(1) INTERNET HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Chuck Wendig tees off on a Huffington Post UK editor who preens about not paying their 13,000 contributors.
Because it isn’t “authentic.” To pay writers.
You toxic tickledicks.
You venomous content-garglers.
You thieves, you brigands, you media lampreys.
Let us expose this hot nonsense for what it is: a lie meant to exploit writers and to puff up that old persistent myth about the value of exposure or the joy of the starving artist or the mounting power of unpaid citizen journalism.
The lie is this: writing is not work, it is not fundamental, it is a freedom in which you would partake anyway, and here some chucklefuck would say, haw haw haw, you blog at your blog and nobody pays you, you post updates on Twitter and nobody pays you, you speak words into the mighty air and you do it for free, free, free. And Huffington Post floats overhead in their bloated dirigible and they yell down at you, WE BROADCAST TO MILLIONS and DON’T YOU WANT TO REACH MILLIONS WITH YOUR MEAGER VOICE and THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU.
But it is an opportunity for them, not for you.
But it seemed to me after a strong start Wendig’s rant winds down and loses headway:
Writing is work. Most things begin with writing. Though I find writing a pleasure, it is also a thing that requires great mental effort. It is not mere content — that word said almost dismissively, as if it is a synonym for styrofoam peanuts. (And by the way: you actually have to buy styrofoam peanuts. They aren’t free unless you rob them from boxes shipped to you.) Content is not slurry. It’s not protein goo. It’s not mud or air or some readily available resource…
Intrinsic value and market value are different things. While I don’t think Chuck Wendig believes all writing has the same market value, or necessarily any market value, it seems to me he has conflated spiritual and economic value in this paragraph.
Wendig is right that Huffington Post capitalizes on uncompensated labor, of course. If HuffPo is making money, that establishes that the content collectively has some market value. Since none of that value flows through to the contributor, you can argue an injustice.
But are all these contributors trying to launch writing careers? I do agree that if somebody is trying to be a pro writer, which not all HuffPo contributors necessarily are, they should be working on material that has a paying market.
(2) THAT GETTING PAID THING. In a series of tweets, John Scalzi thanked Wendig for doing the heavy lifting today, and tossed in a few more points:
I should note I am only very rarely asked to write for free these days. Set enough people on fire for asking, everyone else catches on.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) February 18, 2016
Publicists: Please don't "invite" me to participate in another author's blog tour. You're not doing me a favor. It's the other way around.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) February 19, 2016
(3) WRITING VS. WIDGETS. Elizabeth Bear tells about detoxing as a writer, metaphorically speaking, in “if you live for something, you’re not alone”.
One of the things I’ve realized that I need to work on in order to develop a healthier relationship with my job involves certain toxic aspects of the professional writing/publishing culture that I’ve done an overly good job of internalizing. And I’m trying to scrape it out of my soul, because in the long term it winds up being the opposite of productive when dealing with a creative career.
Some of that is a competition thing: “Writer X turns in three books a year and I’m a slacker if I don’t, too!” And that’s not great, honestly, and the sheer pressure to produce isn’t great, either, and doesn’t necessarily lead to good work. One has to think up new things to say between books, after all, or one ends up writing the same book over and over again. No use in that.
I think there’s a certain bravado of culture among may writers that is actively toxic in a lot of ways. And it’s tied to the NaNoWriMo kind of mode of “produce a bunch of stuff really fast, lather rinse repeat” pressure, and also the “THIS JOB SUCKS AND WE’RE WARRIORS FOR DOING IT” thing. It’s this weird Puritan machismo in suffering.
I mean, you don’t learn to write well by turning out 50K in a month once a year. It’s the two pages a day or whatever that get you there. Constant practice, as with any art. And mammals don’t respond well to punishment for performance. If we do a thing and the result is horrible, we generally avoid doing that thing again
(4) STARSHIPPING. From the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Principium, Issue 12, February 2016 [PDF file]. The overview begins —
In this edition our guest introduction is by Gill Norman. Gill is a former director of i4is. She has helped us become the reasonably well organised body that we now are. Her thoughts here are on the necessity of human engagement in Interstellar Studies and space in general, Space: It’s all about people. She tells us how we need to engage resources and talents from all who feel our outward urge. Scientists and engineers are essential but so are entrepreneurs, PR experts and, of course, the best administrators we can find!
