Pixel Scroll 2/27/17 That’s it! Scroll Over Man, Scroll Over!

(1) ACADEMY INVITES LE GUIN. Ursula K. LeGuin has been voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters reports SFGate. The 87-year-old Le Guin is one of 14 new core members of the Academy.

The arts academy, an honorary society with a core membership of 250 writers, artists, composers and architects, once shunned “genre” writers such as Le Guin. Even such giants as science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and crime novelist Elmore Leonard never got in.

Academy member Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, advocated for Le Guin.

“As a deviser of worlds, as a literary stylist, as a social critic and as a storyteller, Le Guin has no peer,” he wrote in his recommendation, shared with the AP, that she be admitted. “From the time of her first published work in the mid-1960s, she began to push against the confines of science fiction, bringing to bear an anthropologist’s acute eye for large social textures and mythic structures, a fierce egalitarianism and a remarkable gift of language, without ever renouncing the sense of wonder and the spirit of play inherent in her genre of origin.”

(2) 2017 RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY COVER REVEAL. Hat tip to F.J. Bergmann.

(3) NEW FICTION WEBZINE. Science fiction and fantasy book imprint Strange Fictions Press will officially launch Strange Fictions SciFi & Fantasy Zine on February 28 with “This Chicken Outfit,” by Pushcart nominated author, A.L. Sirois. Siriois’ short stories have appeared in ThemaAmazing Stories, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He has also contributed comic art for DC, Marvel, and Charlton.

Strange Fictions will focus “on publishing speculative short fiction, nonfiction, art, and poetry twice a week for genre fans worldwide.”  New stories, poems, and essays will appear every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribers can sign up for email notifications whenever a new story is posted.

Strange Fictions SF&F Zine is open to submissions from both new and experienced genre writers, and details can be found at the website.

Authors of acquired pieces for Strange Fictions SF&F ‘Zine will receive a flat fee payment of $5 for stories, essays, poetry, and book reviews of 4,999 words and under and $10 for stories, essays, poetry, and book reviews of 5,000-10,000.

(4) ALOFT. Martin Morse Wooster recommends Miyazaki Dreams of Flying as “a lovely compilation of flying scenes from Miyazaki films, including an interview where the great animator expresses his love of airplanes.”

(5) DEFYING THE LAW…OF GRAVITY. In “Mars Needs Lawyers” on FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the many problems of international law that have to be solved in we’re ever going to have successful Mars missions.  For example:  if you have astronauts from five countries flying in a spacecraft that’s registered in Liberia, how do you figure out which country’s law applies?

For instance, a limited number of satellites can orbit the Earth simultaneously. Put up too many, and you end up with an expensive game of celestial bumper cars. But some countries — Russia and the United States, in particular — had a big head start on gobbling up those slots. What do you do if you’re Nigeria? Today, Gabrynowicz said, the international community has settled on a regulatory system that attempts to balance the needs of nations that can put an object into geostationary orbit first with the needs of those that aren’t there yet but could be later. And even this compromise is still extremely controversial.

The same basic disagreement behind them will apply to Mars, too. And it’s at issue right now in the U.S., as lawmakers try to figure out how best to implement the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act — a bill signed by President Obama in November 2015. That law states that U.S. companies can own and sell space resources — including minerals and water. But the details of what this means in practice haven’t been worked out yet, Gabrynowicz said. Legal experts say that those details will make the difference in terms of whether the law puts the U.S. in violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

This question of whether space should be an Old West-style gold rush or an equitably distributed public commons could have been settled decades ago, with the 1979 Moon Agreement (aka the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies), which would have established space as part of the “common heritage of mankind.” What this would have meant in practice is not totally clear. But at the time, opponents saw it as having the potential to ban all private enterprise and effectively turn the heavens into a United Nations dictatorship. It ended up being signed by a handful of countries, most of which have no space program. But it is international law, and if humans go to Mars, though, we’ll likely end up debating this issue again.

(6) GAME WRITING. Monica Valentinelli gives an “Overview of Game Production and the Role of Writers” at the SFWA Blog.

