Pixel Scroll 12/11/16 “Scrollitively, Mr. Pixel?” “Pixelutely, Mr. Scroll!”

(1) NOT TODAY’S TITLE. “ONCE UPON a time there was a Martian with a wooden leg named Valentine Michael Smith. What its other two legs were named, nobody knows.”

(2) EXFOLIATE! The Baltimore Science Fiction Society has seasonally decorated the club’s Dalek. Michael J. Walsh snapped a photo —

bsfs-dalek-foto_no_exif

(3) ICON RECOGNITION. The Guardian’s “Picture quiz: how well do you know your sci-fi and fantasy?” is really an elaborate ad for The Folio Society.

Calling all Tolkien heads and sci-fi savants: can you match the illustration to the book? Each one has a clue to help you out.

In theory you should be able to guess from the artwork. Although I scored 7/8, without the clues I don’t know if I’d gotten any of them right.

(4) THE ROOTS OF BABY GROOT. Skeptics have been put on notice that this was something done only for wholesome artistic reasons – I’m sorry, did my nose just grow? Guardians of the Galaxy 2 director says Baby Groot was a ‘creative change,’ not a marketing ploy”.

Despite what some may believe, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 director James Gunn insists Baby Groot is not a ploy to sell more Marvel merchandise.

Responding to a fan inquiry on Twitter, Gunn wrote, “I’m sure some people think that but for me keeping him Baby Groot throughout the film was the creative change that opened the film up for me. I was less confident the studio was going to buy in on Baby Groot than I was they were going to buy in on Ego the Living Planet” — the latter being Kurt Russell’s character and Star-Lord’s father.

(5) DYLAN’S NOBEL. The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich covered the ceremony — “A Transcendant Patti Smith Accepts Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize”.

That Dylan ultimately accepted the Nobel with a folk song (and this specific folk song, performed by a surrogate, a peer) seemed to communicate something significant about how and what he considers his own work (musical, chiefly), and the fluid, unsteady nature of balladry itself—both the ways in which old songs are fairly reclaimed by new performers, and how their meanings change with time. Before Smith took the stage, Horace Engdahl, a literary historian and critic, dismissed any controversy over Dylan’s win, saying the decision “seemed daring only beforehand, and already seems obvious.” He spoke of Dylan’s “sweet nothings and cruel jokes,” and his capacity for fusing “the languages of the streets and the Bible.” In the past, he reminded us, all poetry was song.

 

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 11, 1972 — Apollo 17 landed on the moon. It was the final Apollo lunar landing. Ron Evans was the command module pilot and Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked on the surface during the mission. Cernan was the last to re-enter their lunar module — the last man on the moon.
  • December 11, 1991 — Amblin’s Hook opens in wide release after its LA premiere days earlier.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL

  • Born December 11, 1922  — Vampira, (aka Maila Nurmi).

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born December 11, 1781 — Scottish physicist and kaleidoscope inventor David Brewster

(9) WHAT’S A GOOD INTRODUCTION TO SF? Jason Sanford returns to controversy he wrote about last year in “Let Us Now Praise ‘Famous’ Authors”.

A few years ago I was on a SF/F convention panel about bringing new readers into our genre. I mentioned that science fiction needed more gateway novels, which are novels new genre readers find both approachable and understandable (a type of novel the fantasy genre is filled with but which are more rare in the science fiction genre).

As I stated this another author on the panel snorted and said we don’t need new gateway SF novels because the juvenile novels written by Heinlein in the 1950s are still perfect. This author believed the first exposure kids have to science fiction should be novels from the 1950s. And that this should never change.

That is the attitude people should fear because, in the long run, it will kill our genre.

This brings me back to my earlier point about the “famous” people our world holds up to acclaim. Yes, many famous authors helped build our genre, but so did the work and love of countless forgotten people.

(10) ROGUE SCIENCE. Neil deGrasse Tyson only needs a minute to explain why he is a Death Star skeptic in a video on Business Insider.

Owning a Death Star comes with some serious risk, especially when it was constructed with a serious design flaw. But astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has a more practical reason why the ‘Star Wars’ Death Star didn’t quite make sense.

(11) DIGITAL COMICS POLL. You have until December 23 to vote for Digital Comic of The Year 2016 at Pipedream Comics.

It’s been another bumper year for exciting and innovative digital comics in 2016. From boundary pushing webcomics to crowd-funded sensations to cutting edge apps, we have picked out 10 of the best for you to vote on and declare the best Digital Comic Of The Year 2016. So get involved and make sure your favourite joins the likes of Madefire’s Captain Stone and Mono:Pacific, David Lloyd’s Aces Weekly and last year’s champion Adventures in Pulp, as winner of our prestigious prize. Below is our rundown of the contenders for this year’s prize, and you can cast your vote here. (Polls close at midnight on December 23rd!)

Here are links to some of the contenders, where you can see full comics or samples:

(12) DOG SHOW. When Doris V. Sutherland dared to question the quality of Brian Niemeier’s Dragon Award-winning book, the author and another puppy blogger insisted the emperor was so wearing clothes — “Horror Puppies Redux: Is Souldancer Really Horror Fandom’s New Favourite Novel?”.

And while we’re at it, let’s look at the two books that I personally found to be the strongest contenders in the Dragons’ horror category. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay is at #156,590 in ebooks, and at #561,851 (paperback) and #60,849 (hardback) in books; Alice by Christina Henry is at #156,678 in ebooks and #27,655 in books. I stand by my statement at WWAC: if the Dragon Awards truly honoured the works most popular amongst fans, then the award for Best Horror Novel would not have gone to Souldancer.

Niemeier concluded his post by asking his readers to prove me wrong by posting reviews of Souldancer; he confidently predicted that the book will soon have more than fifty ratings on Amazon. This call to action resulted in Souldancer‘s review count going from eight to twelve, prompting Niemeier’s glass-half-full statement that “Souldancer reviews are up 50%”. A few more reviews have been posted since then – although the more recent ones have been somewhat mixed, as is to be expected from the novel reaching a broader audience following its Dragon Award victory.

(13) LIGHTS, CAMERA, NO MONEY! If Sad Puppies made a sci-fi movie, I  bet their promo would sound a lot like the ads for This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy, a New Zealand comedy film.

What happened to the good old days of sci-fi, when spaceships were real models, monsters made of latex and laser guns a curling iron painted silver? Now imagine a universe where everything was just like this for real.

For three ordinary guys Tom, Jeffrey and Gavin, this just became a reality. One minute they were watching an old b-grade movie, the next they’ve been thrust inside the movie itself and at the helm of a rickety old spaceship. Panic ridden they stumble into a space battle. and make a mortal enemy of the evil Lord Froth while unwittingly saving the space princess Lady Emmanor. Then suddenly Jeffrey starts to change into a sci-fi character called Kasimir. They must adapt quickly if they are to survive long enough to find a way home. For all they know they could be next. If that happens they will be lost in this world forever. They embark on a quest to find a cure for Jeffrey and a way back home. This is an action-packed comedy adventure of giant lizards, space battles, robots, aliens, warlords and amazons that has to be seen to be believed.

 

(14) MR. SCI-FI. Marc Scott Zicree shares his afterword for the new Magic Time audio play he and Elaine directed and wrote that will be released by Skyboat Media. It’s based on his bestselling series of novels from HarperCollins, and stars Armin Shimerman of Deep Space Nine and Buffy and Christina Moses of The Originals and Containment.

(15) EXTRATERRESTRIAL SEASON’S GREETINGS. Another sampling from the sci-fi Christmas catalog.

Barry Gordon – Zoomah the Santa Claus From Mars

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Mark-kitteh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W. “Not Today’s Title” credit goes to File 770 contributing editor Daniel Dern.]

305 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/11/16 “Scrollitively, Mr. Pixel?” “Pixelutely, Mr. Scroll!”

