(1) If you are fan who drinks, the newly reopened Clifton’s Cafeteria would like to tempt you with these two science fictional libations –
(2) “Another Word: Chinese Science Fiction and Chinese Reality” by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu, in Clarkesworld, talks about the themes of other Chinese writers after these introductory comments about the domestic reception for his own work.
China is a society undergoing rapid development and transformation, where crises are present along with hopes, and opportunities coexist with challenges. This is a reality reflected in the science fiction produced there.
Chinese readers often interpret science fiction in unexpected ways. Take my Three Body series as an example. The alien-invasion story takes as its premise a “worst-case” scenario for relationships among members of the cosmic society of civilizations, which is called the “Dark Forest” state. In this state, different starfaring civilizations have no choice but to attempt to annihilate each other at the first opportunity.
After publication, the novels became surprisingly popular among those working in China’s Internet industry. They saw the “Dark Forest” state portrayed in the novels as an accurate reflection of the state of brutal competition among China’s Internet companies….
Authors (myself included) are often befuddled by such interpretations.
(3) From “’Star Wars’: Their First Time” in the New York Times.
Ridley Scott: I had done a film called “The Duellists” and was in Los Angeles to shoot at Paramount, and I honestly think Paramount had forgotten. I remember saying, I’m Ridley Scott, and they said who? So David Puttnam, one of the greatest producers I’ve ever worked with and the most fun, said, “Screw them, let’s go see [“Star Wars”] at the Chinese [theater].” It was the first week. I’ve never known audience participation like it, absolutely rocking. I felt my “Duellist” was this big [holds thumb and forefinger an inch apart], and George had done that [stretches arms out wide]. I was so inspired I wanted to shoot myself. My biggest compliment can be [to get] green with envy and really bad-tempered. That damn George, son of a bitch. I’m very competitive.
(4) Andrew Porter was interviewed, complete with photo, for “Longtime Brooklynites Reflect on a Changing Brooklyn” on Brownstoner.com:
Now you can put a face to me and my non SFnal opinions about recent changes in Brooklyn Heights, where I’ve lived for 47 years.
I’m sure you’ll also appreciate the comments, one of which accuses me of hating Brits!
(Daveinbedstuy accuses – “Andrew Porter sounds cranky; as he usually does on BHB. I wonder what he has against ‘Brits.’ And bringing up ‘granite countertops’ Really????????”)
(5) Jim C. Hines on Facebook:
I HAVE WRITTEN THE FIRST 22 WORDS OF MY NANOWRIMO NOVEL!
The NaNo word counter says at this rate, I’ll finish by January 20, 2022.
I suppose I should probably keep writing, eh?
(6) “Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910” is on exhibit through February 26, 2017 in the newly renovated Smithsonian Libraries Exhibition Gallery of the National Museum of American History.
Travel with us to the surface of the moon, the center of the earth, and the depths of the ocean – to the fantastic worlds of fiction inspired by 19th century discovery and invention.
New frontiers of science were emerging. We took to the air, charted remote corners of the earth, and harnessed the power of steam and electricity. We began unlocking the secrets of the natural world. The growing literate middle class gave science a new and avid public audience. Writers explored the farther reaches of the new scientific landscape to craft hoaxes, satires and fictional tales.
Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910 is accompanied by an online exhibit.
(7) Francis Hamit, a novelist and film producer who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, has published A Perfect Spy, a memoir about his first two years at the University of Iowa when he was a dual major in Drama and Business. While he narrates the ongoing dramatic social changes that were transforming society and the university in 1965 and 1966, he also covers the impact of the sexual revolution, the sudden rise of a drug culture, and the beginnings of the anti-war movement at the University of Iowa, from a first-person perspective.
“I saw the first draft card burnt,” Hamit says; “And I would see the last anti-war riot there several years later. I was also very disturbed by the rise of all kinds of drug use in and around Iowa City. Unlike almost everyone else I knew, I did not think this ‘cool’. I saw people ruining thier lives by refusing to tell the police who’d sold them the drugs: facing years in prison. I offered to help them find the dealers if they would leave my friends alone. How I did this is narrated in A Perfect Spy, which is a 118-page excerpt from my forthcoming book Out of Step: A Memoir of the Vietnam War Years.