(5) FRAUD AT ICE CREAM COUNTER. “Astronaut ice cream is a lie”!
Astronaut ice cream — did it really fly? Vox’s Phil Edwards investigates, with the help of the Smithsonian and an astronaut.
(6) MOVING DAY. “China displaces nearly 10,000 humans for huge telescope in search for aliens” reports Asia One.
China will move nearly 10,000 people to make way for the world’s largest radio telescope which promises to help humanity search for alien life, state media reported on Tuesday.
It’s compensating them less than $2,000 each to relocate.
(7) CONGRATULATIONS: Becky Thomson and Tom Veal, friends for over 45 years, have announced they are engaged to be married. The wedding will be on June 25, in Ft. Collins, Colorado.
(8) SIGNALLING THE BEST. At SF Signal, “Top 15 Sci-Fi Comics of 2015 (Becky Cloonan, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Greg Rucka, More” .
We don’t write many articles about comics here at SF Signal. That’s not to say that we dismiss comics as literature, though. Many of the contributors to this blog are huge fans of the medium, but sites devoted the field abound, and whether superheroes are actually science fiction or a form of fantasy that simply employs sci-fi conventions as convenient MacGuffins is debatable. The one notable exception to our comic freeze out is our annual list of the top science fiction comics of the year… which number exactly one, because last year’s list was our first.
To my surprise, though, last year’s list of the Top 14 Sci-Fi Comics of 2014 turned out to be one of our top ten most popular articles of 2015. So, back by popular demand, here’s a rundown of the best on-going science fiction comics to hit stands in 2015. It’s not exhaustive, because there were a LOT of great sci-fi series this year, but it’s what we consider these to be the cream of the crop. Feel free to debate or contribute your own suggestions in the comments below….
(9) KENYON/CLARE ARTICLE. Laura Miller at Slate writes with a fannish slant about “The Shadowhunters vs. the Dark-Hunters”.
A lawsuit between two best-selling authors involves fantasy, romance, charges of plagiarism, and fan fiction gone mainstream….
I have friends with deep roots in fandom—albeit without much connection to this particular sector of it—who believe that this is the true source of the undying animosity toward Clare: She left fandom “badly,” or, worse yet, she seemed to be repudiating her own origins in that community by changing the spelling of her name. Fan-fiction writers are routinely and viciously ridiculed and shamed for their hobby, which makes their communities especially insular and self-policing. “Back in the day,” Cleolinda Jones, a onetime regular at Fandom Wank, wrote to me, “we used to say, ‘The first rule of fanfic is, do not take money for your fanfic.’ Because the overriding fear was intellectual property holders would sue everybody and shut fandom down.” Rights-holders that once issued cease-and-desists against fan sites for using promotional photos now encourage fan art and other tributes, Jones says, but in the early 2000s, “I just really cannot overstate the sense of living on borrowed time by the grace of the IP holders.” This would explain why word-for-word plagiarism, as opposed to the transformative appropriation of another creator’s characters and setting, would seem a catastrophically reckless sin against the entire community.
Of course, Clare was reviled—and adored—in Harry Potter fandom even before the plagiarism charges against her came to light. And fan fiction itself has come a long way, spawning numerous real-world stars, fan writers such as E.L. James who move on to publish best-sellers. Clare was among the very first to do this. But the prospect of going pro and striking it rich seems to many fan-fiction writers like a serpent in the garden, corrupting what once felt like an idyllic, egalitarian gift-economy of like-minded dabblers. Once, fandom was a destination in itself; now it’s just another stepping stone for ambitious writers with their eyes on a richer prize. Like so much of the idealism of the early Internet, this, too, has become an offshoot of the marketplace. “I think what you don’t understand,” one friend told me when I expressed bafflement that Clare’s fellow fan-fiction writers didn’t view the popularity of her books as a feather in their collective cap, “is that a lot of them just feel used.” When I admitted that didn’t make sense to me, she added, “It’s hard to explain, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
(10) CON OR BUST. MidAmeriCon II has also pitched in:
MidAmeriCon II, August 17-21, 2016, Kansas City, MO, USA. MidAmeriCon is the 2016 WorldCon; its Guests of Honor are Kinuko Y. Craft, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Tamora Pierce, and Michael Swanwick, and its Toastmaster is Pat Cadigan.
