also don’t have to attack every possible time.
@JJ
For what it is worth, the campaign did get me (and I imagine many others) involved in the Hugo Awards, but only because I was tired of their ceaseless dissembling.
Shao Ping: For what it is worth, the campaign did get me (and I imagine many others) involved in the Hugo Awards, but only because I was tired of their ceaseless dissembling.
I’m quite sure that they weren’t wanting to get you involved… you are the wrong sort of person. 😉
Hepp, I also got involved in the Hugos because of the puppies. Congrats to them, I guess. :/
Brad, Larry, Teddy, and most especially John are excellent motivators*. Their various shenanigans brought me out of the woodwork and got me to pay/prepay (supporting, alas) for three Worldcons (thus far).
*Kate and Sarah** are coming on strong but still in the shadow of the SP3 yappers, especially this week.
**Amanda needs to step it up; I had to look up her name.
I have also seen Torgersen mention Hurley’s “We have always fought” as proof of the leftist domination of the award:
(From a comment on GRRM’s blog)
So yeah, their complaints is a bit more varied than Ancillary Mercy, Dinosaur and Scalzi. Although those are the staples.
(The reason I remembered this is that in the same comment Torgersen complains about being called racist and sexist, “Even though nobody can demonstrate the truth of this, against any Sad Puppies 3 individual.” And I’d really like to see his reasoning behind disagreeing completely with the politics in Hurley’s essay from a non-sexist position. I mean, I agree that the essay is political, but personally I don’t consider it controversially “liberal” or “left” – I’d say you have to be pretty far out on the anti-feminist side to object to most of what Hurley says.)
I love Kameron Hurley’s essay, “We Have Always Fought”:
http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/
I linked to it over on a roleplaying gaming forum I hang out on and we had some interesting discussions. A lot of the fellas over there are conservative or libertarian in politics, but they were perfectly able to see the reasoning behind Ms. Hurley’s arguments.
Among the admiration of Hurley’s well-chosen visual illustrations of player-character-type women in plausible armor (even if they objected to the lack of helmets in combat), it came out that a lot of them had wives, girlfriends, or daughters who enjoyed gaming with them and they pretty much all could see the wisdom and sensibility in allowing the women and girls as much possibility and fun in the games as the men and boys.
It seems to me that Torgersen’s anti-women comments are not so much a conservative or right-wing position as they are a reactionary arsehole position.
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote: “I’m fairly sure that list of demands is not only unreasonable, but impossible: SFWA cannot expel people who aren’t members, and PNH is an editor, not a writer.”
Actually, he’s been a writer too. Three short stories in 1992 & 1993. As I recall, three short stories was one of the threshholds for SFWA membership back in those days. (Not sure if that’s still the case, or if Patrick is currently in SFWA; I let my own membership lapse in 2009.)
I remember reading the “Binding” story in the Aladdin anthology and thinking that it was pretty impressive for a first fiction sale, and hoping he might take some of the ideas in that story and develop them at longer length.
If Patrick ever retires from editing and goes back to trying his hand at fiction, I think he’d probably be able to produce some really interesting work.
While starting one of my non-fiction (re)reads, I was amused to come across…
====
Now that American science fiction, past its majority, is heading for the peaceful middle age of an established form, some of its earliest adherents feel as if they had suddenly grown long gray beards; there is nothing more pathetic, I suppose, than the look on the face of an old-guard fan who’s waiting to say something about Stanton A. Coblentz, while all around him people are talking about Heinlein.
With understandable bitterness, some have been driven to the extreme position that no science fiction published later than 1935 is worth reading—while among their younger colleagues it isn’t hard to find those who will put the date still later, and argue that everything published before it was trash.
(Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, 1956)
=====
The more things change…
So two measures passed 4/6 and EPH. If one measure drops, I hope it is 4/6. If EPH drops I think it will be because claims that it is too much work for the counting staff. But hopefully the proponents are ready for that discussion.
I think it will in major categories. I spent a lot of time looking at how it works. The block voting just gets diffused. Remember it is a series of run offs from the bottom up. People can nominate 1 works so 1 vote = 1 point. Or they can nominate 5 so one vote = .2 points. The lowest points determine the first elimination round. The highest nominations determine the winner of that round.