“I was already in place,” Hamit added; “A perfect spy who made no pretenses of approving of recreational drugs. I didn’t do anything with them, but simply watched and listened so I could collect some useful intelligence for the police. At the same time, I became involved with some very interesting women who were part of the Sexual Revolution. That was part of a larger social revolt. None of what happened then can be viewed in isolation, so I’ve just tried to be as truthful as possible while changing a lot of the names of the people to prevent embarrassment.”
A Perfect Spy will be available exclusively at first from November 12, 2015 on Amazon Kindle for $5.00 and can be pre-ordered now. A print edition will be available in March, 2016 with a suggested retail price of $12.00 from most bookstores.
(8) “The artist who visited ‘Dune’ and ‘the most important science fiction art ever created’” – a gallery of Schoenherr at Dangerous Minds.
Frank Herbert said John Schoenherr was “the only man who has ever visited Dune.” Schoenherr (1935-2010) was the artist responsible for visualising and illustrating Herbert’s Dune—firstly in the pages of Analog magazine, then in the fully illustrated edition of the classic science fiction tale. But Herbert didn’t stop there, he later added:
I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr’s careful and accurate illustrations.
High praise indeed, but truly deserved, for as Jeff Love pointed out in Omni Reboot, Schoenherr’s illustrations are “the most important science fiction art ever created.”
(9) Jason Sanford posted a collection of tweets under the heading “The fossilization of science fiction and fantasy literature”. Here are some excerpts.
https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660782118356783104
https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660783781654233088
https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/660789856075948034
Although I have friends that do exactly what Sanford complains about, he doesn’t hang with them, read their fanzines, or (I’d wager) even know their names, so I’m kind of curious whose comments sparked off this rant.
Personally, I’m prone to recommend Connie Willis or Lois McMaster Bujold if I’m trying to interest someone in sf – though both have been around over 25 years and aren’t spring chickens anymore either.
People recommend what they know and esteem. It’s perfectly fine to argue whether recommendations will win fans to the genre, but it seems petty to act as if pushing “classic” choices is a war crime.
(10) John Scalzi was more or less content with Sanford’s line of thought, and responded with “No, the Kids Aren’t Reading the Classics and Why Would They”.
Writer Jason Sanford kicked a small hornet’s nest earlier today when he discussed “the fossilization of science fiction,” as he called it, and noted that today’s kids who are getting into science fiction are doing it without “Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Tolkien.” This is apparently causing a moderate bit of angina in some quarters.
I think Sanford is almost entirely correct (the small quibble being that I suspect Tolkien is still common currency, thanks to recent films and video games), nor does this personally come as any particular shock. I wrote last year about the fact my daughter was notably resistant to Heinlein’s charms, not to mention the charms of other writers who I enjoyed when I was her age… thirty years ago. She has her own set of writers she loves and follows, as she should. As do all the kids her age who read.
The surprise to me is not that today’s kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this.
(11) “The kids” who don’t read the classics are one case, would-be sf writers are another, explains Fynbospress in “Slogging forward, looking back” at Mad Genius Club.
Kris Rusch has also noted how many young writers she’s run into who are completely ignorant of the many, many female authors who’ve been in science fiction and fantasy since the start. Among other reasons, many of their works have gone out of print, and the new writers coming in may not have read the old magazines, or picked up the older, dated-artwork books at the used bookstores. So they really, truly, may not know that their groundbreaking new take has been done to death thirty years before they came on the scene, or that they’re trying to reinvent a wheel that has not only been invented, it’s evolved to all-wheel drive with traction control.
(12) I can’t say that Vivienne Raper is going where no one has gone before in responding to the latest Wired article about the Hugos — “Five reasons why the ‘Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul’ isn’t about ‘white men’”.
[First three of five points.]
