(1) SPOILERS SPOIL. You know this. “Spoiler alert: Story spoilers can hurt entertainment” at EurekAlert.
While many rabid fans may have scratched their heads when a 2011 study showed that spoilers could improve story enjoyment, a recent experiment, conducted by researchers Benjamin Johnson (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Judith Rosenbaum (Albany State University), shows that narrative spoilers can ruin a story. Their findings show that spoilers reduce people’s entertainment experiences.
“Our study is the first to show that people’s widespread beliefs about spoilers being harmful are actually well-founded and not a myth,” says Johnson. Furthermore, in a follow-up study, Johnson and Rosenbaum found that the effects of spoilers are actually linked to people’s personality traits. Johnson: “While the worry and anger expressed by many media users about ‘spoilers’ in online discussions or reviews is not completely unfounded, fans should examine themselves before they get worked up about an unexpected spoiler.”
(2) DOCTOR VISITS HOSPITAL. Radio Times has a heartwarming video — “Peter Capaldi surprises young Doctor Who fan in hospital, stays in character the whole time”.
“There’s a new Doctor on the ward and it’s me…”
https://twitter.com/BadWilf/status/674283494982492160
(3) SATURDAY SIGNING IN GLENDALE. Mystery and Imagination Bookshop‘s Christine Bell says “Call it a mini HORROR SLAM.” This Saturday at 2 p.m. in the store’s upstairs room, Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison will read a couple of stories, talk about writing, take questions, and sign books.
Oh, the wonderfulness of being famous literary smart guys. Could this be the start of a new Saturday afternoon tradition? It’s all free and it won’t hurt a bit. After that it’ll still be daylight, so…Porto’s is just across the street! I mean, really, what more could you ask for? See you there?
The address is Mystery and Imagination & Bookfellows Bookshops at 238 N. Brand Blvd.
(4) RETRO REVIEWS. Steve Davidson has the latest installment of “Scide Splitters: 1941 Retro Hugo Eligible Novelettes” posted at Amazing Stories, which focuses on humorous stories such as “Butyl and the Breather” by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1940).
Although this story can be read as a stand-alone, it is a sequel to Sturgeon’s 1939 short, “Ether Breather,” and I do think it is more enjoyable if you read that one first.
Ted Hamilton, a writer and central character in the original story, still feels guilty that about telling the Ether Breather to stop messing up color television. It has been a year since the incident and the Breather has refused to respond to any attempts to contact it. Mr. Berbelot, perfume tycoon and television hobbyist, is still mad at Hamilton for exactly that incident and refuses to speak to him. But Hamilton has come up with an idea to get the Breather to respond and Berbelot reluctantly agrees to hear him out.
(5) BROOKS OBIT. Actor Martin E. Brooks died December 7 at the age of 90. Brooks played scientist Dr. Rudy Wells in two 1970s TV series, Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman.
His other genre work included episodes of The Wild Wild West (1967), Night Gallery (1971), Planet of the Apes (1974 – I’d managed to forget this was also a TV series), and Airwolf (1985).
He also was in the movies Colossus: The Forbin Project, T-Force, and TV’s Bionic Ever After?
While Brooks probably didn’t think he was ending his career at the time, IMDB shows his last role was symbolically the “Man thrown off the roof” in Street Gun (1996).
(6) A NOT-STUPID. Ethan Mills at Examined Worlds poses the philosophical question “Is Violence the Answer” in “Like Avatar, but Not Stupid: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin”.
Okay, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest is actually not that much like Avatar, but there are similarities. Some militaristic Terrans come to steal resources from a forest planet inhabited by small, furry humanoids called Athsheans. The Athsheans end up fighting the technologically superior but numerically inferior Terrans. There’s a Terran anthropologist who comes to almost understand the Athsheans (but he doesn’t quite go full Avatar). One of the villages of the furry guerrillas fighting an imperial power is called Endtor. Maybe George Lucas owes Le Guin some royalties, not just James Cameron. But as an American book published in 1972, the real background seems to be the war in Vietnam.
(7) BLOOM NOMINATED. Rachel Bloom is a Golden Globes nominee for her work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Ray Bradbury would be thrilled.
https://twitter.com/Racheldoesstuff/status/675047096957984768
(8) THE XANATOS QUESTION. Larry Correia put his spin on last night’s game show reference to Puppygate: “Sad Puppies: The Hugos Lost On Jeopardy”.
Some Puppy supporters didn’t like how it was phrased, with “scandal” having negative implications. Personally, I like it. Especially the part where they used “Rocked”. Damn right. Rocked you like a hurricane. The scandal was the part where the CHORFs ran a lying media smear campaign, and handed out wooden butt holes, while block voting No Award to keep out barbarian Wrongfans having Wrongfun.