One of the things I enjoy doing as a game developer is hiring new writers. In almost every case, writers are shocked to learn how many levers and pulleys there are in game production. This tends to hold true regardless of what kind of game a writer is contributing to; in part, this has to do with the process of transitioning from a consumer’s mindset (e.g. fan, critic, reviewer) to that of a creator’s. Sometimes, however, the process is confusing because there are aspects physical development that writers aren’t always involved with. A good example of this is that developers often regard word processing documents with an eye for production when they redline and provide comments. What’s laid out vertically on a page in text isn’t how it will be rendered in the final product, and that has a huge impact on what the writers are hired to write, edit, and make changes on. Sometimes, the number of words that fit on a page or a screen can also shape a writer’s assignment, too.

Other, lesser-known aspects of production might include:

  • Canon or Setting Bible creation
  • Systems/rules documentation
  • Marketing copy and sell sheets
  • Outlining and project management
  • Mock-ups and proofs for manufacturing
  • Playtest or beta editions

(7) DISNEY’S DUDEFRÉRES. Another clip from the live-action Beauty and the Beast shows LeFou singing “My, what a guy, that Gaston!” With Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as LeFou.

(8) VOIR DIRE STRAITS. Shadow Clarke juror Jonathan McCalmont followed his introductory post with an entry on his ownblog, Ruthless Culture “Genre Origin Stories”.

A couple of things that occurred to me upon re-reading the piece:

Firstly, I think it does a pretty good job of capturing how I currently feel about the institutions of genre culture. To be blunt, I don’t think that genre fandom survived the culture wars of 2015 and I think genre culture has now entered a post-apocalyptic phase in which a few institutional citadels manage to keep the lights on while the rest of the field is little more than a blasted wasteland full of isolated, lonely people. One reason why I agreed to get involved with shadowing the Clarke Award is that I see the Shadow Clarke as an opportunity to build something new that re-introduces the idea that engaging with literary science fiction can be about more than denouncing your former friends and providing under-supported writers with free PR….

McCalmont’s post includes a high overview of the past 40 years of fanhistory. I was surprised to find many points of agreement, such as his takes about things that frustrated me at the time they were happening, or that I witnessed affecting my friends among the LA locals who founded anime fandom.

Regardless of whether they are conventional, idiosyncratic, or simply products of distracted parenting, our paths into science fiction cannot help but shape our understanding and expectations of the field. Unfortunately, where there is difference there is bound to be misunderstanding and where there is misunderstanding there must inevitably be conflict.

The problem is that while the walls of science fiction may be infinitely porous and allow for inspiration from different cultures and artistic forms, the cultural institutions surrounding science fiction have shown themselves to be remarkably inflexible when it comes to making allowances for other people’s genre origin stories.

The roots of the problem are as old as genre fandom itself. In fact, the very first Worldcon saw the members of one science fiction club deny entry to the membership of another on the grounds that the interlopers were socialists whose politicised understanding of speculative fiction posed an existential threat to the genre’s continued existence. A similar conflict erupted when the unexpected success of Star Wars turned a niche literary genre into a mass market phenomenon. Faced with the prospect of making allowances for legions of new fans with radically different ideas as to what constituted good science fiction, the institutions of genre fandom responded with sluggishness indistinguishable from hostility. Media fandom was born when traditional fandom refused to expand its horizons and the same thing happened again in the early 1990s when fans of anime decided that it was better to build their own institutions than to fight street-by-street for the right to be hidden away in the smallest and hottest rooms that science fiction conventions had to offer.

The institutions of genre culture may pride themselves on their inclusiveness and forward-thinking but this is largely a product of the excluded not sticking around long enough to give their own sides of the story. Time and again, the institutions of genre culture have been offered the chance to get in on the ground floor when science-fictional ideas began to manifest themselves in different ways. Time and again, the institutions of genre culture have chosen to protect the primacy of the familiar over the vibrancy of the new and the different….

Cultural commentators may choose to characterise 2015 as the year in which genre culture rejected the misogynistic white supremacy of the American right but the real message is far more nuanced. Though the institutions of genre culture have undoubtedly improved when it comes to reflecting the diversity not only of the field but also of society at large, this movement towards ethnic and sexual diversity has coincided with a broader movement of aesthetic conservatism as voices young and old find themselves corralled into a narrowing range of hyper-commercial forms.