There are many reasons why I might be “angered” by previous Hugo winners. And none of them are anything to do with ‘the increasingly multicultural makeup’ of the awards:
ONE
Science fiction’s most prestigious award‘ for Best Novel was decided in 2014 by fewer than 4,000 voters.
TWO
The Best Short Story for 2014 got onto the ballot with fewer than 43 nominations.
THREE
Popular blogger John Scalzi has won more Hugo Awards (inc. best fan writer) than Isaac Asimov – author of I, Robot – or Arthur C. Clarke. He also has 90K+ Twitter followers.
(13) Jeb Kinnison at Substrate Wars is more analytical and lands more punches in “The Death of ‘Wired’: Hugo Awards Edition”. Here are his closing paragraphs.
The various flavors of Puppies differ, but one thing they’re not is anti-diverse — there are women, people of various colors, gays (like me), religious, atheists, and on and on. The one thing they have in common is that they oppose elevating political correctness above quality of writing, originality, and story in science fiction. Many of the award winners in recent years have been lesser works elevated only because they satisfied a group of progressives who want their science fiction to reflect their desired future of group identity and victim-based politics. For them, it is part of their battle to tear down bad old patriarchy, to bury the old and bring themselves to the forefront of culture (and incidentally make a living being activists in fiction.) These people are often called “Social Justice Warriors” – they shore up their own fragile identities by thinking of themselves as noble warriors for social justice. Amy Wallace places herself with them by portraying the issues as a battle between racist, sexist white men and everyone else.
She then goes on to give some space to Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, and Vox Day (Ted Beale). While her reporting about them is reasonably truthful, they report that she promised to interview Sarah Hoyt (who ruins the narrative as a female Puppy) but did not do so, and left out material from other interviews that did not support her slant. Tsk!
The piece is very long, but written from a position of assumed moral superiority and elite groupthink, a long fall from classic Wired‘s iconoclastic reporting. It’s sad when a quality brand goes downhill — as a longtime subscriber, I’ve noticed the magazine has grown thinner in the last year as ad revenues declined and competition from upstarts like Fast Company ate into their market. Now they are me-tooing major controversies for clicks. Once you see this dishonesty in reporting, you should never view such sources as reliable again.
(14) Sometimes I suspect AI stands for “artificial ignorance.”
File770 insiders insist Portuguese == Latino. Yo, mental midgets: take that up with the US Government.
— finger chomper (@sadrbtpuppies) November 2, 2015
If the programmer of this tweet-generating robot was literate, they could easily discover that the words Portugal and Portuguese are not even mentioned in this U.S. Census definition of “Hispanic or Latino.”
(15) “The Original Star Wars Trilogy Gets An Awesome Force Awakens-Style Trailer” via Geek Tyrant.
I’d warn that there are too many spoilers, except you’ve already seen the original trilogy how many times?
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Mark-kitteh, Will R., JJ, Trey Palmer, Francis Hamit, 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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@cally Look for hope in the Puppies? That sounds like a first here.
“/shoo”
I must study this kind of substantive argumentation.
@cally If the Hugos are no better than the Oscars, then we can all go home.
@Jim Henley
I dunno, I think any claims to leadership got blown around the time I cursed people’s towels, assuming any survived the monsters bit… 🙂
@Greg
I can’t use it since I’m typically on an iPad. I probably wouldn’t anyway for reasons but sometimes it would be awfully tempting just for the duration of a conversation… (Also, as it turns out, apparently you can’t post a comment identical to a previous one, which is sort of annoying but I suppose saved me from having to /shoo a second time.)
@Will R.
The thing is, I have every sympathy for feeling disappointed that a book you loved and thought was excellent wasn’t on the shortlist, but since numbers suggest that a lot of really great books that people loved won’t make it onto the shortlist (or longlist) I’m not really sure what wider point you’re trying to make, or whether there’s a strong evidence base for it? If there is one, I’d love to know what it is! If there isn’t, and it comes down to [one book] wasn’t on the shortlist and that makes you disappointed then, well… I’m sympathetic, but that’s going to happen an awful lot, even with really great books that are otherwise getting attention from awards (which, as far as I can tell, The Peripheral hasn’t had).