(9) PUPPY TIME. And coincidentally, at Mad Genius Club Kate Paulk has declared “It’s Time”.
Because yes, it is time to start Sad Puppies 4 in Earnest. And Houston. And Philadelphia. And Back-o-Beyond. You get the idea.
Nominations will open in January 2016, and probably close in March (the closing date hasn’t been officially announced). I’m planning to have The List posted mid to late February (depending, as always, on just how feral my work schedule happens to be). Recommendations have been trickling in, but we need more. MOAR!
(10) WRIGHT IN. John C. Wright, commenting on Vox Day’s post about Jeopardy!, told the Dread Ilk he is prepared to make the sacrifice of being a multiple Hugo-nominee again in 2016.
“Does anybody know if Wright is willing to be a lightening rod again? “
Lightning rod for the sputtering sparks of CHORF energy? I get a bigger shock from petting the cat on a dry day after rubbing my stocking feet on the carpet. I was pleased in a dark and evil way to see the Morlocks burn their own cities rather than allow me be elected mayor. I would have been MORE pleased had he Hugo Awards kept even a modicum of decency and honesty, and actually received the awards I earned, but I cannot expect powerdrunk patheticos to give up on power. I did not expect schoolboy wooden anus jokes, however. That was pathetic. Numbers wise, I am not sure if we can sweep the nominations again, but I would like to see the Hugos either returned to the old worth, or destroyed utterly. Leaving them in the clammy webbed hands of Christ-hating America-hating, Science-hating, Literature-hating Morlocks is unimaginable to me.
(11) HAN TALKS CHEWIE DOWN. Must have missed this in November — Harrison Ford settled his feud with Chewbacca on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
(12) IN MEMORY YET GREEN. Chris Taylor analyzes “How Star Wars Conquered the Galaxy: The economic power of the greatest movie franchise ever” at Reason.com.
…Even before the December release of The Force Awakens, the Star Wars franchise pulled in an estimated $42 billion total in box office, DVD sales and rentals, video games, books, and related merchandise. And that’s just the amount flowing into officially sanctioned channels; the unofficial, unlicensed Star Wars economy has generated untold billions more.
Some $32 billion of that staggering revenue was derived from physical stuff rather than an audio-visual experience. Like Davy Crockett, the Star Wars universe made its biggest economic impact in the realm of merchandise—clothing, accessories, food and drink, housewares (Darth Vader toaster, anyone?), and especially toys. But unlike Walt Disney, George Lucas devised a way to pocket much of that money himself. That helped buy editorial freedom, which helped this obsessive creative make the rest of his movies how he saw fit, for good and ill, until Disney bought the rights to the franchise in 2012 for $4.06 billion. Lucas and Star Wars created a category of economic activity that previously did not exist, and in so doing forever changed the face of entertainment….
(13) FOUNTAIN OF LOOT. Here’s some of that Star Wars merchandise – a series of fountain pens that sell for $575 apiece. Jon Bemis tells why he’s a happy customer in his review “Why I Bought the Cross Townsend Star Wars Limited Edition Fountain Pens” at The Pen Addict.
…While it looks like a standard brass pen body from a distance, close up the C-3PO is fluent in over six million forms of beautiful. It is gold (of course) and covered with accent lines recalling the curves and circles etched on Threepio himself. The clip is centered in a ring of concentric circles like those in the center of the protocol droids chest, and the caps finial looks like his eye….
C3PO style Cross pen.
(14) JUST PLAIN BILL. The Captain of the Enterprise is still out there hustling every day, too. Vulture has a new interview with William Shatner, who is hard at work marketing Priceline. He talks about his new book project and tells a Nimoy story he says he’s never told before.
What’s a piece of science you’ve come across lately that was particularly interesting to you?
I’m writing a novel with a writer named Jeff Rovin that will be out next year called Zero-G, and I suggested we use something in it that I had read about. I read that microbial life dries up and seems to be dead and then, with the addition of water thousands of years later, can come back to life. That’s astonishing. Thousands of years! These are scientific concepts so mysterious that they beggar our imagination. I saw a photograph yesterday of a black hole absorbing a star, and it burped energy back out! A black hole cosmic-burped dust out the other way! What is more intriguing than that? Perhaps a good pasta.
(15) SMACK BACK. For those who are fed up with Kirk there’s an alarming site — Slapkirk.com – that lets users control an animation of Kirk slapping himself, and with a kind of slap-o-meter that tracks how many slaps have been delivered, at what rate per second. Those who get it going fast enough are rewarded with the “Red Alert” sound effect…
(16) MUTANT TRAILER. A trailer is out for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, coming to theaters June 3, 2016.
(17) LET KYRA EXPLAIN. Kyra’s comment makes the taxonomy of fantasy fiction as clear as is the summer sun...