MidAmeriCon has donated four memberships to Con or Bust, either in full or as upgrades to supporting memberships (if the recipient already has one).
(10) TAKING ART IN NEW DIRECTIONS. “Best Fan Artist?” asks Steven H Silver. GPS Doodles’ Stephen Lund creates figures by riding his bike in meatspace on routes tracked by Strava. Some are Star Wars-themed.
Wasn’t it Yoda, Grand Master of the Jedi Order, who said “Doodle. Or doodle not. There is no try”?
Well, doodle I must. And on May the 4th, there’s little choice but to doodle the Jedi Order’s most disciplined master of the Force. Good ol’ Yoda.
“Take a ride on the dark side”
Subject: ride along I’d like to request one. Can you come up with a suitable topic? Vader and his young apprentice perhaps?
It sounded like fun – not just the Star Wars theme but the idea of having someone along for the ride.
Kudos to Geoff, who stuck with me for the entire 4.5+ hours with no inkling whatsoever about what we were doodling. He was completely in the dark (“on the Dark Side,” I suppose you could say) until he got home afterward and downloaded the ride to Strava.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 18, 1930 – Clyde Tombaugh discovered planet Pluto, before it became a dwarf.
- February 18, 1977 – First unmanned test flight of space shuttle Enterprise mounted on another aircraft.
(12) ARE YOU SHOCKED? Kate Paulk’s award overview series continues with “Hugo Categories Highlight – The Short Fiction Categories”.
The problems of the Hugo voting/nominating population being relatively small and to a large extent long-term fans who could be termed the science fiction “establishment” (in the sense that many of these people have been to the same conventions for twenty and more years and helped each other run quite a few of them) have probably had years where they actually could read everything eligible with the result that they’ve seen practically everything.
This leads to a kind of weird inversion of killer mailbox syndrome (what happens to your marvelous tale about a killer mailbox when the slush reader has just read the third killer mailbox piece in the slush dive and the other three were horrible. The horrible gets imputed to your story because of the human mind’s extreme pattern-making and association ability) where something that isn’t all that great seems the freshest, most wonderful piece of the year because it’s sufficiently unlike the rest of the entries it stands out. This gets good-but-not-extraordinary works nominated and winning awards because they aren’t like everything else.
There’s no need for a conspiracy to explain some of the “winning the future” selections in recent years – this effect will do just as nicely, particularly since many of said voting group have very similar opinions about what constitutes a desirable message and from what I’ve seen are honestly shocked that their views of what is right and proper are not shared by the rest of fandom (two rules that we fans have to remember: sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice; and highly intelligent people are capable of extremely advanced stupidity).
(13) THE REBUTTAL. Vox Day at Vox Popoli makes additional arguments supporting his contention that he is a better editor than David Hartwell.
The SF-SJWs at File 770 are appalled at the fact that Tor Books and Castalia House author John C. Wright is willing to go on the record and state that, in his opinion, I am a better editor than the late, Hugo Award-winning editor David Hartwell:…
You see, I have perspective that they do not. Unlike them, I have seen Mr. Wright’s unedited prose. I know exactly what it looks like. And as it happens, it looks very much like the prose that appears in Mr. Wright’s novels that are published by Tor Books. John is an excellent writer; he is one of the greatest SF/F writers alive. But he writes very, very quickly and he is prone to what one might describe as an exuberant approach to writing. Last year, Castalia House offered him a contract for a 60k-word book. I am now reading the manuscript, which clocks in at nearly 200k words. Even those authors who don’t like Mr. Wright or his style might well contemplate suicide if they truly understood how speedily and effortlessly the man writes… and writes well. When I say he is a great writer, I do not do so lightly, nor do I do so because I am fortunate enough to publish some of his works. I say it out of pure envy and awe.
…. UPDATE: It appears my surmise about the extent to which Mr. Wright’s books were edited at Tor Books was correct, as per L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright
Just in case anyone wondered: John has tremendous respect for Mr. Hartwell, whom he admired, appreciated working with, and liked as a person. But Mr. Hartwell almost never made any changes to John’s manuscripts.