If you want to talk about changing the approach to the shortlist or the longlist in order to make sure more books benefit from the Hugo aura, I’d be really happy to talk about that! I’m just not sure what else you could possibly ask for..?
(I’m also not sure Gibson needs Hugo exposure to get people to pay attention to his books! Or at least, any more than he’s already had, which is more Hugo exposure than most authors ever get.)
@Will R.
I don’t feel the need to respond with a substantive argument to someone who didn’t make one.
@cassy That’s my problem exactly. I think the Hugos should surface works like those. The good ones, the ones obviously worth consideration (almost none of the people here disagree about that with the Peripheral). If they don’t, then what do they do?
Yes, it’s subjective. But it’s a fuzzy set, and the question is one of what the structure is set up to recognize.
@meredith To quote my mentor, /shoo.
Why?
The Hugos are not a curated list. Isn’t that the Locus longlist – a long list of books that are considered award-worthy by critics? And what do you know, there is The Peripheral, on the 2015 shortlist.
I don’t understand why you think The Peripheral is in need of ‘surfacing’ in the first place. Gibson is a best-selling author, multiple award winner, published by a major house that had a decent publicity drive, and I’m sure The Peripheral was widely reviewed. It is not some obscure gem.
You liked it and wanted more people to read it and talk about it – sure, understandable. But it is not the fault of the Hugos if people didn’t.
@Will R:
I’ve had (probably everyone has) less than charitable thoughts about Hugo nominees, too, and wondered how the heck all those other people could have possibly ignored [x] in favor of all that other crap. That’s just the nature of popular awards, and of humans living inside their heads, where they are more right than anyone else. (Silly humans, I’m the one who’s right all the time, obvs.)
Best is wide-open: some people think Hugos are for Science Fiction only, and they can’t even agree on what qualifies as Science Fiction. Some think sf is about entertainment, so obviously the best is the most fun. There are lovers of tight plots, lovers of well-crafted prose (and what qualifies as that?), of things that happen in spaaaace, of cautionary tales, of difficult stories, of nutty nuggets, of protagonists who resemble Kyra, of shapeshifting hedgehogs… People nominate what they think is best.
But if we can get away from “broken” and from Brian Z’s “help”, there may be an interesting discussion somewhere in here. You clearly have an idea about the shape of the field (one that includes the Peripheral); why not argue that? What is it that you think “best” should mean in Hugo terms that’s being overlooked?
If you need more datapoints about the silence on the Peripheral: I want to like reading William Gibson more than I actually do. I love his non-fiction, his interviews, but then, the books (yes, even Neuromancer) just aren’t my thing. His coolness gets on my nerves, I often don’t really care about his characters. And there’s something in the pacing I react badly too. So I’m unlikely to pick up his books, what with all those other things I have to read that don’t feel like homework.
And you still haven’t said what’s so great about the Peripheral.
It is important that everyone here has the same taste as me. Otherwise the whole universe is broken. Neither Brian Z or Will R have discussed The Sculptor as best Best Graphic Story. They have doomed us all.
Now the Hugos are bound to go down in flames in an apocalyptic holocaust that will take the rest of the world with it.
SHOO! RIDDIKULUS!!
And thus endeth the multiverse.
@ray I came into this thinking the Hugos were for me, a truly run-of-the-mill sci-fi fan. That’s why I want works like these to be surfaced–so I have some hint as to what’s worth reading from the vast and growing pool of choices.
There are a bunch of other awards, with different methods of creating short lists, different bodies of nominators, and none of them picked up on the The Peripheral, either. Are they all broken, or just the Hugos?
The essential first step for anyone to nominate anything, for any award, is that they’re aware of it. For most people, they have to have read/seen/heard it, but even the Puppies didn’t manage to nominate works they would have liked but whose existence they entirely missed, such as, oh, say, The Three-Body Problem.