Look, it’s very simple —
Urban Fantasy: Fantasy set in a city
High Fantasy: Fantasy set in the mountains
Low Fantasy: Fantasy set in the Netherlands
Fantasy of Manners: Fantasy set in manors
Epic Fantasy: Fantasy in the form of a lengthy narrative poem
Fairy Tale Fantasy: Fantasy about fairies with tails
Science Fantasy: Science fiction but there’s an annoying pedant in the seat behind you saying that it’s fantasy because FTL travel isn’t real plus the Force, what about that
Sword and Sorcery: The party must include a magic user, a cleric, a fighter, and a thief
Weird Fiction: Like, the characters know they’re in a book and some of the text is upside down and stuff like that
Steampunk: Everyone has cybernetic enhancements but get this, they’re CLOCKWORK
Dieselpunk: Like Steampunk, but the cybernetic enhancements require diesel fuel
Mythpunk: Like Steampunk, but the cybernetic enhancements have tiny gods in them
Grimdark: When the superheroes change their costumes so that now they’re in dark colors, weird
Magic Realism: Like when your aunt actually believes that if you put the knife under the crystal pyramid, it will totally get sharper
Paranormal Romance: Fantasy with naughty bits
Young Adult Fantasy: One of the above genres marketed to a group that will actually buy itSee? Easy.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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1. It depends on what constitutes beating the slate.
Every time I vote for something I like without caring about whether guys like Corriea, Wright, Torgersen, or Beale are up to, I beat the slate. Every time I put No Award ahead of nominees who aren’t good enough to be on the ballot, I beat the slate.
Jim Henley says:
In the context of the consistently terrible grasp of public relations displayed by the SP leadership throughout this year’s campaign, IMHO, it is entirely plausible that SP could truly, dearly want to separate itself from RP, and yet could wind up taking no constructive action toward achieving that end.
@aaron
Well said.
TO THE GRAPHMOBILE! https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/hugo-nomination-stats-power-law/
Definitely a Zipf-like distribution. For each drop in rank (say from 2nd to 3rd etc) it averages about 90% of the more popular nomination in Best Novel.
e.g. if Henleys in Space gets 100 nominations then The Banes of Felapton gets 90 nominations.
However, Zipf like distributions scale nicely. Double the number of people voting and the proportions stay the same. So if somebody wants to model what would have happened if more non-Puppies had voted (and assumed there was little overlap in choices) then you just need to increase proportionally the number of nominations Ancillary Sword etc got by the same factor. e.g. Ancillary Sword got 279 and Goblin Emperor got 256 nominations. Double the number of non-pups and the best estimate is they would have got 588 and 512 nominations.
…sorry, forgot to add before the Jack Bauer timer hit the advert break…
If you double the number of non-pups in 2015 for Best Novel in the proportional way I described (i.e. just double all the non-pup nominations and leave the pup noms as they are) then the top three novels are the non-pups and the next two are pups (of which one is Monster Hunter Nemesis). If Larry withdrew in this scenario then Lock In would be a nominee.
A 2.5 increase in non-Pups for 2015 nominations would have made it slate free.
@Camestros
re Katsu 2: Ooh, you got the clockwork in the eyes! How lovely. It also makes a great desktop background.
Now if somebody would actually BUILD me a Katsu, either for my desk or the top of my bookcase….I’d pay a reasonable amount for that, I think.
re Wright, Mr Beale, the Impaler et al:
Just keep up your idiotic
ballot stuffing“nominations,” people. If you try to hijack the ballot again, the response will be the same as it was this year. Now go stand in the corner, I’ve got books and stories to read.In my first go the clockwork was there but it wouldn’t render because of the lighting. Eventually I had to stick a light inside its head. All part of the learning curve.
Guys, this is a crazy thought, but – what if the Sads were really the larger group during the nominations? It’s very striking that:
* Only ~165 people nominated VD for the best editor slots
* Chuck Gannon, a Sad-Only candidate, pulled just shy of 200 votes
* Torgersen, a Rabid-Only candidate, also got about 200 votes, but seems likely to have benefited from some crossover voting from Sads
If the Rabids were about 160 people, the Sads were about 200, Butcher and Correia picked up some non-slate voters, and some JCW stans followed his announcement of RP but voted just for his works, things would seem to shake out.
Also wondering about a possible “SP2 faction” of up to a 100 that voted just for Correia and Butcher. Maybe.
No we shouldn’t urge people to stay on a slate. If someone says I am not voluntarily on a slate we can use our brains to judge their words and work appropriately.
If I’m going to claim I’m on the side of good than it behooves me to act ethically and morally. I’d prefer not to see slates. I’m not going to award slates. I’m an adult not a robot or a child. I have a working brain. I intend to use it just like I’ve done since SP1.