  1. Chip “speaks for everyone” and says that everyone knows it’s bullshit. Notice how no one called Chip on that.

    That may be because “That was shown to be utter bullshit 40 years ago” and “Everyone knows it’s bullshit” are not the same statement. So in trying to say Chip spoke for everyone, you’re putting words in his mouth.

    There’s just a group of people who cannot tolerate disagreement. It has nothing to do with how that disagreement is expressed.

    I think it has quite a bit to do with how you express it, and I think you’re working very hard not to understand that.

  2. If he’s trying to tell a story about the merciless logic of physics rather than human error, then if he means for her to have gotten in through a cascading catastrophe of human error, (a) it should be in the story, and (b) the story wouldn’t be about what it purports to be about.

    Maybe. But the point of the story is in the now – after all of the preliminaries to her being on the ship had already happened. The story is about the cold equations of the now, and not the precautions that could have taken place to prevent the now from happening.

  3. @Greg: Here are two comments of yours from the previous page of the thread:

    All the problems I’ve seen cited about “The Cold Equations” are parts of the what-if of the story, and therefore, in my view, not valid. If you reject the what-if of any story, you aren’t going to enjoy it. In the extreme case, you won’t enjoy mainstream literature because it’s talking about people who aren’t real.

    Now, in my opinion, this is completely absurd: it’s the responsibility of the storyteller (in whatever medium) to sell the what-if to the audience, and if they don’t, it’s the fault of the storyteller, not the audience. This is why Pacific Rim, for example, completely failed to work for me: if you can kill kaiju by punching them in the head with your giant robot, or cutting them in half with your giant robot’s giant sword, then you can kill them far more directly and simply by blowing them to pieces with missiles and torpedoes. (The movie isn’t even internally consistent, as near the climax they kill several kaiju with a nuclear detonation. Not that I cared at that point.) The movie doesn’t make any attempt to justify why the kaiju can only be fought with giant robots, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief at the absurdity of the premise for even a moment.** And that was precisely my reaction to The Cold Equations.

    However, this is clearly your opinion, and while I don’t even slightly agree with it, so what?

    Further down you say this, in response to Kurt Busiek’s
    I think the objections are more saying, “But you didn’t set it up convincingly.”

    you say this

    If that really were what they were saying, then they’d have a valid point. But the complaint is very specifically “I swallowed your what-if, I was immersed in your story, it made me cry, and then when I thought about it, your what-if sucked.” Their complaint is quite the opposite of “I didn’t buy the what-if.”

    I don’t see anyway to read this comment except as you literally putting words in the mouths of Lenora Rose, and Red Wombat, and Kurt Busiek, not one of whom said anything resembling ““I swallowed your what-if, I was immersed in your story, it made me cry, and then when I thought about it, your what-if sucked.” They all complained that the absurdity of the premise kicked them out of the story. (As did I, but my comment was after this, so not relevant. JJ’s comment is more ambiguous to interpret, and Chip Hitchcock’s is pungent but non-specific. Speaking only for myself, I didn’t read Chip’s remark (“That was shown to be utter bullshit 40 years ago”) as claiming to speak for everyone.)

    **In contrast, in the classic Harryhausen film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, they discover after wounding the Rhodosaurus that its blood carries an ancient virus that is deadly to humans, and so they can’t just blow it to pieces, they have to find some other way to destroy it.

  4. But the point of the story is in the now – after all of the preliminaries to her being on the ship had already happened.

    They still matter. The story treats them as a non-issue, but if it’s a catastrophic security failure, it’s one that happens so often that the story informs us dispatch pilots encounter such instances maybe once per career. It’s even in the regulations, so this is a considered policy. When the captain hears about it, his response is basically, “Yeah, so what?”

    Since it’s a manipulative story, it immediately pivots from the frequency with which it happens and the unconcern of the management to say that the usual stowaway is unsympathetic, rather than confronting the idea that submitting pilots and ships to that kind of risk is massive human error, and apparently those catastrophic security failures happen often enough that every dispatch pilot can expect, at some point, to have to risk his life and his ship on an avoidable circumstance.

    The “now” of the story works if the now has been effectively built.

    If a story was concerned with the “now” and what happens after the setup, all grimly logical, and the setup is that there’s a giant chocolate cake plummeting toward your house, and if you carry the baby as you flee you won’t make it but if you leave the baby behind you will…

    …it’s probably a reasonable complaint that the giant chocolate cake falling from the sky is an absurdity, and a story of grim logic built on that setup doesn’t hold together.

    Especially if we learn during the story that people are regularly instructed what to do in case of cakefall, and it happens often enough that every postal carrier can expect to witness at least one. Readers might suggest that rather than such a training policy, they should recalibrate the sights on the Giant Cake Flinger rather than have a policy for when the sight mechanism regularly slips out of true. And telling the reader that usually, those crushed by the cakes are escapees of the nearby prison, so the regulations didn’t think to cover the cost of cake-sight engineering rather than paying out for crushed houses on an ongoing basis — that’s not likely to be considered a workable patch, at least not in a story that roots its power in the inescapable logic of physics.

    “It was a law not of men’s choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier.”

    No, it’s not. It’s a law of men’s sloppiness and unconcern, apparently. That’s the seventh paragraph, and Godwin is already lying to us — the regulation he’s referring to is a law of men’s choosing, and there are alternatives.

    Were I editing the story, I’d have suggested there’s a way to make it work: Have it be the first time it’s ever happened, and have the stowaway be the one to decide they have to be spaced. It would still be a heartbreaking choice, but it wouldn’t be a heartbreaking choice built on callous policy and apparently-steadily sloppy security.

  5. @PhilRM

    Now, in my opinion, this is completely absurd: it’s the responsibility of the storyteller (in whatever medium) to sell the what-if to the audience, and if they don’t, it’s the fault of the storyteller, not the audience.

    Ah! Here we can actually have a conversation. I can see how you interpreted my comment that way, but it’s not what I was trying to say. Let me try it from a different angle.

    1) If the what-if fails for you, then the story fails. That’s the fault of the author, not the reader. No disputing that, I hope.

    2) If the what-if succeeds for you, and you enjoyed the story, then it’s unreasonable to come back later and poke holes in it. Not everyone agrees with this.

    3) If you do go back and poke holes, you’ll discover that very few fictional stories have a what-if that can withstand close analysis. If you really do believe that this is grounds for disliking a story, then you’ll end up enjoying very little fiction.

    For the rest, this is what I was talking about:

    Tom Godwin used a huge logical cheat to achieve an emotional response in the reader. The story appears hugely moving upon first reading, but then falls apart completely in the post-analysis.

    I was at pains to point out that I had no disagreement with anyone who said the story didn’t work on the first read. And I think my summary (which you quoted) is a fine summary of various statements (including in the link I remember reading a while back) which made essentially the same argument. It gets rather tedious when people say “well, I didn’t think that–you can’t speak for me” when I already said I was only critical of people who did think that.

    You’re right that Lenora Rose said it failed for her on the first read. However, I thought she was talking just about how she didn’t like Nightfall either, so I skipped over it. Anyway, I never mentioned her by name.

  6. They still matter. The story treats them as a non-issue, but if it’s a catastrophic security failure, it’s one that happens so often that the story informs us dispatch pilots encounter such instances maybe once per career. It’s even in the regulations, so this is a considered policy. When the captain hears about it, his response is basically, “Yeah, so what?”

    Does Apollo 13 fail as a movie because the characters don’t spend a bunch of time talking about what went wrong to get to the point where the panel blew out? No, they set about trying to solve the problem and deal with the now.

  7. @Greg: I’ll just say that I agree with what Kurt Busiek said up at the top, and leave it at that.

  8. 1) If the what-if fails for you, then the story fails. That’s the fault of the author, not the reader. No disputing that, I hope.

    A little, actually; it depends on how badly the what-if fails, and how much the rest of the story depends on it. This is not a binary calculation.

    2) If the what-if succeeds for you, and you enjoyed the story, then it’s unreasonable to come back later and poke holes in it. Not everyone agrees with this.