I thought that was well said. Unfortunately, I also read the comments.

(9) BELATED BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • February 24, 1909 – August Derleth
  • February 26, 1918 – Theodore Sturgeon

(10) THE STRAIGHT POOP. “Do Cats Cause Schizophrenia? Believe the Science, Not the Hype” advises WIRED.

The link between schizophrenia and cats goes back to the 1970s, when psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey learned that viruses from dogs might trigger multiple sclerosis—a neurological condition—in humans. “That got me thinking about which animals host which infectious agents,” he says. Soon, he learned that cats host the most successful infectious bacteria in the world: Toxoplasma gondii. Looking into previously published research, he found plenty of studies showing that schizophrenics often had higher levels of toxoplasma antibodies in their blood than people without the mental illness.

Then he started surveying schizophrenics about their life history, and found that many had indeed lived with cats. But what’s important isn’t just if, it’s when. See, Torrey’s theory isn’t merely that T. gondii causes mental illness, it’s that it somehow alters the development of a person’s brain during crucial periods of brain development—and probably only if that person is genetically predisposed to schizophrenia. It’s a complicated hypothesis, and even after four decades of study, Torrey says he’s still not totally convinced it’s fact. Hence, his continued research on the subject.

Still, every study he publishes—his most recent, dropped in July of 2015—attracts the media like nip. Same with refutations, like the one published this week. The authors analyzed a dataset of 5,000 UK children, looking for a correlation between cat ownership during critical ages of brain development and behavioral indicators of later psychosis (like dark thoughts) at the ages of 13 and 18. Their statistical analysis of the results showed no correlation. Most (but not all) news websites ran with some variation of “Relax, Cats Don’t Cause Schizophrenia.”

But that’s not what the study said.

(11) GUESS WHO. From 2015. David Tennant’s NTA Special Recognition – his reaction: “Actor Sees A Tribute Video On Screen. The Realizes It’s For Him And He Can’t Believe It”

(12) TELL YOUR FRIENDS. Carl Slaughter says, “This documentary convincingly demonstrates how the Batman movies/trilogies reflect the cultural era in which they were produced.”

  • 60s Batman  –  prosperity
  • 70s  –  disillusionment  –  no Batman movies
  • Batman  –  escapism
  • Batman Returns  –  anti rich
  • Batman Forever, Batman & Robin  –  safety
  • Batman Begins, Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises  –  fear
  • Batman versus Superman  –  extremism

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer Sylvester.]

149 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/27/17 That’s it! Scroll Over Man, Scroll Over!

  1. Cirsova: I didn’t throw out your name, someone else did after I left.

    Sorry about that. Sloppy reading on my part.

  2. Cirsova: I don’t know who Vivienne Raper is or if they were a Puppy

    That seems a pretty bizarre thing to say, given that you’ve both hung out commenting at the same blog on numerous occasions as recently as 6 weeks ago, and that you’ve actually posted a comment on her blog.

    Also, that commenter was here on File 770 defending the Puppies quite frequently some time back.

    I don’t base my comments on what you tell me you know, I base them on what I know.

  3. @ Dann
    Katherine Blake’s The Interior Life starts out with two plot streams that sort of interact, and by the last chapter you’re jumping back and forth between them in alternate paragraphs and sentences. Blake intended to use different fonts, but the dead tree version doesn’t have them. I think the eBook does. No matter, however, it’s brilliantly done, the reader is never confused and the cumulative effect is tremendous.
    Heavy Time does switch back and forth, but IIRC the problem for me was that Dek was out of his mind for a while. I like working a bit while reading, but that one was tough, even for Cherryh.

  4. I would have guessed there were 7-8 venues for short SF fiction, but when I made that list of lists the other day, I linked to 48 different free sites that publish fiction that someone thought was among the best of 2016. There is a magazine that publishes only fantasy novellas, a magazine that specializes in stories about forests, a magazine that prefers vegan stories, a magazine that publishes only stories based on random photos of people holding things, and a magazine with eldritch in its title that doesn’t publish horror stories.

    I don’t know if the readers these magazines are aspiring writers or just have very specific tastes, but the short SF ecosystem is much vaster that I had imagined.