This year I’ve read more and will be nominating in 70-80% of the categories thanks to filers and all the places people are putting up eligible works & recommendations. Depending on what SP4 and RP4 gets to the finalist level and all I’ve read this year and will continue to read next year I may not have much reading to do when voting comes around (read until you know it’s not the best).
In other Pixel Scroll items news —
Is anyone else disturbed by the hideous rubbery too-close-to-human uncanny valley horrifying faces of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
If I haven’t said already, Kyra’s taxonomy of fantasy fiction is ingenious.
@Aaron: “I recall Correia talking about the voting system like it was some sort of mysterious black box a year or two ago in reference to Weisskopf’s nomination.”
And don’t forget, Correia’s supposed to be good with numbers. He was an accountant, y’know. If anyone should be able to understand the voting system, it’s him.
Maybe the only numbers he’s actually good with are 9, 22, 38, 44, 7.62, 45, 223, and so on.
@Tasha Turner
You don’t appear to have understood what I said at all.
@Rev. Bob: That is the weirdest Fibonacci sequence I ever saw in my life….
Ridley Kemp on December 11, 2015 at 8:19 am said:
No, not just you.
You seemed to suggest that people hold off on withdrawing their nomination until reaching finalists stage to increase chance of non-puppies getting on final ballot.
Am I misunderstanding? Did I take too much from a throwaway comment?
If they stick to their stated aims*, this year the Sad’s slate will consist of popular works, as recommended by (mostly) their fellow travellers. Given their stated aim of removing only those authors who have recused themselves, I suspect we’ll see some amount of them including generally popular works, and almost immediately after that a bunch of authors etc saying “Whoa, I’m not with that guy” .
Also, generally speaking I think we’ll see a lot of what happened with “Guardians of the Galaxy” from non-Puppies,in that if it’s good, it gets voted on.
Which, based on past experience, will result in a whole lot of whining from the Usual Suspects about “why does author X hate their fans” and “Oh the Ess Jay Dubyas pressured them onto saying that”
*=I know, assuming facts not in evidence.
Jim Henley: The sense I got was that the Rabids were more stable than the Sads, so that the Sads were doing better in the more popular categories, while the Rabids fell off less rapidly in the less popular ones; this makes sense if the Sads were actually trying to read things. Certainly the idea that the Rabids were universally more dominant is something of an illusion, caused by such things as ‘Molakesh’ being disqualified, and VD nominating an episode of Game of Thrones that was going to be there anyway.
Camestros: I’m not sure just what your figures are meant to show. The claim that doubling the overall vote would double the votes for each candidate can only be true if doubling the vote does not introduce any new candidates, which seems improbable. The actual effects of doubling the vote must surely depend on just who the new voters are.
Thank you for posting that piece by Sunny Moraine- it was was magnificently angry. I’d live to do an analysis some time, but for now, Is it Hugo eligible? Because if so, I’d like to add it to the list.
Buzzfeed weighs in with The 24 Best Science Fiction Books of 2015.
So very much this.
Some publications already do this as a matter of course. For example, Asimov’s categorizes their stories into Novella/Novelette/Short Story in their Table of Contents each issue. Interzone provides wordcounts of accepted stories, and I see Vasha has already mentioned Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com.
Hear! hear!
By the way, a podcast audio version of Barry Hughart’s “Bridge of Birds” is available from Forgotten Classics. [It’s new to me, but then I am 3-4 years out of date]
@Rose Embolism: Yes, “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” is Hugo eligible
There are two different scenarios there.
If we assume that we are just drawing from the same general population then new candidates will be introduced but that just adds to the long tail of the distribution of candidates.
However, if it was some very different group of people drawing from a different pool of works (e.g. only Australians and only nominating works by Australians) then you’d have a very different situation.
Greg Hullender: Even with EPH, the puppies would have swept the novelette category this past year.
That’s not obvious at all. The top 5 novelettes would have only had 1/5 to 1/3 of a point apiece to start (33-53 points), whereas depending on which other novelettes had how many people put them together on their ballot, several would quite possibly have had more points than that because they were individual choices.
Peace Is My Middle Name: They lied. Quite a number of their nominees had not been contacted beforehand and did not agree to be on any kind of slate.
Even some of the people who were contacted were asked if they were willing to be on an individual’s recommendation list, not on a political slate. So the Puppies lied about that, too.
Aaron: Every time I vote for something I like without caring about whether guys like Corriea, Wright, Torgersen, or Beale are up to, I beat the slate. Every time I put No Award ahead of nominees who aren’t good enough to be on the ballot, I beat the slate.
Exactly. Regardless of the end result, No Award or a non-Puppy Hugo, the only place the Puppies “destroy the Hugos” is in their childish dreams.