    Very few will agree that it’s always unreasonable. Are we really supposed to take this statement at face value (i.e., changing one’s mind about a story is an “unreasonable” thing to do)?

    3) If you do go back and poke holes, you’ll discover that very few fictional stories have a what-if that can withstand close analysis. If you really do believe that this is grounds for disliking a story, then you’ll end up enjoying very little fiction.

    Again, that depends. In The Cold Equations, the weaknesses many of us see with the set-up may not be instantly obvious — but given that the whole point of the story depends on the situation being exactly the way it is, the what-if has a lot more riding on it than is the case in most stories.

  9. @Lowell Gilbert

    In The Cold Equations, the weaknesses many of us see with the set-up may not be instantly obvious — but given that the whole point of the story depends on the situation being exactly the way it is, the what-if has a lot more riding on it than is the case in most stories.

    An excellent point.

  10. Stepping aside from any discussion of whether you’re best by people who brook no disagreement, and just commenting on the three legs of this particular tripod:

    1) If the what-if fails for you, then the story fails. That’s the fault of the author, not the reader. No disputing that, I hope.

    I wouldn’t, certainly.

    2) If the what-if succeeds for you, and you enjoyed the story, then it’s unreasonable to come back later and poke holes in it. Not everyone agrees with this.

    I would guess — without speaking for anyone but myself — that few people would agree with this. It’s apparently built on the premise that a story is a good story, and maybe a classic of the form, so long as it’s enjoyable while you’re reading it, and even if you realize it has gargantuan plot holes two seconds later, pointing them out is unreasonable.

    That suggests that stories only have to work scene to scene and sentence to sentence. If they dance around their flaws in such a way that you don’t notice them instantly, they’re not flaws. I suspect this is not a majority viewpoint.

    3) If you do go back and poke holes, you’ll discover that very few fictional stories have a what-if that can withstand close analysis. If you really do believe that this is grounds for disliking a story, then you’ll end up enjoying very little fiction.

    This I disagree with even more strongly. It suggests that if one story falls apart on reflection, then most stories will (which I don’t think is true). It also suggests that if a story falls apart on reflection, that was “close analysis,” rather than casual thought, and I think plenty of stories fall apart on casual thought.

    I think “The Cold Equations” is not a story that takes very close analysis to pull apart. Beyond that, you early suggested that people who were critical of TCE wouldn’t enjoy THE MALTESE FALCON on the grounds that the Falcon is not real — but that’s not remotely the same kind of analysis, close or otherwise. Interstellar travel is also not real, but that’s not what complaining readers of TCE tend to object to (I’ve never seen anyone critique it on those grounds, but who knows, maybe there’s someone). The problem isn’t that fiction is fictional, but that TCE has specific flaws unrelated to it not being a true story.

    So the idea that if one finds flaws with TCE, that amounts to such a close analysis that, if applied to other fiction, it will render fiction in general unenjoyable, seems absurd.

    Aside from the fact that fiction has varied rules — we don’t object to “The Fox and the Grapes” on the grounds that foxes don’t speak, because it’s not meant to be realistic in that particular way, but we would object to a talking fox in John Grisham’s THE FIRM — it is entirely possible to critique stories for poor set-up and still enjoy fiction that doesn’t have such faulty set-ups.

  11. Does Apollo 13 fail as a movie because the characters don’t spend a bunch of time talking about what went wrong to get to the point where the panel blew out? No, they set about trying to solve the problem and deal with the now.

    We can take one of two lessons from this:

    1. Not detailing the set-up to every occurrence is not always fatal.

    2. Not detailing the set-up to every occurrence is always successful.

    You seem to be arguing #2 — if that worked in APOLLO 13, a story that involves an engineering problem in an early, experimental spacecraft, then it’s perfectly sensible for there to be a policy about forcing stowaways out the airlock at gunpoint in a far more mature space program, because setups don’t matter. But by that logic, APOLLO 13 would have worked equally well if the problem had been that a dying gryphon smashed into the ship. Who cares where it came from, deal with the now.

    I think #1 is the better lesson. Is APOLLO 13 structured in a way to support the idea that things may go wrong? Well, one astronaut gets the measles and has to be scratched from the mission. The second-stage engine cuts off prematurely. The LOX tank explodes, another is leaking.

    The idea that malfunctions and other problems happen and have to be worked around is part of the story. So I don’t think we need to show the exact chain of circumstances behind it. However, if Chekov’s control panel suddenly blew out in an episode of STAR TREK, a story in which the possibility of ongoing equipment failures is not established (problems happen as a result of battle, of low dilithium, etc, but not just out of the blue), then we’d expect an explanation. The Enterprise had just been tuned up at a starbase, maybe, little glitches are happening everywhere and Scotty’s furious at what those butchers did to his systems.

    There’s a structural set-up in APOLLO 13. There’d be one in our hypothetical TREK episode. There’s one in TCE, but it doesn’t make much sense, at least not to those who feel the story doesn’t work.

    So, perhaps, the analogy might be that in APOLLO 13, the panel blows out and we’re told it’s because NASA had hired capybaras as engineers, but don’t worry about that, it’s the “now” that matters.

    I think viewers would consider that a flaw.

  12. The idea that malfunctions and other problems happen and have to be worked around is part of the story. So I don’t think we need to show the exact chain of circumstances behind it.

    But the idea that security protocols could be lax is so foreign that the story fails if one doesn’t detail that in the story? I don’t buy that. You’re arguing that non-foolproof security and safety protocols are so rare that they are the equivalent of a gryphon crashing into a spaceship, and that just doesn’t stand up as a comparison.

    We know that there are lax security protocols and safety computations even in situations that are life and death. It would have cost Ford $11 per Pinto to upgrade its fuel system. They didn’t do it because they figured that the injuries and deaths that would result were an acceptable loss in comparison with implementing the fix – and they had a pretty good idea that such injuries and deaths would occur. This sort of thing happens all the time in the real world, with mature technologies that are in everyday use, but somehow in this one story it is entirely unbelievable? That’s almost absurd.

  13. But the idea that security protocols could be lax is so foreign that the story fails if one doesn’t detail that in the story?

    Yes. That they could be that lax, on that steady a basis, yes.

    You’re arguing that non-foolproof security and safety protocols are so rare that they are the equivalent of a gryphon crashing into a spaceship,

    No, I’m arguing that “just deal with the now” is a faulty defense of a bad setup.

    It would have cost Ford $11 per Pinto to upgrade its fuel system. They didn’t do it because they figured that the injuries and deaths that would result were an acceptable loss in comparison with implementing the fix – and they had a pretty good idea that such injuries and deaths would occur.

    And if you wrote a story that depended completely on a car exploding in a rear-end collision in 1974, you’d probably bring it up. You wouldn’t just figure that the audience will suss out that this car must have been a Pinto.

    Not to mention that the Pinto was the subject of the largest automotive recall in history up until that date, because people didn’t just shrug their shoulders when it came out, and say, “Well, it says in the Driver’s Handbook not to get hit from behind, so it’s all the fault of those cruel laws of physics.” They blamed Ford, they sued Ford, and things got dealt with.

    But here, what’s at risk isn’t the occasional customer — it’s trained pilots, valuable equipment belonging to the company, and entire colonies. And it’s been going on so long that they actually know roughly how often pilots will encounter it. So it’s a pretty long-established occurrence.

    The problem with the Pinto started to be noticed in 1973, and the recall was 1977. Not exactly the sort of thing we shrug our shoulders at and blame on cruel physics. We blamed the manufacturer, and made them fix it.

    This sort of thing happens all the time in the real world, with mature technologies that are in everyday use,

    Not if the Pinto is your example, it doesn’t.

    Also, remember: It completely changes the theme of the story. If you blame it on the company being lax, because companies do that, as witness how the Ford Pinto is still an explosion risk and still being manufactured and all, then “the cold equations” are the equations of profit and loss, and they’re cold because the space liner company are a bunch of assholes who don’t mind if pilots get killed, ships crash and colonies die because a stowaway actually thought to bring a gun.