(14) ADMIRATION. John C. Wright’s contributions to the foregoing discussion included this compliment to another author:
I would have trouble editing George RR Martin’s books. Most of the comments here mock him, but he is an exquisitely skilled writer, a consummate writer. His writing is a little dark for me, but reread the opening prologue of GAME OF THRONES: the text establishes a fullfledged three dimensional character, a man who is realistic yet sympathetic, and who is snuffed out as a redshirt a few paragraphs later to show you how the monster works — and it comes as a surprise because usually the redshirts are not given a backstory. What in other hands would have been a boring B-movie horror scene in Martin’s is a masterful, and even moving, establishing scene. Now, to be frank, I have not read his last two volumes, and I may never, because he has killed off too many likable characters and is taking too long to get anywhere: but once the series is done, and I know it reaches a satisfying conclusion, I may revisit that decision. So Mr. Martin may be suffering from the victory disease, where some of his discipline lapses due to his popularity. Or he may be, as I am, an exuberant writer who likes his digressions.
(15) TROPE TRAP. At The Book Smugglers, Carlie St. George “examines the Sexy Douchecanoe trope” in “Trope Anatomy 101: Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him – I Kicked His Jerk Ass to the Curb”.
The Sexy Douchecanoe isn’t an official trope, as such; at least, it’s not one that I often find people analyzing, subverting, and/or railing against. It is one, however, that I run into constantly because, while they’re often unfairly associated with strapping, half-dressed men on paperback covers, Sexy Douchecanoes actually pop up in every medium and every genre. The first time I remember coming across one, I was maybe 20 and reading Naked in Death by JD Robb. At the time, I’d been interested in giving romance a go, but as I hadn’t read much of the genre, I wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I figured the best plan was to pick a romance that was also a murder mystery set in the future.
And maybe that plan would have been successful, if I hadn’t hated the love interest with the power of a thousand suns.
(16) MONSTER HIGH NOTE. Lady Gaga and Mattel are teaming to create a Monster High doll.
You know you’ve made it big when you’re commissioned by a major toy manufacturer to design a doll. That’s exactly what’s happened to Lady Gaga. The singer/actress is adding “toy designer” to her resume now with a forthcoming Monster High doll. Is there anything she can’t do? She’s designing the doll with her sister, costume designer Natali Germanotta. Which is totally fitting, given Gaga’s Mother Monster moniker.
https://twitter.com/LGMonsterFacts/status/698251609860485120
(17) THIRD MILLENNIUM. Part three of “Who Are Millennial Fans: An Interview with Louisa Stein” by Henry Jenkins at Confessions of an Aca-Fan.
[Louisa Stein] I mentioned above the TV series Supernatural’s ambivalent depictions of female fans over the years. Supernatural is a series that has a dynamic and rich transformative fandom, and the majority of those participating in the fandom are women. Supernatural fans, while expressing love for the series and its characters and potential, have long been critics of its gender and racial politics, and have spoken out at times about how they have felt misrepresented and even attacked by the series and its metatexts, for example, in response to a preview that declared the teenage girl the “ultimate monster.”
(18) STUBBY ON SPUDS. At Tor.com Stubby the Rocket says, “Matt Damon Has Replaced Sean Astin as the Face of Pop Cultural Potato Enthusiasm”. Yes, I guess he has…. (It’s a reference to this antique video from the dawn of YouTube.)
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, Brian Z., Dave Doering, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day redheadedfemme.]
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Re: HuffPost
I remember in the earlier days of free open source software, there were complaints that the movement was anti-capatalist, anti-American, and should be made illegal because it hurts the people and companies that are attempting to write programs for money. This argument was so successful that literally billions of devices today run on the free, open-source Linux operating system (including the free, open-source Linux variant known as “Android”), nobody expects to pay for a web browser any more, and there are many other free alternatives to for-pay programs such as Gimp vs. Photoshop and Open Office vs. MS Office. Whether for-profit programmers like it or not, there will always be people willing to produce free software because they like doing it and because they think it is the socially-correct thing to do, and don’t care if you would rather make money from it instead.
The same thing goes for the Huffington Post. Professional writers and would-be professional writers can complain as much as they like about HuffPost contributors not being paid, but they will never get anywhere because there will always be people who write for fun or for ideological reasons, not for profit, and are willing to go into the deal eyes wide-open and do the writing for free. If you demand to be paid, you can simply be kicked out and replaced by one of the 50 people waiting to write for free that are in line behind you.
tl;dr: Want to be paid to write for the Huffington Post? You are out of luck as long as there is a plentiful supply of people not in it for the money that can replace you.