Andrew M.:
One thing I do is follow recommendations from people I either know and like, or have reason to expect I will agree with. So, if a friend of mine says “here are six short stories I liked recently, with a two-sentence description of each,” I may read 2-4 of those, even if I haven’t looked at the rest of the magazine issue. I won’t nominate a story because Mrissa liked it, but that does make me more likely to read the story, which in turn means it’s possible I’ll nominate it. It’s the same general idea as being more likely to read books by writers whose previous work I liked, or that sound interesting based on a review, rather than just grabbing the three top things from the “recent arrivals” stack.
Again, I’m not going to nominate something just because the author is a friend, but I have friends whose writing i like, so I’m more likely to at least start reading their works than if the same story was by someone I’ve never heard of.
The other thing that helps is to resist the sunk cost fallacy. If, after a bit, you don’t care what happens to those people, you can stop and not waste more time, rather than feeling that you started the story so you have to go on.
> “Buzzfeed weighs in with The 24 Best Science Fiction Books of 2015.”
They also have one on The 32 Best Fantasy Books Of 2015.
(I might weigh in on the ones on both lists I’ve read or intend to read when I get a moment.)
Yup. That’s exactly where I’ve been struggling. I want to fill each category in order to beat a slate, but just because I’ve read 8 novellas this year (which is 8 more than I normally read) doesn’t mean I have 5 novellas I want to nominate.
It’s a little easier now that I’ve got two library systems to work from, and the new-to-me one actually allows skiffy magazines to be checked out. And has a ton of graphic novels. But I’m *tired* of reading in order to find nominees. I want to go back to reading things because it’s what I’m in the mood for.
Sorry Mike.
I stand by my statement that he certainly hasn’t grokked the message of Jesus to love thy neighbor and let God do the judging.
He also doesn’t seem to be following the dictates of his Pope, which makes him a bad Catholic.
And “earning HIS awards” is purest bollocks. He finished behind other Puppies, even. Kary English’s story was serviceable and might very well have won. It wasn’t great, but I liked it and it was a bit moving. It’s certainly no worse than some things that have won over the years. Would he have been magnanimous enough to truly believe she deserved it, if she was the only slate winner?
(And what’s his obsession with derrieres? Ranting against sodomites, calling asterisks buttholes… Freud would say something about that. People I know with colon cancer don’t talk about posteriors as often as he does.)
(2) DOCTOR: I love Capaldi, both as the Doctor and as a quite decent bloke. I wish he had better writing. I hadn’t bought any NuWho merchandise at all, but at the last con, I sprung for a 12th Doctor mini-Pop. He’s atop my TV looking cute (Yes, I still have a TV wide enough to put things on).
(6) NOT-STUPID: The catch phrase there is quite good.
(12) FOUNTAIN: Yeah, I use dollar store pens since I lose them all the time.
(17) KYRA: I giggle every time I read that. Like all the best jokes, it gets funnier and funnier as it goes. And mostly true! You are the queen of our wretched hive.
Right now I’m taking a break from Hugo reading and am about halfway through “Anno Dracula”. Quite entertaining. It was one of those books I’d meant to get to, and now I have. I like how the fictitious characters are worked in, even better than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The real history and the fake are knitted together so seamlessly.
@Dex: It’s toooo haaaard to start your own award. That’s what they’ve said. All the work done with the yearly organization of their slate, cheerleading for each other, vilifying SJWs, and getting outsiders to buy memberships and vote in lockstep seems to show that they actually could do it if they put their minds to it. But no.
@Vasha: that Sunny Moraine story is amazing!
@snowcrash: Apparently “Watchmaker” is Pulley’s very first publication! !!!
@Camestros: I love Katsu-2! Why isn’t every steampunker alive busy building Katsus for sale? Even if they wouldn’t be as mobile as book Katsu. Someone could be making a ton of money.
On voting for the Hugos or not:
If you have the privilege of being able to nominate this year DO IT. It doesn’t matter if you read only one short story that blew you away, put that on your ballot and email it in. Did you see a great piece of art? Put that down. Read one delightful novel? Go for it. Saw one good movie? Do it. If you’re not sure about the Novella/Novelette break point, ask here. I’ve asked about a few stories, Filers have answered.
Much of the work is available online for free. So you don’t have to spend money buying the magazines, just read the free stuff and vote for those. The online works also often have a word count right there; Tor, Clarkesworld and Lightspeed do.
I passed along some free F&SF issues I’d gotten to a friend who has other nominators in the extended family. I dog-eared the ones I really liked and double dog-eared the one I’m nominating. Said friend knows my taste in books, and they and theirs can either read them all or start with the ones I’ve marked. Everything I marked has a complete story and nothing terrible about it. Most of them aren’t Hugo-caliber but all were very entertaining, and a few were very funny. One of ’em (no I don’t remember the title) would have had Cliff Simak chuckling. I didn’t order them to read only what I wanted, though, so it’s not at all slating.