    That’s not the story Godwin meant to tell, and not the one he claims to be telling. So even if the reason for the problem is that we’re supposed to intuit that this is a wacko-libertarian space future, it’s still a flaw with the story, because Godwin doesn’t want to tell us that men are uncaring and cruel. He wants to tell us that nature is.

    But it’s not unavoidable nature that’s guilty, if we make those assumptions, any more than it’s unavoidable nature that is guilty of making Pinto gas tanks explode.

  14. So, perhaps, the analogy might be that in APOLLO 13, the panel blows out and we’re told it’s because NASA had hired capybaras as engineers, but don’t worry about that, it’s the “now” that matters.

    I think viewers would consider that a flaw.

    I’d watch the hell out of a movie featuring capybara engineers.

  15. @PhilRM: This is why Pacific Rim, for example, completely failed to work for me: if you can kill kaiju by punching them in the head with your giant robot, or cutting them in half with your giant robot’s giant sword, then you can kill them far more directly and simply by blowing them to pieces with missiles and torpedoes. (The movie isn’t even internally consistent, as near the climax they kill several kaiju with a nuclear detonation. Not that I cared at that point.

    See, this is a great way to phrase it: the movie failed to work for you.

    OTOH, it worked great for me! I was never a Godzilla or monster movie fan until I moved in with a major Godzilla/monster/Jurassic Park fan whose enthusiasm has proved to be contagious: and above and beyond that, though I had a doubt or two at the first preview, I was so THERE for Idris Elba (“We are cancelling the apocalypse!), and for Rinko Kikuchi (ALL the feels, and her character inspired the Mako Mori test, a complement to the Bechdel test), and the big robots punching it out with the kaiju were cool, and the two scientists dudes were an unexpected and entirely amazing pleasure to watch. And yeah, there was a little voice in my head going at one point something like “they’re building walls but cancelling the robot program that seems ridiculous”) but there is such a thing as the willing suspension of disbelief (from Coleridge’s 1817 essay on poetic faith) that operates here. And of course different people have different things that they are willing to suspend disbelief for (as with every literary or artistic work, responses are immensely subjective)! I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief for PR–in part because the rewards were so rich.

    Not so with TCE–no rewards, and too many things I’m supposed to disbelieve.

    Another link somewhat connected: if the popular and many official historical narratives have excluded (white) women from participation in science in the U.S., even more so have African-American women been excluded: and yes, VOILA!: Hidden Figures (which I’ve seen a few scattered previews of, and one poster without a date on it in our local movie theatre AND YET! OMG! Black women mathemeticians working at NASA! I can hardly wait.

  16. The “lax safety protocols in real life therefore story works” is not convincing me for different reasons than Kurt B. discusses (although I was nodding along all the way through his excellent post!).

    There’s a reason that “truth is stranger than fiction” is a useful cliche: I mean, I read a lot of feminist dystopias, and NONE of them came up with anything like Trump. I’m not sure anybody would “believe” it! (The closest is probably Tepper’s Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.)

    And when my beginning creative writing students try to defend their work with “this really happened to me,” my response is more or less, that doesn’t matter–if your story depends on your reader having the exact same experience and responses you do, then you’ve failed. You need to set it up better and convince them it could happen, not come along afterwards and says “it really did” (or even “I didn’t intend it that way”).

    I still remember one young woman who was immensely disappointed that I told her that as far as I knew, there was no way she could make every reader get the message she wanted out of her story (this was after the first round of workshopping in the class–I emphasize strongly that the best peer response starts with a description of what the reader sees/gets out of the story because there is always variation.)

  17. Yes. That they could be that lax, on that steady a basis, yes.

    Or, more specifically: If you’re going to write a story that in order to function depends on a company being corporate greedheads on a Ford Pinto/Proctor & Gamble toxic shock tampons level, you should acknowledge in the story that it’s what’s happening.

    And if you don’t, and instead overtly and explicitly blame their sloppy greedheaded policies entirely on physics, then that’s a story flaw.

  18. @Aaron

    I understand what you’re saying, but at the same time I’m reminded of the quote (and damned if I can remember who said it) which states that “fiction has to make more sense than real life.” Crazy things happen in real life all the time that I wouldn’t accept in a story.

  19. I’d likely be in for a movie about capybara engineers, but not if it was meant to be semi-accurate history of the space program.

    I was going to do a breakdown analysis of Greg’s three points, but it would come across as remarkably similar to Kurt Busiek’s. I already mentioned that fridge logic comes in multiple degrees of severity, though, and that I feel some of those variants do ruin stories, so this should be a surprise to no-one.

  20. That’s a lot of assumptions not in the text there. …
    The same holds for a pre-flight check list. Perhaps he did have one, and she got into the closet after he checked that, and he didn’t bother to check it again simply because it would have been a minor hassle. Perhaps he skipped portions of the check list, just because he was lazy.

    But it IS in the text that the story is written exclusively from the point of the view of the pilot and his profoundly deep sense of guilt about spacing the girl. He feels guilty even though his own mind and even the universe at large in the form of his superior officer radioing him from the mothership go out of their way to reassure him that he has done absolutely nothing wrong from beginning to end and that nothing he did or failed to do led to this death. Even the NAME of the story reassures us that the girl’s death is the fault of The Cold Equations of physics – not the warm, feeling human who will be haunted by the death.

    But if the story is so obviously set up to make all those warm humans basically guilty of this (and many other) deaths by their carelessness – and never even give a thought to that carelessness (by the pilot feeling guilt for something he really WAS responsible for, like having a moment of agonizing guilt about forgetting to check the closet before sealing the hatch, or the CO dressing down that pilot for skipping this essential step), then what we get is the impression that this stowaway, past stowaways and future stowaways are all doomed by an organization which is determined not to take any measures that might reduce such mortality because they prefer to pass the buck of their responsibility onto the indifferent universe rather than examine their own sloppiness. That is, the pilot and his fleet are the villains of the story – when the story is transparently trying to present them as heroes…which is why this story doesn’t work for me.

    Oddly enough, I didn’t have as much of a problem with Nightfall. I did buy the premise were people essentially like humans except they have the vulnerability of the fear of darkness which leads to mental dysfunction when in darkness too long and worse when suddenly presented with the unfathomable AFTER some time spent in the vulnerable state. Wasn’t that much of a stretch to me except for some time afterwards I wondered what kind of an advanced civilized society could evolve without artificial light. Was EVERY mine a strip mine? Is it even possible for an advanced technological society to evolve with that restriction?

  21. The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. Others have already posted variations of that, but that happens to be the one I like. 😉

    The events in Apollo 13 don’t happen because of sustained lax Ness on the part of the entire organization that anyone watching realizes they didn’t bother to fix because lives are cheaper than good engineering. If they had, and the movie had ignored that elephant in the room, people would object strenuously.

    If a movie were made about the Challenger explosion that didn’t acknowledge the contributing effects of the O rings, the cold, and Reagan’s desire to have the launch go off on time, people would object, strongly.

    Physics wouldn’t have killed the girl in TCE if the pilot and/or a string of people behind him had done their jobs in a common sense way.

  22. Star Trek has an institutional problem with audience expectation, because most of them are aware that if they so much as show Chekov’s control panel in the first act, it is obliged to go off before the end of the show.

  23. @robinareid: I wouldn’t dream of dissing someone else’s enjoyment of a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters! And there were certainly elements of the movie that I liked – I’m pretty much always there for Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi was great (have you seen Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter? Excellent film, although very sad), and of course Ron Perlman.

    Although I do feel compelled to point out that Coleridge did a lot of laudanum, which may have considerably aided his willing suspension of disbelief.

    ETA: Kip W, please accept this additional internet.

  24. And it’s been going on so long that they actually know roughly how often pilots will encounter it. So it’s a pretty long-established occurrence.

    Sure. And they know how to deal with it: Space the intruder and move on, because its cheaper than the alternatives.