The Peripheral was published late in the year. There was a time, and I’m old enough to remember it, when every sf fan who wanted to could read every single sf/f work published in the course of a year. That time is decades in the past. Everyone misses lots of things they might have loved until it’s too late to nominate it for a Hugo. And while Gibson is has been influential in sf, he hasn’t been as widely popular as, for instance, Stephenson. Fewer people wait with bated breath for his latest, and read it as soon as it comes out. The sad truth is that many of us bounced hard off Gibson in the eighties, and checking out his latest, given that we can’t read everything, is a lower priority than his true and devoted fans might wish.
So no, the Hugos didn’t highlight The Peripheral as you wish they had. But neither did the Nebulas, Goodreads, the Locus awards, or, well, name your award. Is the whole world broken, because your favorite this year didn’t win awards? Seriously?
Or is it just the Hugos that had this obligation to reflect your particular judgment on what needed to be highlighted this year?
@susana I do wish I’d used a less loaded term than “broken.”
As for what’s great about Peripheral: it’s got it all: great characters, roaring story, substantive discussion of the prostheticization of our world resulting from war and commerce, alternative universes. And great writing. It’s the whole deal.
Did I love Breq enough to nearly overlook that Ancillary didn’t have everything? Almost.
Thinking they were what for you? An award in which you can participate? A recommendation list that will always match your preferences?
They’ve always been the first. The second is an unrealistic expectation to have of anything.
Well, they do provide a hint – usually a better hint than this year. And the Clarkes are another hint. And the Nebulas, and the Locus awards. And the bestseller lists. And reviews.
But this award didn’t shortlist one book you really liked, and you conclude it is broken?
@Will:
Now, that’s a pitch. Although “great writing” is highly personal, in a way that “bad writing” isn’t. I may try it, after all.
The solution to “it’s not being discussed enough on File 770” is, of course, to do so yourself. Which doesn’t help you with the book-scouting, I know.
What parts of everything didn’t Ancillary (Mercy, I assume) not have? Other than coffee, I mean.
Ah, there’s your problem.
All the rest of us are truly run-of-the-mill sci-fi fans, too, and when we nominate, our tastes have just as much impact as yours when you nominate. “Run-of-the-mill sci-fi fan” doesn’t mean “tastes exactly coincide with Will R’s.”
And here’s the thing : You didn’t need the Hugos to highlight The Peripheral. You read that. You needed the Hugos to highlight the stuff that you, personally, might have missed. The good stuff you didn’t seek out.
We all have years when we are just shocked, shocked at how dumb all those other Hugo nominators and voters are, as well as years when the Hugo nominators and voters obviously got it “right.” That’s the nature of an award run by actual human beings in the real world.
Why don’t you tell us why The Peripheral is a wonderful book, rather than complaining about the fact that not enough Hugo nominators didn’t discover this on their own?
I think the Hugos should surface works like those.
Leaving aside the Puppy influence this year, that is exactly what they do. There are just a lot of works that are good every year and some good works, inevitably, get left out.
Don’t mean to be too “helpful,” but as far as general recognition goes it was tied for fifth place. To broaden the discussion slightly, top-nominated novels not on the Hugo longlist are:
– Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta
– Europe in Autumn, David Hutchinson
– The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
– The Peripheral, William Gibson
– The Race, Nina Allan
1. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu: 5 nominations, 0 wins (Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Locus SF, Prometheus)
2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie: 4 nominations, 2 wins (Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Locus SF, with wins in the BSFA and Locus SF)
3. Annihilation/Area X, Jeff VanderMeer: 4 nominations, 1 win (Campbell, Nebula, Locus SF, World Fantasy, with a win in the Nebula)
4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison: 4 nominations, 1 win (Hugo, Nebula, Locus Fantasy, World Fantasy, with a win in the Locus Fantasy)
5. Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Clarke, Tiptree, Philip K. Dick)
5. Europe in Autumn, David Hutchinson: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Clarke, BSFA, Campbell)
5. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North: 3 nominations, 1 win (Clarke, BSFA, Campbell, with a win in the Campbell)
5. Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor: 3 nominations, 0 wins (BSFA, Tiptree, Kitschies)
5. The Peripheral, William Gibson: 3 nominations, 0 wins (Campbell, Locus SF, Kitschies)
5. The Race, Nina Allan: 3 nominations, 0 wins (British SF, Campbell, Kitschies)
https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/checking-in-with-the-sff-awards-meta-list/
Brian Z —
How seriously should we take the Chaos Horizon list, after we notice that The Three-Body Problem, not Ancillary Sword, won the 2015 Hugo?