Dead Amish clown werewolves gonna be knockin’ on my nightmare doors tonight…
Books with structure!
Dorothy Dunnett – The House Of Niccolo. Seven big books of historical renaissance drama and action and romance and intrigue, exquisitely constructed both on the micro and the macro level with the author constantly pulling the ground out from under the characters and the readers from chapter to chapter, then delivering exquisitely awful shocks and reversals from book to book, then utterly changing everything you thought about the way you read the entire series. It’s a series so full of allusion and ambiguity that you just don’t recognise the clues for what they are. When you get to the end it is at first devastating, even disappointing, but then brilliant.
Others prefer her Lymond Chronicles, written first, set later and somewhat laboriously (for Dunnett, so it’s not very laborious at all) connected to Niccolo, but common wisdom has it that whichever you read first will be your favourite and Niccolo was mine – but great as Lymond is, it doesn’t have the sheer dazzling, breathtaking structural bravura of Niccolo.
The Quincunx by Charles Paliser – another big book, a Dickens/Collins pastiche that resolves to replace their reliance on chance and coincidence with a fastidious attention to plot and motive – and a massively complex plot it is, with a huge cast of characters, such that a full final resolution of all the mysteries remains just out of reach, though all the clues necessary are present in the text.
These aren’t SFF, of course, but I tend to regard them as genre-sympathetic. I also second recs for Gone Away World and Cloud Atlas and want to read many of Kyra’s other recs.
(House Of Leaves I half-loved – the description of the film was unputdownable, the textual, typographical games were brilliant, but the rest was mostly a tedious drudge.)
Amish Werewolves….
I’d read that in a heartbeat, but I now have ‘Amish Paradise’ playing in my head.
@Kendall: Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll give it a shot.
ETA: Also JJ!
As far as I’m concerned the Shatner version of Common People is THE version.
I love that entire album of his.
> “Others prefer her Lymond Chronicles …”
Like me!
> “… common wisdom has it that whichever you read first will be your favourite …”
Read Lymond first, so this checks out.
> “… great as Lymond is, it doesn’t have the sheer dazzling, breathtaking structural bravura of Niccolo.”
This is possibly true, but reading the first book of the Lymond Chronicles (The Game of Kings) without foreknowledge of the kind of tricks Dunnett is likely to pull is a pretty breathtaking experience … It’s my go-to example of a book that makes people want to read it twice, because things you thought were going on turn out to be something else entirely.
(Also, I will never forget/forgive “languish locked in L”, a sequence in The Ringed Castle which would have made reading the series worth even it if the entire rest had been nothing but “blah blah blah” literally typed out 100,000 times.)
I think I’ll make it to Boskone this year. I’ve had conflicts the last few years, but my wife and son will both be busy on Saturday with Skid School, so I’m free for the day.
Just to throw out other books with incredible plotting and structure – Peter Straub’s Blue Rose trilogy – these are a serial killer saga, but the mirror image of the type of books that became dominant in that genre, as inspired by the forensic/profiling approach everyone took from Thomas Harris while mostly ignoring everything else he did. There’s no forensics or profiles, it’s all character and story, history and atmosphere, a nightmarish trip into dark places with incredible writing and the slow unfolding of an epic, but incredibly tight, secret history of violence and abuse.
James Ellroy’s LA Quartet – though as the books go along they become terser, more pared and clipped in terms of language, and of course, they are sprawling and vulgar and cynical and violent, filled with racism, misogyny and homophobia, but they are plotted and planned and structured to a T, as much as any Agatha Christie whodunnit. Of his later books only American Tabloid is really as good – perhaps better – but that’s more of a driving political saga than a twisted crime novel.
@Darren Garrison
Be that as it may, I know editors who will go on multi-hour rants about how every writer should use MS Word, not Open Office. One of the horror stories I heard involved a glitch with either Open Office or Libre Office that caused every single proofreading insertion or deletion in a ~120,000 word novel to be moved one position to the right.
The publisher just bought her MS Word after that.
@cat
I don’t know if this is meant to be a direct reference to this cartoon, but I figure it’s a good one to share with more people regardless.