  25. He feels guilty even though his own mind and even the universe at large in the form of his superior officer radioing him from the mothership go out of their way to reassure him that he has done absolutely nothing wrong from beginning to end and that nothing he did or failed to do led to this death.

    Here’s the thing: Perhaps he did do nothing wrong. Perhaps he followed all of the safety procedures and she got on the ship anyway. We know that this sort of thing happens in real life all the time: People follow all of the procedures correctly and still something goes wrong. They didn’t do anything wrong, and yet there is still a disaster. The criticisms all assume “I could have fixed that, with my hindsight, knowing what was going to happen”, but that’s entirely unconvincing as an argument. Sure, I could figure out fixes to all kinds of situations that crop up in books by going back and saying “Well, the characters should have done this prescient thing that would have solved that problem they were going to have in the future”.

    And most of these criticisms are entirely outside the scope of the story. Take the Challenger example given above. Suppose someone wanted to write a short story inspired by that disaster in which a part not properly tested (and which everyone involved knew was not properly tested for the conditions of the launch) failed and caused the loss of a ship and the death of several people. The story focuses on the grief and anguish of the people left behind, telling their story. If the story doesn’t explain in detail the testing process of the O-ring and the politics surrounding the launch that led to the loss of life, does that mean the story fails? I don’t think so.

    I’m going to say this as a final statement: I’ve read all of the objections. I’ve read all of the “but they should have had this precaution to prevent this from happening” digressions. and in my opinion they are all categorically idiotic to the point that I am embarrassed for the people making them.

    And so the last thing I’m going to say on that issue is simply this: My assessment is that you’re wrong. Bluntly and flatly wrong. I find your analyses to be simply silly and not worth bothering with any more.

  26. Aaron on December 14, 2016 at 5:00 pm said:

    Here’s the thing: Perhaps he did do nothing wrong. Perhaps he followed all of the safety procedures and she got on the ship anyway.

    I think it still reads more like that the pilot is in a messed up psychological experiment.

    Scenario 2.3 ‘stowaway’ is a young woman. Subjects eject the ‘stowaway’ on 93% of trials. Short-term psychological injury in 80% of subjects regardless of choice.
    Scenario 2.4 ‘stowaway’ is a elderly man. etc

  27. Here’s the thing: Perhaps he did do nothing wrong. Perhaps he followed all of the safety procedures and she got on the ship anyway. We know that this sort of thing happens in real life all the time:.

    Sure it does. But imagine if you read about a story from the point of view of a doctor’s inner thoughts sadly watching a patient of his (or hers) die, thinking about the terrible things that the unstoppable Methcillin-resistant Staphiloccocus Aureus is doing to the poor young patient’s inner systems as they shut down one by one, the doctor’s pain as s/he watches the poor young patient’s family harbor painful hope that the physician knows are futile under the inexorable math of the multiplying bacteria before bidding the patient farewell, while the physician’s superiors reassure him that he’s done his best and nothing was really his fault.

    Now imagine the same story – but you read a beginning in which the physician did not wash his hands before changing the patient’s surgical dressing, and spends absolutely NO thought on this lapse, even though with ALL the knowledge he shows off of medicine during his inner monologue it should be as perfectly clear as it is to the most ignorant reader that it is something he SHOULD have done – it’s soap and water, not rocket science! – and IMO, that’s a TOTALLY different story about complacent human fallibility, not the cruelty of nature. Yes, the doctor DID do something wrong! We SAW the doctor do it!

    IMO, it’s the same here. Yes, it’s in a rocket, but the failure has nothing to do with the rocket. It was a closet door and a hatch. The closet should have been checked before the hatch was closed. That obvious and simple. No rocket science needed to see that. The story presents a set of deadly bumblers as heros without questioning – therefore, IMO, the story fails, to me.

    I’m sorry if you think that’s silly. But since the author was not allowed by the editor to write the ending he actually wanted, I’ve a hunch the author might have also thought his published ending silly, no matter how much acclaim it later received.

    http://www.challzine.net/23/23fivedays.html

  28. Aaron:

    Sure. And they know how to deal with it: Space the intruder and move on, because its cheaper than the alternatives.

    Except that doesn’t make sense, for reasons already covered.

    And it also makes it the fault of company policy, not physics, which undermines the intent of the story.

    Here’s the thing: Perhaps he did do nothing wrong. Perhaps he followed all of the safety procedures and she got on the ship anyway.

    Then maybe the story should say so. If you’re going to point the finger of blame squarely at physics, and you want it to be convincing, you need to shut off the obvious other avenues of guilt, not just assume the reader will do it all for you.

    It isn’t the fault of physics. It’s the fault of sloppy security, which you say should be assumed to be the result of a penny-pinching company. If that’s so, it torpedoes the story.

    If the story doesn’t explain in detail the testing process of the O-ring and the politics surrounding the launch that led to the loss of life, does that mean the story fails?

    If the story blames the failure on something else, without ever mentioning the O-ring, then it’d be a pretty dishonest story.

    I don’t mind if you think the objections silly; I think the defenses are silly, so we’re even there. I’m used to people liking stories I don’t, and vice versa.

    Jayn:

    But since the author was not allowed by the editor to write the ending he actually wanted, I’ve a hunch the author might have also thought his published ending silly, no matter how much acclaim it later received.

    I think Godwin was resisting that ending because he’d stolen the story idea from an earlier story, and was trying to cover his tracks. The earlier version had that “cold equations” ending, and Campbell, not knowing Godwin was stealing the story, properly argued that without that ending, there’s no story.

    He apparently didn’t have a problem with the setup, but hey, so it goes.

    But whether Godwin swiped it from “A Weighty Decision” in WEIRD SCIENCE #13 (by Al Feldstein & Wally Wood) or “Precedent” by E.C. Tubb, it looks like he was trying to write a variant on the premise and Campbell forced him back into the story structure he was trying to veer away from. Leading Algis Budrys to say, “‘The Cold Equations’ was the best short story that Godwin ever wrote and he didn’t write it”.

  29. @Kurt: But whether Godwin swiped it from “A Weighty Decision” in WEIRD SCIENCE #13 (by Al Feldstein & Wally Wood) or “Precedent” by E.C. Tubb, it looks like he was trying to write a variant on the premise and Campbell forced him back into the story structure he was trying to veer away from. Leading Algis Budrys to say, “‘The Cold Equations’ was the best short story that Godwin ever wrote and he didn’t write it”.

    SRS?

    I did not know!!!!! And I think I’ve read some of the academic stuff on hard sf and don’t remember seeing anything about this in there.

    I haz no time at the moment but I’m making a note to followup just because this is fascinating. *goes to google to see what I can find*

    Well enough known for an online cliffs notes: https://www.enotes.com/topics/the-cold-equations

    I wonder how long ago I read the stuff on hard sf I’m thinking about (maybe late 1990s)?

    Yep–lots of stuff linked from a Black Gate article.

    *fascinating*

  30. Fascinating posts by Paul Kincaid at his blog (where he posted a reprint of a critique of the story and got major response): and then analyzed the response (I got to Kincaid from the Black Gate article).

    https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/reprint-the-cold-equations/

    https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/reprint-hard-right/

    https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/hard-sf-redux/

    https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/analysis/

  31. @robinareid: you might try not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. I did not say the story was not sexist; if I had used that word, I would have said that it was not conspicuously more sexist than other work of that time, because such sexism was so pervasive. You acknowledge the ethos that I describe, then nitpick around the edges, ignoring my statement that men couldn’t see the facts even closeup. In case it’s not clear, I’m a year older than the story; I don’t claim to have a complete perspective, but I picked up some info along the way — including fringe-helping with a study on mistreatment of female civilian employees that the Pentagon attempted to suppress because it made them look so bad. And I’m quite aware there were \some/ women in the sciences — I hung around MIT long enough to know some of its history — but I was speaking of the broad sweep (which your Yaszek quote acknowledges) rather than the edges.