Lis: isn’t that reflected by how it got a greater number of nominations than any other novel? But I wasn’t evaluating the Chaos Horizons method for its prediction – rather, to give us a broader sense of what notable works were missed by the Hugos than “Will R” liked it.
This list was also useful: of the “Critics’ Choice” novels, four of the top nine vanished without a trace:
– The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman
– Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear
– The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
– The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine
Gibson was in the Top 13 where he tied (after disqualifying The Martian) with one Hugo long listed novel, City of Stairs, and two that didn’t make it:
– All those Vanished Engines, Paul Park
– Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes
Actually Hugo long listed My Real Children made the Critics’ Top 20, tied with 11 others.
So of the Top 15 Hugo long list novels, more than 50 percent got there with zero love from the critics and few if any other award nominations: the “puppy” recommended novels, yes, but also Lock In, Words of Radiance and The Mirror Empire.
But the total lack of recognition for Echopraxia is what we should all really be ashamed about.
The thing you will notice about that list of notable works is that none of the awards picked all of them. It’s almost as if, to get a sense of the notable works in a field in a given time period, you should consult multiple sources.
Ray: while “tastes differ,” an argument could be made that Skin Game, Monster Hunter Nemesis, Lines of Departure, The Dark Between the Stars, Trial By Fire, The Chaplain’s War, Lock In, Words of Radiance, and The Mirror Empire are not the best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2014.
What if they had not made it to the Hugo long list? It might have looked like this:
Ancillary Sword
The Goblin Emperor
The Three Body Problem
City of Stairs
My Real Children
Lagoon
Annihilation
Steles of the Sky
Memory of Water
The Bone Clocks
Europe in Autumn
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
All those Vanished Engines
The Peripheral
To me – aside from the shame of not recognizing Echopraxia – that would’ve been a stellar list.
yeah, that argument could be made.
Someone else could take your list, remove two or three items, add two or three others, and say that would have been a stellar list. And someone else could take that list…
So fucking what?
Will R, well, for what it’s worth, you’ve shown enough passion for The Peripheral that I’ll add it to Mount File 770. I’m still working on 2015 Hugo-eligible works, however, so it may take me some time to get to it…
If the answer is so fucking what, why care about the Hugos?
I have to say, I don’t care that much about your idealised version of the Hugos where only your own individual preferences are valid.
Those weren’t my preferences, they were the top 15 nominated and acclaimed books of the year.
The top 15 not including the books that you arbitrarily removed from the Hugo longlist.
But you already don’t care about the Hugos. So your opinion hasn’t changed.
And I never expected the Hugos to be a perfect recommendation list, that will always pick either the most acclaimed books (as if consensus could be reached on what that even means)*, or the books that I like best, arranged neatly in order. So my opinion hasn’t changed.
So what’s the point? Oh yeah, there is no point. This is just the latest thing you argue about.
I didn’t arbitrarily remove anything. I noted that they had not received multiple nominations and acclaim like the others.
@Susana Thanks. The big problem for me with Ancillary (the first two at least; still waiting on the library for the third) was structure–it takes way too long to get into Breq’s character and is very slow to dole out the world. Mainly I thought it needed to be rearranged a bit and condensed slightly. That doesn’t make its writing bad for me, but it does mean it’s not at Gibson’s level. (And it does have tea, which I like nearly as much as coffee.) It’s also very dryly written, which is certainly to my taste but doesn’t have the universality that something like Peripheral will have. Which leads to…
@et al. Part of the issue is that I’m not as interested in what a few people passionately think is the best thing as I am in things that almost everyone (Filers and non-Filers alike) can agree are really, really good. That’s the kind of touchstone work I’m looking for. Not the lowest common denominator, but the most universal.