Great. Now I have an entire Amish Warren Zevon album running through my head. Maybe The Rumspringa Boy album. Or Bad Luck Streak at Bible School.
Send Farmers, Seeds and Buggies?
Like all her books! But yeah, I can only imagine diving into that all innocent and unknowing.
Even as a confirmed Niccolite, I would have to concede the justice of this claim. Besides which, for there’s nothing else out there in modern popular fiction to match the end of Pawn In Frankincense.
Because there are no bugs in Microsoft Word? Seriously?
@ Kyra,
I can’t thank you enough for the effort that went into your very useful answer. The whole list looks fascinating, and several items are on my TBR list. The only one I’ve read is “Little, Big”. (I finished it on a transatlantic flight, and a cabin attendant stopped and asked, “Are you all right?” because tears were streaming down my face. I said, “I’m fine – it’s just so beautiful!”
Thanks also to NickPheas and Hampus
Books with Structure:
The Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks – One timeline moves forward. One timeline moves back.
A Perfect Spy, by John LeCarre – There’s a third-person manhunt for a possible defector. There’s a first-person memoir by the same possible defector. In SPAAAAAACE…!
Absolute Friends, by John LeCarre – This is a good book disguised as a bad one for most of its length. There’s a GWOT-related present-day plot. There’s a long flashback that seems like LeCarre finding an excuse to shoehorn in a focus on his Cold-War comfort zone. It turns out that the book is showing how any of us can be made to look bad before the entire world via selective focus on elements of our personal history.
Because there are no bugs in Microsoft Word? Seriously?
Because network effects are a thing.
…okay, between you people and the friends who not only endorsed this but spent fifteen minutes on IM coming up with “and then there can be EROTICALLY CHARGED BUTTER CHURNING” and how the second novel should be a big-city werewolf career woman and a humble Amish werewolf carpenter because SEXY WOODWORKING SCENE, I totally do have to write these. Enablers, all of you. ;P
(I may make it “influenced by Amish” werewolves rather than Amish per se, insofar as I don’t want to be offensive but also cannot write abstinence and/or modesty without my head exploding in a matter-and-antimatter-type way. But still: erotic woodworking. And barnraising. And actually radical pacifism is an interesting way to cope with lycanthropic urges GOD DAMMIT NOW IT’S A WHOLE THING.)
…no bugs in Microsoft Word?
Well, not that bug, anyway. The main reason other prepress people and I shook our heads at manuscripts submitted “all ready to go” in Word was usually that they’d laboriously formatted the whole thing by the apparent pages, putting headers at the top, and numbers at the bottom, and five (count ’em) spaces by hand at the start of every paragraph. Couldn’t rightly blame the program itself, but they went hand in hand so often, the other programs were starting to whisper.
@ Fugue
OMG, I wonder if that could partly explain why cleaning up the final proofs of The Mystic Marriage was such a nightmare? (Certainly there were a lot of added commas that were on the wrong side of their spaces.) Review of final page proofs should not require dumping a print-ready pdf back into Word and stripping out all the print formatting in order to do a file comparison with the last submitted version.
Hampus Eckerman: “…and the other half is puppies.”
Standing O!
Book structure: Steven Brust’s Teckla begins with a laundry bill (1 grey knit cotton shirt: remove wine stain from rt sleeve, etc.); then, in the course of each chapter, different articles of clothing suffer the damage shown in the invoice.
@Isabel Cooper
Way, way back in the day the group I did Vampire with had someone who made a very good fist of playing a pacifist vampire. Made for a good and quite touching story, with some great comic moments.
Re: books with interesting structure
What about Le Guin’s Always Coming Home? Narratives, poems, ethnographic reports, all organized into the double spiral that is central to the culture being described.
‘You have an… unconventional taste,’ he growled, licking her ankle with a lycanthropic tongue.
‘That’s just the feckin’ butter splashin’ everywhere,’ she gasped, churning furiously.
Let’s see, books I love with great structures…
Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. It’s amazing. It’s as tightly wound as a lot of Gene Wolfe’s stories. I read it because Stephen King praised it in Danse Macabre, and everything King said about it there is true. (Including his great observation about gothics: “Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel’s machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic— it’s PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!).”) Things hang together ridiculously, marvelously well.
Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort. It’s too uncomfortable for me to re-read it now, but there are a couple of specific points of brilliance in it. A planned-out assault on some of the bad guys by some of the good guys leads to the sudden death of one of the good guys, and it’s shocking in its complete surprise to everyone involved. It shifts the whole course of the book, all in one brief paragraph, and works superbly. Later, several of the characters meet another, who’s provided the viewpoint for a good chunk of the story, and we find out that the one has been doing a lot of self-deception. The intensity of the conflict between the character’s internal story and external reality is, again, just about shocking. Very well done.
Isabel Cooper, if you’re not comfortable making the protags Amish, you can make them one of those back-to-the-earth hippy commune movements. Then you don’t have to deal with the intricacies of a specific defined religion and specific defined mores; you can make them up to suit the plot…
Just finished A Darker Shade of Magic. I liked it even though I usually hate books with paralell universes or alternative futures (X-men made me allergic). Not that happy with the books villains, to cliché evilness, but it helt together. Will place on longlist for now.
(18) STUBBY ON SPUDS
It turns out that a certain colourful filer also has Opinions about potatoes.
Breaking news: Harper Lee has died.
Authors of open-source software are donating their labor to the community of developers and users; some of the developers in that community reciprocate by supplying bug-fixes and adding features. Furthermore, many employers in the IT industry, recognizing the benefits of this kind of cooperation, allow their employees to develop open-source software on company time, or even hire one of the principal developers of an open-source package that their business depends on.
Authors of HuffPo “content” are donating their labor to…
“You’re not like other girls”, he gasped.
“You’re right. I’m a werewolf”‘. Then she Julienned his liver and had it for dinner.
Re: writing for free vs developing free software
The salient difference, to my mind, is that a great many of these open-source movements are not about transferring the value of labour to a for-profit business. Volunteer labour for a non-profit group or cause is fine (though if you want to control somebody’s hours and efforts in a job-like manner, then you need to give them a paying job), but it’s not the same thing, because the goal there, not just for the individuals but for the organization itself, is to labour specifically for the net benefit of the community, whereas in a for-profit environment, even a newspaper or other “public service” type business, the benefit to the community at large is ultimately incidental; the purpose of the organization is to make Ariana Huffington (or whomever) wealthy, and that will always come first. Content is filler for advertising, and it was ever thus. When the nature of the organization you labour for changes, the nature/meaning of your labour can also change even if the thing you do (writing, whatever) remains constant.
Devaluing ourselves is granting others permission to devalue us as well.
@NickPheas
Ah, yes, Hugoratius at the Bridge! Gotta love the classics 🙂
Darren Garrison: Breaking news: Harper Lee has died.
Ah, no. May she rest in peace.
Reading Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings, all innocent and unaware of what I was getting into . . . wow. I can’t remember how old I was–fairly young–but I know I picked up the book just because it looked interesting. I didn’t realize it was a series, even–in fact, I’m pretty sure that Checkmate hadn’t even been published yet. But I was hooked from the opening sequence about Lymond’s return . . . until he stepped onto the page with a line I bet I can still quote verbatim though it’s been years since I’ve so much as opened the book: “Lucent and delicate, Drama entered, mincing like a cat.”
That’s just–yeah. I think maybe I should dig out my old paperbacks and do some re-reading one of these days . . .
They are getting their ideas out to a large audience, caring about the egobo (hey, I didn’t realize that had an SF root!), not the money. That the content provider makes a profit is utterly irrelevant to those who don’t have a profit motive. (Does Mike Glyer care that WordPress is a for-profit company, even though (I’m guessing) File770 likely generates essentially bupkis income for all the time he puts into it?)
alas, there goes my retirement plan.
I’m sure that if you wrote it, it would be entertaining as well as intelligent.
Jim beat me to Use of Weapons. Also by Banks is Walking on Glass, three narratives, one overtly SFnal but how do they connect?
And if you stray outside genre, two of the big ones are Pale Fire – a novel as footnotes to a poem – and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a book full of first chapters where you search for a continuation.
Or Perec – A Void is a nov… book missing a particular common thing, a thing no authors until that work could do without. Or Life: A User’s Manual, a series of stories about the people living in an apartment block, and a jigsaw puzzle.
Now Harper Lee will never finish her trilogy.