    @Kurt: thank you for calling Greg on his twisting my words; I’d given up reading his defenses.

    @robinareid: re no feminist dystopias resembling Trump: any idea why? Could it be that non-specific dystopias (e.g., It Can’t Happen Here) have already covered such a case? Many of the few FD I’ve read assume a working economy; if Trump becomes the third Republican to blow up the economy through sheer pigheaded stupidity, we’re all going to be toast.

    @Jayn: fascinating point about mining in “Nightfall”.

  32. @Chip Hitchcock
    Of the examples for possible male stowaways I gave, I’d argue that a teenaged boy would be as much of an innocent victim as a teenaged girl. Ditto for an old man who only wants to visit his family, he’s maybe stupid, but certainly innocent. The only non-innocent victim would be the criminal on the run – unless it’s a wrongfully accused person like Dr. Kimble (which would have made for a much better story BTW).

    But if a teen girl with zero knowledge of physics was Godwin’s and Campbell’s idea of the ultimate innocent victim, this is quite telling, not to mention highly sexist. And yes, the story would still have been sexist, if the girl had been saved.

    Never mind that, as robinareid pointed out, there were women scientists and engineers working in the 1950s and 1960s, including women of colour.

    @Greg Hullender
    If the genders had been reversed or both pilot and stowaway had been of the same gender, the sexist aspects of the story would have been avoided. However, the fact that the set-up is badly rigged to achieve the desired conclusion would still marr the story, at least for me (and apparently for many others here).

    @Aaron
    You’re right that corporations are lax about safety to cut costs all the time. There are plenty of examples, such as the Ford Pinto, the Contergan/Thalidomide scandal, the Dalkon shield, the Duogynon/Primodos scandal, the scandal surrounding faulty breast implants, etc… (and it’s telling that the victims were mostly women and unborn children).

    However, in the real world, avoidable injuries and deaths due to lax safety standards are eventually exposed and lead to lawsuits, settlements and huge public outcries. So while it’s not inconceivable that lax safety standards could lead to a Cold Equations type scenario, I for one cannot believe that there wasn’t a public outcry as well as investigations, lawsuits, etc.. after the first couple of times stowaways managed to sneak on board and were spaced. In order for people to simply shrug and accept that stowaways get thrown out of the airlock and blame everything on the unforgiving laws of physics requires a society of sociopaths and there is no indication that The Cold Equations is set in such a society.

    Never mind that I would also expect protests and resistance from the pilots who I’d assume don’t want to be turned into killers. One real world comparison are train drivers who have a decent chance of running over a suicidal person or – less frequently – someone who gets stuck on the train tracks for some reason and who see what’s happening, but can normally do nothing about it, because by the time they see someone on the tracks it’s too late to stop. However, such suicides and accidents are considered a huge risk of depression and permanent disability for train drivers and railroad companies are doing their best to prevent such incidents and offers counselling to affected train drivers.

    The pilot in “The Cold Equations” is a lot more culpable in the girl’s death than a train driver who runs over a suicidal person. Yet the story expects us to accept that hardly any attempts are made to prevent such tragedies and pilots are expected to just shrug it off rather than suffer psychological trauma. And sorry, that doesn’t work for me, unless we really are dealing with a society of sociopaths.

    @robinareid
    I love Pacific Rim as well and have no problems suspending my disbelief, even if the premise is frankly ridiculous. And indeed I wouldn’t have accepted kaiju showing up in – say – Apollo 13 or Gravity or The Martian – but Pacific Rim states its ridiculous premise in the first few minutes. So it’s clear from the start that the premise is ridiculous, so we’re free to enjoy Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, the highly underrated Burn Gorman and Ron Perlman being awesome and kicking kaiju arse.

  33. “There’s a reason that “truth is stranger than fiction” is a useful cliche: I mean, I read a lot of feminist dystopias, and NONE of them came up with anything like Trump.”

    Try the Tim Robbins movie Bob Roberts.

  34. Greg Hullender: Your repeated claims (with zero proof) that I pretend to speak for others without their permission is a personal attack

    <sigh> I was really, really, hoping that you would not be so foolish as to go there, yet again.

    I’ve repeatedly called you out for presuming to speak for other fans when the comment you have made doing that is sitting right there. Other Filers have repeatedly done so as well. Your continual refusal to acknowledge that you are insisting that you know what people are thinking, when it differs from what they have actually said – and when they have then spoken up and said that it’s not what they’re thinking – is astounding.

    And then there are the times when you’ve told Filers what they “have to do” in terms of Hugo nominating and voting, or in terms of reading and analyzing SFF stories.

    Pointing that out is not a “personal attack” by me. Although you clearly feel that anything which points out a lapse in behavior on your part is a “personal attack”, my stance is that it’s not a “personal attack” when someone points out a fact – which it is. If it’s a fact that you don’t like hearing, then perhaps you should reconsider your own behavior instead of blaming others.

    Note that I didn’t say anything about “permission”. That’s a weasel word inserted by you, which I presume is intended to try to technically claim that you haven’t ever actually presumed to speak for others.

    But okay. Here’s your proof:

    There was the time you explained why Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch novels really didn’t work for any of us fans.

    Greg Hullender: The funny thing about the use of pronouns in the Imperial Radch series is that it was just a gimmick, and, truth be told, it was a gimmick that didn’t actually work. It was supposed to make the reader think of the Radch as having ambiguous gender, but what it actually did was cause us to think of everyone except Seivarden as female. Then, whenever we saw Seivarden referred to as “she,” it popped us out of the story.

    McJulie: Say “me” instead of “us” and I won’t argue.

    Me: I’d really appreciate it if you’d not presume to speak for other people here. I don’t agree with what you’ve said at all (and most of the things I’ve seen other people say here don’t agree with it, either).

    junego: I disagree with you about this, as some others have also. You’re not speaking for me and I doubt you have special knowledge of what Leckie’s intentions were in using this device.

  35. And then there was the time you accused me of being disingenuous and claimed that I didn’t actually mean what I said, and I asked you twice to justify that claim, and you said… nothing — nor did you ever apologize for essentially calling me a liar…

    … all while telling all of us fans what we think the Hugo Awards are about:

    Me: The verbiage on the Jovian site makes the same mistake as Justin Landon and a whole bunch of Puppies have made: insisting that the Hugo Awards have to represent the preferences of all SFF fans, rather than those of the Worldcon members, to whom the Hugo Awards belong.

    Drive-by Commenter: I feel this is a little disingenuous… <lengthy stretch of verbiage which completely fails to explain why my statement is disingenuous>

    Me: I am sure that you can understand why I am more than a little unhappy that you call what I’ve said “disingenuous” without then proceeding to give a legitimate rationale as to why. . . . What I said was that the Hugo Awards represent the preferences of the members of Worldcon, rather than those of all SFF fans. And I’ll thank you not to twist my words in that way again.

    Greg Hullender: To be fair, I agree that the statement was disingenuous. To wit, it is a semantically true statement that is pragmatically false… In this case, the Hugo Award is prestigious precisely because Worldcon is widely believed to represent fandom. We all (almost all) believe this–even the puppies. That’s why we argue that the puppies claim to represent a silent majority of fans was refuted by the final vote. That would make no sense if we didn’t really believe that Worldcon represented all of fandom.

    Me: Several times now, you’ve presumed to speak for others here on File770, and for other fans. I really wish you would stop doing that. It reflects very badly on you — not least because, every time you’ve done it, you have most definitely not expressed my opinion. I don’t believe that Worldcon “reflects all of fandom”. I don’t believe that the Hugo Award is prestigious precisely because Worldcon is widely believed to represent fandom. I believe that the Hugo Award is prestigious precisely because it has consistently, over the decades, surfaced quality works. I see nothing in your post demonstrating that what I’ve said is false, and I see nothing in your post substantiating your claim that what I said was disingenuous.