Every little bit helps. Lift every voice and sing. Just do it. Etc.
Vote for what you like/love and let the chips fall where they may.
@JJ on December 11, 2015 at 4:25 pm said:
I misremembered the result. Making the most favorable possible assumptions about the other votes, you can use the released statistics to show that even with EPH non-slate candidates could not have won more than two slots, but, of course, that’s different from saying the slates would have swept the category.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016283.html#4216987
However, the assumptions are so optimistic that a sweep by the slates would still be the way to bet.
Keith Watt’s conclusion on that thread said it very well: “Again, the answer is to get more voters so that EPH has enough “raw material” to do its job. Under the current system, even if we add more voters, slates will still sweep the ballot because there will be no concentration of support in the non-slate works at all. EPH can amplify that concentration of support so that you don’t need as many voters, but it does need something to work with.”
You managed to make that message disappear in a mocking, multi-part analogy about how Wright would certainly have conformed to the dominant religion of any historical period he might happen to have landed. The guy was an atheist most of his life, so probably not.
Some of the analysis about the effects on nomination skewing with increasing pool size are reminding me of the academic article I had published on trying to develop comparative metrics of personal name popularity patterns between historic populations of different sizes. (“Comparing Historic Name Communities in Wales: Some Approaches and Considerations” in Studies on the Personal Name in Later Medieval England and Wales ed. Dave Postles & Joel Rosenthal, in case anyone is curious.)
My basic question was: what is the minimum arbitrary random sample size which provides reliable metrics in comparing the overall diversity of the “name pool” (i.e., the length of the “long tail” as it were), and the relative skewing of name choice toward the most popular choices (i.e., what ends up on the “short list” and how close the race is).
There are some interesting parallels to award nominations and some interesting differences. One big difference is that the hypothetical name pool that’s being drawn on may be larger than the set of names in actual use at any given time. (I.e., people may, in theory, name a child a name that is preserved in memory but not currently borne by a living individual), whereas the potential nomination pool can’t be larger than the set of stories actually published in the target period.
But I suspect that one similarity would be that the % share of the most popular choices will stabilize at some sampling size, and while the “tail” will continue to increase with increasing sample size, the rate of increase will fall as the sample size increases. I tried desperately to come up with some sort of complex mathematical index to be able to represent this sort of “pool size” factor, but the best I could do was pick a sample size at which the comparison of “unique items” within the set was meaningful.
Have I ever mentioned that I really REALLY geek out about analyzing data patterns?
On Buzzfeed’s 24 Best SF books —
Haven’t read very many of these; once again my recent tendency to lean towards fantasy instead of SF is showing. Perhaps more interesting is that some of these haven’t even been getting a lot of buzz in the various places where I hang out on the interwebs. Comments on a few:
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente. I am a HUGE Valente fan, and am greatly looking forward to reading this. But the price for her books in the UK seems to be insane. I haven’t yet gotten The Bread We Eat In Dreams (£60 now, used!), Speak Easy (£16), or Radiance (£17) because it’s hard for me to justify dropping that much on a single book. Arg.
Broken Dolls by Tyrolin Puxty. This is the first I’d heard of the book or the author, possibly because it’s not quite out yet, at least in the UK. But I’m interested enough by the description here to check it out.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. At last, one I’ve actually read. I’d call it not in my top five books this year, but probably in my top ten. Despite mixed reviews from some, I liked it, I’d say it’s a solid pick, and no surprise to see it on a best-of list. Science fiction, though? Hm, maybe so. Although it has much more of a fantasy “feel” to the furniture, there is no magic (yet, at least — there was an odd hint in there that could be referencing either magic or SF), and some aspects of it could be seen as super-advanced Behavioral Science.
Persona by Genevieve Valentine. I didn’t like this book. Didn’t care about the characters. Wasn’t convinced by the world. And I usually love Valentine, I’d give raves to both Mechanique and The GIrls At The Kingfisher Club. I’ll chalk this one up to Opinion Varies.
Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Looking forward to it. Really liked Halfway Human.
Firefight by Brandon Sanderson. Is this SF? I suppose it depends on where the superpowers are coming from, although there are finally hints in this one … Anyway, I found it a bit of a letdown. I really liked the first book in this series and eagerly snapped this one up, and found it a lot less interesting. There’s still a good chance I’ll finish out the series, but this book has me wavering on that.
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. This was fabulous. What a great close to the series. The second and third books work best for me read straight in a row as a single “double sized” novel, and they pack a powerful punch taken together. This is the one on the list I’ve read that gets rave reviews from me.