Open Office vs. MS Office
I have both LibreOffice and MSOffice. They are not equivalent. I can open larger files in LibreOffice – but there are some kinds of editing it does not do, and MSOffice will.
Books with Structure:
Shockwave Rider.
@Kip, that’s okay. I believe her lawyer found her notes and is looking for someone to expand them now
Regarding the similarity of free content at HuffPo and open source software, the idealistic picture of devoted hobbyist programmers doing free work for the love of community is largely a thing of the past, at least for big projects. In 2013 (the last year I could find) 17% of contributors to Linux listed their corporate affiliation as None or Unknown. Everyone else was sponsored, by Red Hat or Google or Intel or Samsung or…
Android and Chrome are free, but do you think Google doesn’t pay its developers? It employs over 10000 of them. Do you think Google shouldn’t pay its developers?
@Ray, Don’t you wish that evil on us.
@Hampus The sequel comes out on Tuesday!
Books with interesting structures (that work):
Armour by John Steakly. Told in a series of vignettes by the protagonist until halfway through the book when, for no readily apparent reason (the first time you read it anyway), the point of view switches to a completely different character with no apparent relation to the first. This put me off the first time I read the book, but I was hooked enough to keep reading, and the switch of POV actually works really well when the pieces are all tied together.
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle by Patrick Rothfuss. It is written in the motif of a children’s picture book, and it has three endings. The first ending is very child friendly, but if you turn the page beyond… not so much.
Working title? To Kill a Mockingbird 2: Kill a Mockingbird Harder.
@Kyra: You are a treasure and I thank you (but my groaning, tortured TBR pile does not)
Books with interesting structures:
The Hunter’s Haunt by Dave Duncan: Various travellers are stranded at an inn during a snowstorm. They decide to have a storytelling contest. They all wind up telling parts of the same story, and they and the inn turn out to be part of it as well…
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson: A group of people keep meeting each other in reincarnation after reincarnation throughout an alternate history where the first outbreak of the Black Death killed over 90% of Europe. Overall I didn’t enjoy where the author wanted to put the emphasis of the story, but I did enjoy the structural exercise. (My favorite section was probably the Long War one because… erm, spoilers.)
+1 for Great North Road.
ETA: Also +1 for Always Coming Home. I kept thinking of it when I read Anathem— a structure like that would have served Anathem (and possibly Stephenson’s subsequent books) much better.
oh, Hyperion for the ‘interesting structures’ list
It’s not the writer’s behaviour that’s at issue, though. It’s the company’s. How would you feel if it was the New York Times or the Atlantic deciding its writers shouldn’t get paid? Not we’ll accept some work from folks who don’t have profit as a motive but rather writing should not be paid for, because that makes it inauthentic and less valuable, which is the claim the HuffPo editor actually made.
Devaluing writers and other “content” producers is actually one of the reasons media, and big media in particular, is running hard up against a significant class problem. Not paying, or paying very little, means you get three kinds of people writing for you: the desperate, whom you can (and if history is any indication, will) exploit and who will generally remain desperate, shills paid by someone else who will likely not disclose the real source of their income and therefore any conflicts or relevant motivating factors, and those who are wealthy (or at least who have sufficient income that their time can be spent doing someone else’s job for free). The dilettantes who fall into the ego boost category and are actually competent and don’t already have a financial support system in place will be a fairly small percentage. But what it will do, and indeed does do, has been doing for a number of years now, is tend to limit those who do rise to the paying gigs to people at one end of an increasingly tight class curve.
It’s not at all about what the writer chooses to do; there are all kinds of reasons and venues for writers and other creators to do stuff for free without somebody else making money off their backs. It’s about what we consider to be acceptable business practices for those whose sole business is presenting that work alongside advertisements.
Books with structure? Christopher Priest’s early Fugue for a Darkening Island (narrative chopped up into short scenes and jumbled without respect for chronology, except the last one – one of the scenes doesn’t fit in anywhere), and The Affirmation (which, as David Langford pointed out, can be read as its own sequel.)
Then there’s the first one that sprang to my mind, Lawrence Durrell’s “multi-dimensional novel”, the Alexandria Quartet – three books take mutually-orthogonal views of a single central situation, then the fourth one advances in time to resolve the whole thing.
Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire – a series of stories set in Northampton from stone age(?) to modern day. And being Moore, it’s all a magical incantation or something… 🙂