You might run into problems with some categories that just don’t get a lot of nominations. Then you are back to “No Award” if the ballot is stupid in those categories. But the key there is for people to nominate.
At some point, the pups are going to get tired of spending $40 because their leaders tell them to do it.
@Laura Resnick
Well, it’s one way to keep feeding the outrage engine.
@paulcarp
What a sitcom that would make.
@Hampus Eckerman
If Mr. Antonelli is going through hard times money or healthwise, I’m sorry for his troubles. But if he wants sympathy because he just feels really bad now about the fact that his former bad actions have led him to a worse place in his life… I’m not willing to grant that, and I’ll explain why.
That exact tactic — I know I did a bad thing, but look at how much I suffered because of it — is used all the time by abusers. They use it to get back into your life after you’ve rightfully kicked them out, by making you feel sorry for them.
It doesn’t matter if the abuser’s feelings are real. They probably are. Tough cookies.
@Johan P
I would say the same thing. But, then, when I looked for some kind of pattern among the nominated works, anti-feminism was one of the more consistent recurring themes that I found. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of that.
@Shao Ping: If it weren’t for all the Rabid/Sad Puppy Rhetoric about the evil SJWs rooning sf, and the accompanying racism, sexism, homophobia, and downright bigotry, I wouldn’t have signed up for Hugo voting (despite being active in fandom on and off to varying degrees since the late 1970s, I never did the Hugo thing, mostly because of first, lack of money and second, lack of interest in what seemed a pretty mainstream conservative con/award, and third, I got out of the con fandom a long time ago).
@Fred Kiesche: *fantastic* Damon Knight quote.
@paulcarp – thank you for the fun (and they scan!) lyrics to go with the morning earworm.
While I’ve been a small f fan for decades, I’ve never been a con-goer. My partner, who is, suggested PAX when we moved to the northwest a few years ago and I shuddered in horror. I’m not exactly sure what changed, but I think it started with some of the puppy rhetoric sounding so out there and entitled that my own sense of fairness kept nagging me until I Took (baby) Steps.
Meredith:
I’m also not completely confident that EPH will pass or that EPH will work as well as hoped. I’d rather be pessimistic now and pleasantly surprised later than blithely confident now and bitterly disappointed later.
Yes.
A few times now I have raised doubts about the perfect effectiveness of EPH, and people always respond by saying ‘No one is claiming it is perfect. It is better than what we have now, and no one had proposed a better solution’. (Both of which are of course true.) And then a couple of days later I see someone saying ‘and once EPH is ratified, we won’t have to worry about slates any more’, as if this were completely obvious.
EPH does not automatically defeat slates. It makes it possible to defeat slates, provided there are both a sufficient number of voters and sufficient focus, in all categories. These are hard to achieve. We can certainly get more nominators, but a lot of them will probably be nominating in a couple of categories, and very likely only a couple of items in them. I still think some people don’t realise just how hard nominating is for a lot of voters. That’s not a reason for not doing it – I agree totally that if you can think of one Hugo-worthy work in one category, you should nominate it – but it does mean that predictions of a vast untapped reservoir of voters are problematic.
I think it likely that with EPH we can ensure that there are some non-slate nominees in every category, and enough non-slate nominees to have a meaningful competition in the most popular categories. In that sense we will have beaten the slates. But beating the slates in this sense is not the same as rendering them irrelevant. If they are a constant presence, they affect everything we do.
They mean that ‘Hugo-nominated’ is no longer an accolade worth having.
They put restrictions on what categories we can have – we have to be constantly asking whether there will be enough nominators in a category to beat the slates, and whether the nominations will be focussed enough. (In an ideal world, I would see no problem with the number of nominators in a category, as opposed to final voters, being small; nominations can be a way of introducing things to a wider audience. Slates rule that out.)
They give a boost to fan-clubs and single issue campaigns, because if slates take a few of the spots on the ballot, the non-slate candidates with the highest numbers of votes are advantaged, and fan-clubs are particularly likely to achieve this.
Now it may be that EPH will be effective, not by directly making slate victories impossible, but by convincing slate supporters that the game is not worth the candle, so making them give up, and either go away or change their tactics. Those Sad Puppies who actually want stuff they like to get awards are quite likely to do this; they will see that the are better ways of achieving their aim. They seem to be moving part of the way in that direction already. That’s not going to work for VD, who wants to destroy the Hugos. We just have to hope he won’t be able to command enough support
FYI, in checking my print copy of the SFWA Membership directory, PNH is an active member.