(There are several books on the list by authors I generally like — Seveneves, Aurora, Nemesis Games, and The Philosopher Kings, for example — whose descriptions haven’t really tempted me. In the case of The Philosopher Kings, I didn’t like the first book in the series. And, gotta ask once again … SF? Hm.)
I attempted to post a comment on Camestros Felapton’s blog about the Zipf’s law fit for Hugo nominations. I cannot tell if it has gone to moderation or if it was just eaten by WordPress, so I’m reposting it here.
I couldn’t resist some followup analysis. Your fit for the Puppy nominations keeps the same rankings as they actually earned. I would argue that it makes more sense to treat the Puppy nominations as one group of 6 nominees, and the other nominations as a separate group of 11 nominees.
This treatment basically gives a view of the nominations under two assumptions. First, without the slates, none of the Puppy voters would have voted at all. Second, without the slates, none of the Puppy nominations would have been in the top 11 nominees. These assumptions are probably not exactly true, but they at least give a way to approach the data.
Before I do that, I’m going to give the “missing” regression from those you performed. That is, if you fit the other nominations with their original rankings, you get the regression line y = -0.6956x + 6.6161, with a p-value of 1.734e-5. (I’m reporting p-values rather than R-squared because I think R-squared is overvalued and I’m being difficult.)
If you compare the regression lines, they seem unlike each other. That is, the slope for 2013 is -0.4808. The slope for the Puppy nominees is -.3352. However, the slope for the non-Puppy nominees is -0.6956, so the slope for all 2015 nominees is -0.5345.
Warning: the conclusions put forth in this paragraph look reasonable, but are not correct. I am only presenting them in order to knock them down. Just looking at the Puppy slope and comparing it to the 2013 slope could lead to the conclusion that slate voting flattens Zipf’s law, that is, the drop off in votes is less steep for the slate nominees than for non-slate nominees. This could itself be taken as evidence of both the power of and the problem with slates.
However, this argument would have to explain why the slope for the other nominees is so much steeper than the slope for 2013.
Instead, treat the Puppy nominees and the other nominees as two separate groups. If you renumber the Puppy nominees from 1 to 6, the regression line is y = -0.4149x + 6.0581, with a p-value of 0.005467. If you renumber the other nominations with ranks 1-11, the regression line is y = -0.5032x + 5.8018, with a p-value of 7.471e-7. Comparing these slopes to the slope for 2013, keeping in mind their standard errors, all three slopes are effectively the same.
The difference in their intercepts is meaningful, but that’s just a function of the total number of votes received.
Two conclusions: First, voting appears to follow a power law. Furthermore, at least based on the limited data analyzed, the exponent for the power law appears to be relatively constant across different years and groups of voters. Second, votes for Puppy nominees and for all other nominees should be analyzed as two separate groups. Any statistic you choose will support that.
The claim that the exponent is constant may not hold up if more data is considered. Comparisons to more years would definitely be justified. Also, the exponent for Zipf’s law is sensitive to how much of the tail is considered. If the data on all votes were available (for one or more years), the slope for the regression lines could well be different than the slope for the first 15 or so data points.
On Buzzfeed’s 32 Best Fantasy books —
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. Despite mixed reviews here, I’m intrigued enough that I’m probably going to read it.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Still haven’t gotten to this one yet, but man, this has gotten the most buzz of any fantasy book this year. Everyone’s talking about it. I admit it — I liked Temeraire well enough, but did not adore it. Curious to see how I’ll find this one. Sounds like it’s not the same thing at all.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. This was great. Honestly, I think it’s Jemisin’s best book yet, by quite a ways, and she wasn’t starting at anything like a low level with the others. An already talented author has taken it to the next level with this one. Definitely gets raves from me.
A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria “V.E.” Schwab. I thought this one was eh. Victoria Schwab has written some great stuff — The Archived, The Unbound, Vicious — and this is the one I’ve liked least of all her work. It seemed pretty boilerplate fantasy to me. It’s getting a lot of love, though. I’ll chalk it up to Opinion Varies.
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. And, once again … I thought Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy was pretty good. This? I was not impressed at all. Apparently, it’s one of The YA books this year. Opinion Varies.
Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace. And again. This book gets a lot of love. I thought it was three stories clumsily woven together. Opinion Varies.
Half the World and Half a War by Joe Abercrombie. OK! Back to books I really liked! Or a book, at least. In particular, Half the World was absolutely great. Half a War wasn’t as good, less innovative than Abercrombie’s stuff and only OK (certainly not bad, just not as brilliant.) But Half the World goes on my Top Ten list this year, I suspect.
Winter by Marissa Meyer. Sitting on my TBR pile. It’s a doorstopper. This series has been resolutely … pretty good, not great, throughout, so I suspect this book will be pretty good, not great. We’ll see.