I have heard the Reasons, which tend to amount to, Gibson had written a decade’s worth of books that weren’t hugely science fictional (I agree) and we’ve kind of been ignoring him for that reason. But that’s exactly why I don’t want to miss this one–because it’s potentially a chance for everyone to share something–a chance that has been missed in this case. I wish I hadn’t used the word “broken,” but it still disappoints me that a work with great potential (yes, my opinion) was overlooked.
So, yes, “best,” but “best for what?” is the question. Are we not seeking community here? (Or, as Mike frequently reminds us between the lines, does this community exist only to disagree?)
Ray, I have never said or implied that I don’t care about the Hugos. You did when you asked “so what?”
Nobody said the Hugos could ever be perfect. Just that if they worked well they’d help us to collectively identify the best work produced in the genre each year.
If they can’t do that, I’m not clear on the point of going through the motions. Though at this point the whole thing reminds me of a song.
@Cassy 🙂 That’s awesome. Thank you!
I didn’t arbitrarily remove anything. I noted that they had not received multiple nominations and acclaim like the others.
Which is an arbitrary basis for removing something. There were books that were nominated for other major awards that only got nominated for that one award. Your silly metric is silly.
The top 15 nominated novels for the Hugo do not match a list you created by mashing together two other lists.
I know you are on a I’m-not-saying-the-Puppies-are-right-but-the-puppies-are-right! kick, and will clutch at any straw to disrupt the cosy File770 consensus, but really, so fucking what?
And I’ll just say thanks to everyone. Part of this is just wishing I’d found The Peripheral early enough to have actually argued for it when it mattered.
yeah, telling me what I meant. Thanks for reminding me why I ignore you
🙂
No, Ray, you told me what I meant.
My comment included a blanket dismissal of all six puppy-listed novels, and only three non-puppy-listed novels, as obviously not deserving to be on a long list of the 15 best novels of 2014. I’m hard pressed to see how you draw the conclusion that I’m grasping at straws to show “the puppies were right.” I don’t agree with what you call your “cozy consensus,” though – that’s true.
Part of this is just wishing I’d found The Peripheral early enough to have actually argued for it when it mattered.
So it didn’t get an award. And? What matters is that it is a book you like and will try to get others to read so they can enjoy it as well. Award recognition is like extra icing on a cake – the important thing is the book itself.
Silly, or imperfect? So name some works that got a single nomination which you think are better than the ones I listed and explain why. (I did, a while ago, with Echopraxia.)
You could at least try and comment with some sincerity.
Lock In won second place for goodreads choice awards. But puppyhatred of Scalzi trumphs everything.
I did – I think you should be ashamed you didn’t nominate Peter Watts. Pay attention.
Silly, or imperfect?
Silly, like everything else you write.
So name some works that got a single nomination which you think are better than the ones I listed and explain why.
The point has sailed over your head. Different awards recognize a variety of works. The Campbell nominees are never identical to the Nebula nominees which are never identical to the Hugo nominees and so on. A book like Ancillary Justice sweeping through multiple awards is unusual. Pretending that a book should be removed from a list on the basis that it was the only nomination it received is silly. It is, by definition, an arbitrary metric.
Where’s this Scalzi hatred you speak of? He’s got the right stuff. He’s got the right contract. Then again, if five or six more years pass and he hasn’t written a great novel, then maybe I’ll start dissing Scalzi.
Aaron, regardless of what has sailed where, if you can’t name which other works getting a single nomination are better and explain why, you don’t have a point.
No, removing his work under the pretext that it was “obviously not deserving to be on a long list of the 15 best novels of 2014” when it had won second place of goodreads award was not dissing. Of course not. Absolutely not. Oh no. Not at all.
Why is it dissing to say that one of his books was not the greatest novel of 2014? Seems like I’d be insulting an awful lot of authors.
So the book that won second place in best novels of the year 2014 for the goodreads award was obviously not worthy to even be placed on the long list?
Thats more than stupid. And yes, it is dissing.