Disclaimer. I am an Affiliate member for various related things such as running an author’s official website, conrunning activities (including chairing a Nebula Weekend) and so forth.
Andrew M: … Now it may be that EPH will be effective, not by directly making slate victories impossible, but by convincing slate supporters that the game is not worth the candle, so making them give up, and either go away or change their tactics.
Of course, all the things you say in your first 4 paragraphs are true.
Where I think EPH, if passed, will have its biggest success is in the lack of a large payoff for those whose intent is to either wreck the Hugos, or to try to steal them away from the Worldcon fans to whom they belong. These sorts of people are in it for the fast, cheap, easy win.
If EPH makes that really difficult — and I think it will, because the big payoff is in the novel category, and that is the one which EPH will protect the best — then I think the vast majority of them will get tired of shelling out $40-50 every year, lose interest and wander off to find something else which is much easier to wreck or steal.
I also think those authors who believe they will magically be able to obtain respect and big sales on their works this way will find out quickly enough that even a Hugo nomination, thus tainted, will not provide the magic payoff they are looking for. I suspect that many of this year’s slated authors are discovering this already.
Those Puppies who are genuine SFF fans who simply want to participate in the process will continue to do so — and I think many of them will eventually realize that participating in the process the way it’s intended will give them more of a sense of satisfaction in the long run. These are not the people who are going to enjoy continuing to be “that asshole”.
Count me in as a big fan of The Interior Life! Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great turned me on to this, and it blew me away (as did some other recommendations). I’ve been buying used copies for friends and would get an book for myself in a minute.
late as usual, Ancillary Mercy kept me up through a 9-hour flight yesterday/today. Wow. like other Filers, I need to reread the trilogy, probably Several times.
@ Teresa Nielsen Hayden
I too find it useful to observe patterns in what people do, as well as what they say. With people whose stories keep changing, I find behavior a better guide.
I also love “The Interior Life”. I wonder how an ebook will deal with the font differences; even the paperback made one pair of fonts harder to distinguish than was ideal.
@Andrew, nice post.
I draw your attention to the reader vs Fan distinction that GRRM makes. I am a reader. From my perspective, I really didn’t want SP/RP on my radar. It intruded into my world.
I intend this to be the last year for that. Next year I don’t won’t to hear about SPs or read about SPs or care about SPs. I hope real Worldcon Fans get their convention back. But they have to take it back.
EPH offers them the best hope of doing that so if they blow this well… hey they get what they get. Now if the pups are 20% of voting members and they nab a slot – fine with me. And if they get shut out and want to carp and whine – fine with me as well.
I have spent enough time at the websites of the pups to know these are some really goofy people too dumb to know they are being used by sub-par writers to sell books. That isn’t going to change ever. These guys don’t have many ways to sell books. But EPH offers Worldcon the best chance of taking back their conventions. They better grab it and then nominate.
I do have sympathy for the Fans. I watched my first award presentation this year. It is obvious that these people have been coming together in fellowship for a long time. I see the camaraderie. I hope the don’t let goofy right wing activist steal it from them.
@JJ
I agree, the lack of a “big win” will dissuade those looking to make a big splash for political or personal motives. Single-work slates will still be as effective in getting a nom, but the lesson of SP is that they needed to graduate from single-work campaigns to get the necessary support. As long as they can’t get a majority in the final vote, those campaigns will just get bored.
I’d also be happy to see people stick around and argue the merits of their faves, once the politics have been dropped.
Half saying a prediction here: perhaps Wright, Beale, and the little puppies like Hoyt, Torgerson, and Correia may have less to say about the Hugos for the next week(s). That’s because one of those rituals that occasionally enliven the US calendar is occurring in rural Oregon right now.
For the uninitiated, a group of fairly well-off white people are occupying a bit of Federal property in service of their god-given right not to pay their taxes* and pro-claiming their willingness to shoot any law enforcement who says they can’t.
The good news is that these almost never end in bloodshed; the bad news is that willing dupes will flock to them and it’s quite tense. Why this matters for now is that every two-bit conservative with a blog tends to shoot themselves purple about the demonstrators right to services without paying taxes, and to threaten anyone they please to that end.