The fantasy list also has some books by authors I bounced off hard, and am therefore unlikely to read (A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen, and Shadow Study by Maria V. Snyder). Color me baffled by the popularity of those authors. Brandon Sanderson, whom I usually like, didn’t really thrill me with The Alloy of Law, so I’m unlikely to read Shadows of Self.
Some books I think are unfairly missing from this list: Definitely — Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman and The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones. Probably — The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness, and Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray. I’d rate all of those above many of the ones that did make it onto the list among the ones I read.
Did you see this recent article on Language Log?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22743
Deals with how estimating vocabulary size by sampling somebody’s writing is inherently difficult.
@lurkertype
Woohoo! Another one for my (unfortunately short looking) Campbell longlist
Following up to my previous post, still in moderation, now that I’ve missed the edit window:
Andrew M: adding some more detail to Camestros’ comment, if the number of votes changes while the exponent in the power law does not change, then the number of votes for the most popular things will change proportionally. (That is, if the number of votes doubles, the number of votes for the most popular things will also approximately double.)
Of course, entirely new things will also get votes. One way to think about this is that you start by doubling the votes for each thing, then randomly redistribute a bunch of votes between the stuff which already has votes and potential new things that could be voted for. This redistribution is done in a way so that even though the tail gets much longer, the popular stuff still ends up approximately twice as many votes.
This depends on the assumption that the exponent in Zipf’s law doesn’t change. And that depends on the assumption that the behavior of the individual voters doesn’t change, even as the number of voters changes. Which may not be true if an entirely new group of voters appears. (Interestingly, even with the Puppies as a new group of voters where we know their voting patterns are different, Camestros’ analysis shows that at least compared to 2013, the Puppies did not clearly change the overall distribution of votes. In a statistical sense, the exponents for the power laws for the two years are the same.)
Heather Rose Jones: I’m interested! Is the article available online anywhere? (Even one requiring an academic log in?) The listed price on Amazon is a little steep. I will also check if my library has (or can get) it.
There isn’t much of a description of Katsu in the book in terms of its appearance (e.g. color etc). Thaniel sees that it is clockwork straight away but also that it is lifelike.
Practically, I think a late Victorian clockwork octopus would probably need a rubber outer skin to seem sufficiently life-like and probably to seem octopus like rather than like a mechanical spider. I trashed an early attempt because it just looked too much like a spider. When reading the book I imagined Katsu’s tentacles to be more like tight coils but that was too had to reproduce.
Having said all that…not going into detail was a well played by the author of the book. The details don’t matter, the idea of clockwork octopus with a mind of its own a tendency to steal socks is more than enough.
@Kyra:
Look Kyra, does it have a tavern in the snow or not?
Glad to see The Philosopher Kings on the Best SF list – even though it does have a Zeus ex Machina ending! It and/or The Just City are going on my Hugo nominee ballot.
Mike
One could argue that JCW needed the absolute, which is why he went from the absolute of atheism to obsessive Roman Catholicism of a class which thinks that the Pope is a temporary aberration who needs to be ignored.
I loathe what JCW does, and is. Every time that people gather together and strive to create beauty in worship. we know only too well that people like JCW will be showcasing the most awful aspects of the Bible, genocide and so on. He probably doesn’t understand that those of us who try to follow all two of Christ’s commandments, as well as his helpful advice on the best way to get to heaven, really are not into genocide. Unfortunately, someone like JCW is..
Jim Henley: Look Kyra, does it have a tavern in the snow or not?
It’s a good thing I had just set down my drink.
Seveneves and Aurora both are, imo, irredeemably bad. And while I am at it, Luna: New Moon is not much better.
The Bring Back MST3K kickstarter has raised over $5.5 million, which, combined with over $400K raised outside of Kickstarter, means it has hit its ultimate goal of 12 episodes and a holiday special! And there’s still a couple hours left to jump on the bandwagon!
If anybody’s heard of Sunny Moraine, or even if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to go here and read the six stories she has eligible for award consideration this year. They’re all tremendous, and they all gave me “oh holy shit that’s good” moments. I don’t know if I can even choose a favorite, although at the moment I’m leaning towards “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams.” At any rate, go and see for yourself.
@redheadedfemme: Sunny goes by the pronoun “they”. (And yeah, “Dispatches from a Hole in the World” is quite a story.)
As someone or other said, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.”
There are those who, I admit, test my charitable resolve in that direction. But there’s a school of thought that says that every creature, at any given time, is doing its absolute best under the circumstances. So I can only hope that the circumstances for some improve.
Dramatically.
Preferably far away from me.
(Hey, I didn’t say I was GOOD at this, only that I tried.)
@Vasha
Sorry, I stomped on your comment a bit. 🙁 Thanks for being the original pointer towards Sunny Moraine.