    Meredith: I can’t speak for anyone else, but I say that because if the silent majority of fandom supported the Puppies there would have been signs of it at the voting end. Since there wasn’t, and the Puppies got resoundly whapped on the nose, the silent majority can’t be Puppies. That doesn’t require me to believe that Worldcon is representative of all of fandom.

    Hampus Eckerman: Absolutely do NOT agree…

    McJulie: I disagree — I think the issue of whether or not Worldcon fans are thought to represent “all of fandom” is a puppy straw man.

  36. And then there’s the time you tried to mansplain to me about why Pluto was no longer a planet, as if I was too stupid to have understood the explanation when the demotion first occurred, and then provided a link saying, “oh, ignore the math if it’s too hard for you”.

     
    And then there’s the time you accused me of writing a filk to “Money for Nothing” with the deliberate intent of specifically trying to hurt your personal feelings, at which point I again called you out on speaking for others, and you again denied having done so.

    Me: You know, you’ve never once walked back, or apologized for, or even acknowledged other peoples’ response to any of the inappropriate things you’ve said on here. Whenever you’ve been called out on those things by commenters, you run away.

    Greg Hullender: I haven’t ever posted anything inappropriate on here. I’ve tried to respond to your campaign of personal attacks against me by ignoring you; that doesn’t amount to running away.

     
    to which other people pointed out, that yes, actually, you had:

    Tasha Turner: “You have said things a number of times speaking for all of us when you shouldn’t have as a number of us immediately disagreed with you. You’ve never apologized for doing so.”

    Meredith: “I’m not sure I ever saw you walk back on the times you claimed to speak for a group that you hadn’t consulted, no matter who called you on it.”

  37. And then there was the time that you said that fans can only say that they really do put quality over all other considerations if “What Price Humanity” wins the Best Novelette Hugo, but they can’t say that if it gets No Awarded:

    Greg Hullender: I think the biggest test of our principles will be the novelette “What Price Humanity?” since it was in “There Will Be War, volume X” from Castalia House. Yet objectively, I rate it higher than any other novelette on the list (I’ve read and reviewed them all). Anyone who really believes in voting for quality and ignoring the slaters has got to at least give it a fair chance.But I fear that most people won’t even read an RP pick from Castalia house, and that’s a real shame. I think that if “What Price Humanity?” were to actually win the Best Novelette Hugo then we’d be able to say that fans really do put quality over all other considerations.

    Tasha Turner: What is up with you thinking it’s ok to constantly tell others how to behave or what we all think and believe? Please, I’ve asked you nicely in the past, I’m asking again, Stop.

    Stevie: I do get pissed off when people tell me what to read, or not to read, to vote, or not to vote; my choices are my own. My objection is to anyone presuming to do so; in this respect I don’t distinguish between VD, Glen H, Greg et al. Anyone who thinks he has the right to order me to act in a certain way when it comes to nominating/voting Hugo works is delusional.

    Greg Hullender: Best Novelette is going force people to choose between voting strictly for quality vs. voting to punish the slates.

    (in other words, people who don’t vote for “What Price Humanity” are choosing to vote that way to punish the slates, and not because they think the story is not of a quality to win the award)

    snowcrash: Greg, I’m glad that you liked “What Price Humanity?”. But this constant insistence that you liking it is an objective statement of it’s superior quality is kinda tiresome, as is the whole insistence that people should vote by your method and metric.

    Stevie: you have spent a year trying to shoehorn fandom in general, and the bit of it that hangs arounf File770 in particular, into your binary world view, and I, as well as a lot of the other posters here, have strongly objected to you doing so, time and time again. You do not speak for me, and I have repeatedly wasted my time having to point out that you do not speak for me. You do not speak for other people and you have wasted their time since they too have had to frequently point out that you don’t speak for them. We could all have been doing much more interesting things than having to point out, yet again, that you do not speak for us. There is a very simple fix for this problem: you stop doing it, and we get on with our lives as we choose.

     
    aaaaannnnd, in utter denial of everything everyone has said about being tired of you speaking for them, you tell everyone that they are not willing to tolerate differing opinions and are therefore like Puppies:

    Greg Hullender: I have the feeling that it can be difficult to express a contrary opinion in File770. Some people always seem to take offense merely because you don’t think as they do. But if we can’t engage each other rationally when we disagree, then I’m not sure we’re that much better than the puppies.

  38. And here you are today, telling other Filers how they have to read and regard fiction, and them telling you that you’re wrong, and asking you to stop telling them what they think and what they have to do:

    Greg Hullender: But the complaint is very specifically “I swallowed your what-if, I was immersed in your story, it made me cry, and then when I thought about it, your what-if sucked.” Their complaint is quite the opposite of “I didn’t buy the what-if.” If you apply that rule consistently, you will have to stop reading SF–and most mainstream fiction too.

    PhilRM: Greg: No, that isn’t what they’re saying, at all… This is just absurd and completely unbelievable. Lecturing people on what their reaction to the story really was isn’t helping your argument.

    Lenora Rose: I’m one of your “They” who were saying, and that’s not even close to what I said.

    Me: That’s not my complaint, and it’s not Lenora Rose’s. Here you are, once again, presuming to speak for other fans as if you are in a position to do so (you’re not).

    Lis Carey: No, it’s not what JJ or Lenora said.

    Kurt Busiek: since you argue that if people don’t think the setup of “The Cold Equations” is convincing and apply the reasons for disliking it consistently, they will have to stop reading all SF and even mainstream fiction, I don’t think I need to remember the plot details of “Nightfall” to think that’s nonsense.

    Greg Hullender: I’m of the opinion that the usual arguments I hear presented against “The Cold Equations” are silly because no one would use those same arguments against other works of fiction. Anyone who did would discover that he/she was unable to read any fiction at all.

  39. Lenora Rose: the tendency JJ is trying to describe is that you often make statements of the form “X-group is saying…” “they feel…” or “fandom thinks…” followed by an assertion that several members of the group under discussion then state categorically that they disagree with.

    PhilRM: When I pointed out that I completely disagreed with you on the merits of the novella, you claimed that I was demanding that no one should be allowed to post anything that I disagreed with. I don’t really see how you could have gotten that from what I wrote, but I’m perfectly willing to accept that was simply a misunderstanding on your part of what I’d written. However, you certainly didn’t apologize when I said that was not at all what I was saying; in fact, you didn’t respond in any way, and vanished from the thread. And as Lenora just mentioned, this is hardly the first time that you have presumed to speak for other people.

    Cheryl S.: I’m another who has objected to what appeared to be you speaking for me. I don’t recall a response from you when I’ve pointed it out.

    PhilRm: you specifically claimed I was saying something that I was not… it certainly wasn’t the first time you’ve adopted a tone of “What the community should really do is…” and you can’t be surprised that many people find that extremely irritating.

    Greg Hullender: There’s just a group of people who cannot tolerate disagreement. It has nothing to do with how that disagreement is expressed.

    Kurt Busiek: I think it has quite a bit to do with how you express it, and I think you’re working very hard not to understand that.

    PhilRM: I don’t see anyway to read this comment except as you literally putting words in the mouths of Lenora Rose, and Red Wombat, and Kurt Busiek, not one of whom said anything resembling [that].

  40. Greg Hullender: If the what-if succeeds for you, and you enjoyed the story, then it’s unreasonable to come back later and poke holes in it. Not everyone agrees with this… If you do go back and poke holes, you’ll discover that very few fictional stories have a what-if that can withstand close analysis. If you really do believe that this is grounds for disliking a story, then you’ll end up enjoying very little fiction.

    Kurt Busiek: the idea that if one finds flaws with TCE, that amounts to such a close analysis that, if applied to other fiction, it will render fiction in general unenjoyable, seems absurd.

    Chip Hitchcock: Kurt: thank you for calling Greg on his twisting my words; I’d given up reading his defenses.

    Harold Osler: I find the attitude of “If you were really a decent person, you’d remove your name from the Hugo list” or deliberately mis-reading what was said more offensive.