Hard for our particular two-bit conservatives to have time for sci-fi if they’re screaming “come and take them.” Hopefully – and probably – no-one will get hurt.
*Yes, these are usually the same white people who describe their ability to pay taxes as what makes them real citizens. Do try not to think of it too hard.
Mark said:
If you want wider participation in book discussions here, the admin will have to do something about how comments are moderated. By the time a comment actually gets posted, the discussion has often moved on.
If you look at any of the others – Scalzi, GRRM, Baen, BT, LT, Making Light – this is the most difficult.
I agree, the lack of a “big win” will dissuade those looking to make a big splash for political or personal motives.
I kind of suspect that some of the Puppy supporters are still laboring under the misapprehension that if a category is “No Awarded” in two successive years, that category is cancelled, and are banking on that in their quest to “destroy” the Hugos.
The question of whether PNH is in SFWA is wandering into the usual Puppy rabbit-warren of illogical conflation, since SFWA has nothing whatsoever to do with the Hugos or the Puppy controversy.
An assertion that X, Y, Z must be demoted or kicked out of SFWA and Q must be reinstated in SFWA in order for “reconcoliation” to occur with the Puppies makes no more sense than if Puppies demanded that GRRM must become a vegetarian before they can consider reconciling with him.
They may be genuinely upset about SFWA membership rules, or SFWA P&P, or SFWA standard, etc. Similarly, someone may be genuinely horrified by the meat farming-and-slaughterhouse industry. But neither grievance has anything to do with the Hugos and the Puppy mess.
Nor is there is a corollary. Most people (all?) involved in running the Hugos have nothing to do with SFWA; WSFS has nothing to do with SFWA; most Hugo voters have nothing to do with SFWA (and the 2015 votership was about four times the size of SFWA); many Hugo nominees and potential nominees have nothing to do with SFWA; many (most?) people arguing online about the Puppy mess for the past year have nothing to do with SFWA; etc., etc. These are not the makings of a corollary
Any Puppy bringing SFWA into the Puppy debate yet again (let alone VD’s ejection from SFWA) is just more Puppy confusion and conflation.
@Laura Resnick: Yeah. To the extent any Pups sign on to Wright’s demand to reinstate Teddy in SFWA or kick these other folks out, they’re revealing:
* they are just VD’s stalking-horses
* the emotional need to have some scalps to point to to assuage the extent of their defeat in last year’s voting
There’s nothing else to it.
Zenu,
As Hugo administrator for Worldcon 75 in 2017, I just want to make it clear that we are entirely prepared to implement any of the rule changes currently on the agenda for the Business Meeting at MidAmeriCon II if they are passed. I won’t be at MidAmeriCon II myself, but feel free to quote me on this if the question of “too much work for the counting staff” is raised.
That’s assuring to hear, Nicholas!
@Zenu
As far as I know, it’s only your first comment here that takes awhile to be posted (though maybe I misunderstood you).
Actually, I agreed with Mr. Martin, and, like him, I do not see a way it can be accomplished. Apparently you all read my comments to that effect as being somehow either an attack, or mere spouting nonsense on my part.
It is odd indeed to hear from Mrs Hayden, first, that I suffer a sense of wounded entitlement or martyrdom, and, second that such a feeling is entirely misplaced, from a comment appended to an extract of a screen by Mr. Lynch both describing me in potty mouth language and libeling me, of all people, as a bigot, and claiming my civility is somehow false, and that my account of Mr. Hayden’s rudeness toward my wife is a fabrication. He cannot bring himself to insult me in a courteous or clever fashion.
And, at such a time, Mrs. Hayden condemns me on the grounds that no one is attacking me, and that therefore my (nonexistent) bellyaching in that regard is risible?
So, to recap: Mr. Martin called for peace, but said it was unlikely. I agreed with him and said that same thing. Most Puppies rejected Mr. Martin overtures with scorn. And here, at file 770, my overture is being rejected with scorn.
Which is precisely what Mr. Martin and I both feared would happen.