  41. And then, just for a BONUS, there was the time you accused Mary Robinette Kowal of buying votes against the Puppies, something which you refused to retract, and for which you refused to apologize:

    Greg Hullender: we do know of at least one person who gave away ten supporting memberships to people to vote against the puppies.

    Kurt Busiek: Er, no. The memberships were given away to people who were then free to vote however they liked. Various Puppies said they’d ask for one, and Mary said they were absolutely welcome to; the point was to increase voting membership, not to establish a litmus test for who got the memberships. And there were enough people who matched or added to Mary’s offer that it would up a lot more than ten.

    Red Wombat: There’s nothing in any of that about voting against the puppies, and she talks at length about bringing people currently outside fandom (including puppies) into fandom.

    Aaron: There’s Did you actually read your link? Because Kowal very explicitly says “If you can afford it, I encourage you to buy a membership to WorldCon and become part of fandom. If you cannot afford it… I will buy a supporting membership to WorldCon for ten people, chosen at random, who cannot afford it. I am in no way constraining how that member nominates or votes.” Chosen at random, with no expectation of how the recipient will vote. The entire post is about inviting everyone in and having their voice heard. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of what you are saying it is.

    Hampus Eckerman: No, sorry to say this, but that is a lie. You link to a post were a person pays for memberships for people to do with as they please. Vote for puppies, against puppies or not at all. This was a campaign that got support from some puppies that also paid for memberships.

    Peace Is My Middle Name: We do *not* indeed, and now you have besmirched the name of a good and generous and decent person and I cannot let it stand. Ms. Kowal gave supporting memberships to people who could not afford them and asked her for them. She very explicitly said she would do this for *anybody* without checking their beliefs beforehand and without requiring anything whatsoever of the people she gave them to… It was a very sweet, very generous gesture on Kowal’s part. The lies — and they are nothing but — that the Puppies have spread about her generosity have been particularly revolting and malevolent.

  42. I resent like hell having to spend some of my precious reading time having to go back and dig up all this “proof” simply because you continually choose to ignore anything that you don’t want to hear.

    So Congratulations! Here it is, a nice extensive sampler of your chronic bad behavior, with citations, gathered nicely into one handy thread. Notice that plethora of Filer usernames, all but one of whom are not me???

    You know, I and other Filers wouldn’t have to keep pointing out your bad behavior on here if you would just 1) decide to learn how not to do it, and 2) learn how to acknowledge when you’ve done it, and apologize for it, instead of doubling- and tripling-down on it.

    I await your apology: for repeatedly presuming to speak for me and for others here — and then repeatedly denying having done so; for falsely accusing me of being disingenuous; and for your false accusations that I’ve posted “personal attacks” against you and “bullied” you in this, and other, threads.

    Oh, and while you’re at it, you should be posting an apology to the rest of the Filers, and to Mary Robinette Kowal as well.

    I am DONE wasting my precious reading time on providing you proof of what so many people have pointed out to you time, after time, after time. If (when) you pull this shit yet again, I will be copying and pasting the entirety of this into the new File770 thread. So you might want to think twice about pulling this shit ever again, because all you are going to be doing is incriminating yourself over and over. 😐

  43. It’s a good thing for the folks on the planet (as well as the pilot) that in The Cold Equations the problem was a stowaway that generated body heat rather than someone stashing their 100kg of drugs (at room temperature) in the closet. Without the heat gauge to make him look in the closet (since he’s apparently not bright enough to check it unprompted and there’s no preflight checklist), the pilot would have realized there was a problem only when he crashed on landing.

  44. @JJ: I remember those. :-/ The only thing missing from your epic proof was a mic drop. Anyway, I’m sorry you felt you had to spend so much time and energy on that, and I hope you have something different and fun planned as a detox!

    I forget if you read/enjoyed Behind the Throne, but if so, the sequel, After the Crown, just came out. Barnes & Noble reviewed it, but I’ll probably read the review after the book (which I’ll probably start after City of Blades). I’m not super spoiler-averse, but sometimes when I get into a book/series, I read fewer reviews about subsequent books ahead of time (maybe just me?). 🙂

  45. JJ:

    I do think you have done some bullying and personal attacks against Greg before. But it was at least half a year ago and probably longer and I find that I do not have your patience in searching through old threads. I’m also a believer in that the only way to get along is to actually forget about old things after a while unless it is a constant irritation (yep, forget about it if they stop doing it is also my solution to the puppy problem).

    I guess everyone of us can find someone here that have irritated them and have 4-5 examples of it. I really hate the internet in that way. It is make so much harder to let bygones be bygones when everyone will bring up old comments ad nausea. I do know that I myself have a temper and people could bring up a lot of old quotes where it got the better of me. If we did the same with tape recorders and ordinary conversations, humanity would be extinct in no time. :/

    While pissed off when it happens, I do think we will have to accept an amount of assholish or irritating behaviour from everyone. As long as it is not constant and without rest.

    With that said, begging for examples is to beg for dirt digging. :/

  46. Saying that JJ (or anyone) has bullied Greg is worthless without examples of what you consider to be that bullying. This is especially true in response to JJ providing the demanded examples of Greg claiming to speak for others or putting words in other people’s mouths.

    I’ve often felt he was doing that; I don’t always speak up about it. And with so many people having the same reaction to how he expresses “just expressing his opinion” it seems long past time for Greg to consider that it might be time for him to examine how he “expresses his opinion.” If multiple people have the same issue with how one communicates, the issue might really be with how one communicates, rather than with all those different people and how they receive one’s communication.

  47. I did not know!!!!! And I think I’ve read some of the academic stuff on hard sf and don’t remember seeing anything about this in there.

    I haz no time at the moment but I’m making a note to followup just because this is fascinating. *goes to google to see what I can find*

    Here’s a thread that I coincidentally read only a couple of weeks ago that discusses that aspect. It mentions that some of this info originates from some jerk called “Kurt Busiek.”

  48. Lis Carey:

    “Saying that JJ (or anyone) has bullied Greg is worthless without examples of what you consider to be that bullying.”

    Everything does not have to have value for everyone. I have stated what I think and that is good enough for me.

  49. Okay, since the TCE thread is still kicking (or at least very fresh for a corpse), a few random thoughts – some of which I didn’t see reflected:

    1. I don’t hold the sexism against the story. I chalk it up to a perception that with all else being equal, casting an innocent young woman as the victim is more effective at driving home the Tragic Situation than an innocent young man would be. Not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad – merely that the perception existed then and still exists now. (I don’t like spinach, but I won’t deny its existence.)

    2. I find considerable humor in the notion that TGE holds the Puppy Seal of Approval while being a prime example of Forcing A Message Makes Fiction Bad.

    3. Talking about security features and preflight checklists is all well and good, but I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that an even more basic set of equations is completely ignored in the story. The stowaway’s mass would throw off the EDS’s trajectory from the moment it launched. Everyone’s going to be under immense pressure to make sure the course is true before the Stardust pops back into hyperspace; they’ll be watching his initial readouts like hawks. I judge it as far more likely that the scenario would actually end with him reporting the problem as he clears the hangar, immediately returning to the Stardust to clear the apparent malfunction, and dumping the stowaway there to pay a stiff fine on top of compensating the ship for the wasted fuel. Furthermore, she shall have no tea for the remainder of her journey.

    The rest of the word count could be taken up by the stern lectures delivered to the hapless stowaway, perhaps punctuated by a chase scene as she breaks away and attempts to commandeer one of the other EDS vessels. 🙂

  50. Just as Aaron convincingly argued for, there are number of times humans will skip on regulations for security. Someone could stove away. But for same reason, humans could skip on any regulations. Bringing extra stuff on board. Failing when filling fuel. Or whatever.

    Which is why you have safety margins. Margins that will allow everything to function even if there is some extra weight, some extra oxygen used or whatever.

    Creating space ships with almost no margin at all would be to trust all humans aboard to do nothing wrong in calculations or what they put aboard. That they thought that “the human factor” could be eliminated.

    Which is kind of stupid.

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