JCJW
@John C. Wright: Of course your civility is false. You prove it by willfully misnaming Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden in the very post where you protest your good heart with your typical disingenuousness. You have famously been corrected on this matter in the past, by an ally no less, but can’t resist slipping in this show of scorn. And Pride! You arrogate to yourself the function of assigning proper names for others, as if you were Adam taking a direct delegation from God. You are a wicked man, passionately attached to your own sin, who imagines that your Pharisaic preening somehow equates to righteousness.
Since you like vocabulary, I recommend looking up the word “unctious.” You can even hold your dictionary up to a mirror and, so long as your face is also there, you will still be able to read the meaning of the word plain.
John C. Wright: Readers are paying more attention to the great chasm between what you and Martin would regard as a successful reconciliation than to your calculation of the odds against it happening.
JCW: for “civility” you could start by addressing the Nielsen Hayden’s by their chosen names. No-one believes you are doing that by mistake. Your “civility” is a smokescreen, and your bigotry has been demonstrated by your own words on many occasions.
It is certainly a show of courteous good faith to use the name a person chooses to call themself — and a deliberate show of bad faith to use a name they have specifically asked not be used.
Sometimes comedy just…happens.
Ninja’d by Jim there. And a pithy yet so precise response by Mike.
In amongst the verbiage I see that JCW is asserting the truth of his account and denying Lynch’s. Given that the first person to correct some details of JCWs account was L Jagi Lamplighter herself, and that JCWs claim of shouting is entirely inconsistent with a room full of people not noticing the encounter, I know which account I believe.
Mate:
1. You still don’t seem to have looked up “deconstruct”. Hint: it doesn’t mean “disagree”. I am not a native English speaker but unlike you I have studied in depth how to deconstruct a piece of text, so I know what it means. Perhaps you should avoid using words you don’t know the meaning of.
2. You called a friend of mine, in writing, in public, “Smeagol”, you accused him of having assaulted your wife – despite in your own later and cleverly hidden in the comments admission that you were not present AND DESPITE YOUR OWN WIFE TELLING YOU IN WRITING IN THE SAME COMMENTS THAT IT DID NOT HAPPEN. To this day there is still, on the page you control, an accusation of having committed physical violence on your wife that YOU KNOW TO BE FALSE.
3. You persist to this day despite having been told several times to address both Teresa and Patrick with a mangled version of their name, because you think your own reactionary notions of propriety more important than their wishes – or, as I understand it, what is the actual legal form of their name.
4. For none of this you have shown the least remorse, regret, or inclination to apologise. I do understand that your cognitive ability is probably not sufficient to grasp the contradictions in fact of your position, possibly because of your fragile health, but your utterances are so offensive and imprudent that I do not consider this a sufficient excuse.
You are un short an ignorant, unintelligent, unpleasant, pompous, deeply rude and uncivil individual, unfit to shine George Martin’s shoes either as a writer or as a human being.
Having known personally both Teresa and Patrick, who to this day show an incredible amount of Christian good will towards you, you are not worthy of uttering their name.
I hope this counts as insulting you in precise and expletive-free language.
JJ:
Given that Stephenson and Robinson are more than a bit SJW, it would certainly be funny if they decided to jump onto a Seveneves or Aurora bandwagon.
Well, I think one SP supporter did praise Robinson in the past, as more deserving of a win than Scalzi; and on other occasions some of them have attacked the Hugos for not recognising Terry Pratchett or, for heaven’s sake, Iain M. Banks. Any stick to beat the Hugos with. (This may not apply to all of them. We should not ascribe too much unity.)
It seems to me the correct response to Mr. Wright is … “Yawn”. Which is what I think last year’s vote communicated.
There is a small element of truth in such claims; the admins would have to “clean” all the data; to make sure that all the references to a particular story or tv episode or whatever were registered as being to that work, rather than seeing “Star Wars 7” and “The Force Awakens” as being two different works. Apparently at least some past Hugo administers have not “cleaned” all the data in the past, because they figured that only the top few mattered.
It did matter though, even without EPH. There was actually a case in 2009 where not-fully-cleaned data prevented “Captain Britain and MI13: Secret Invasion” from being nominated.
So yes, there’s a case to be made that inasmuch as EPH requires clean data, it’s harder on the admins, but it’s a weak case, as cleaning the data is something they should be doing anyway, with or without EPH.
Mike, Jim, Anna: Good stuff. Thanks, all of you.