  5. @JJ
    So, I left a comment on their blog over a year ago. A blog I’ve since forgotten that their name on the comment on Jonathan’s blog didn’t link back to.
    And I left a comment on Lela E. Buis’s blog. I missed any sort of ping-back from their reply, so I did not reply to her response (which maybe I should go do, now that you’ve pointed it out).
    I also don’t typically lurk here, so no, I don’t recall her defending Puppies here in the comments.
    So, yeah, I don’t know who they are.

  6. @Cirsova

    That hardly sounds like someone who is pro-Puppy.

    Vivienne has a long history here. She and a few others don’t identify as puppies, but they do seem to think some of the Sad Puppy’s complaints have some merit to them.

    Also, a fun factoid about us that you may not know: I thought that the short fic picks that the Sad Puppies put forward were pretty weak, which is one of the reasons I went the “I’ll build my own amusement park” route and started a magazine.

    I wish you luck, then. I sometimes think the root problem here is that the Sad Puppies are actually unable to see how bad their own writing is, and so they imagine that they are being denied awards unfairly. If you start trying to hold them to a higher standard, I’m pretty sure they’ll hate you too. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

  7. @Kip W:

    Things change. I remember reading that Metropolis started out being Toronto.

    It did, at least in part. Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, and used to be a paperboy for ‘The Daily Star’. (Now called The Toronto Star, but still running.) As I understand it, the newspaper in the comic book had to get renamed to ‘The Daily Planet’ for legal reasons in 1940, but Shuster’s childhood job as a paperboy in Toronto was definitely part of the inspiration for Clark Kent being a reporter.

    @Cora:

    Regarding Metropolis, I recall reading somewhere that the inspiration was Cleveland, because it was the biggest city Siegel ane Schuster knew as young men.

    And that would likely be the other main inspiration, since Shuster moved to Cleveland when he was about 10, and met Siegel there.

    That said, a lot of the look of Metropolis was likely inspired by New York skyscrapers as well.

  8. @von Dimpleheimer

    I would have guessed there were 7-8 venues for short SF fiction, but when I made that list of lists the other day, I linked to 48 different free sites that publish fiction that someone thought was among the best of 2016.

    It’s pretty amazing, but it also points to how challenging it is for people to attempt to make nominations for things like the Hugos. I read 5.5 million words of short SFF last year, including all of 11 magazines and 11 anthologies, and yet I only covered about 75% of the stories that were recommended by the other prolific reviewers.

    And when I read the stories that I hadn’t looked at, I recommended some of them (not all) too.

    That said, there’s definitely a hierarchy, and the odds of finding a good story drop the further down you go. Authors are going to submit their work to the most prestigious magazines first and only if they get rejected will they resubmit them further down the chain. For a lower-tier magazine to get a top-quality story it requires either that the upper-tier magazines all passed on it by mistake or (more likely) the author lacked self confidence and didn’t even try submitting it elsewhere.

  9. Thanks, Jenora. That was what my mind wanted to say, only lacking in detailed memory of specifics, and it would have come out rather mushy, so I’m glad to have your account of it. (And of course, I now realize I was steadfastly failing to go look up what was likely easy enough information to find.)

  10. I generally don’t support magazine Kickstarters or Patreons to avoid this perception. But overall, from the perspective of someone who’s published a fair amount of short fiction over the pst decade, selling spec fic is hard and competitive and not at all like a vanity press.

  11. @Jenora
    Thanks for the info. I didn’t know that Joe Shuster (whose name I misspelled, since it seems the c got lost somewhere on Ellis Island) was from Toronto.

    It also makes sense that the skyscrapes of New York City would influence Superman’s Metropolis. They certainly influenced its namesake, since Fritz Lang reported that his first glimpse at the skyline of Manhattan sometime in the early 1920s inspired the iconic look of Metropolis.

    Also thanks to whoever provided the info about Gotham, the TV show, being shot on location in New York City. It was always obvious that the city shots were New York, especially since they capture the occasional building famous enough that an architecture buff will recognise it. But they’re always very good at keeping too modern buildings out of shot (and New York has a lot of them, including very big ones), so I assumed they used older stock footage.

  12. Jeff Jones: What is glory, anyway?

    Well, you see what I’m covered with?

    That ain’t it.

  13. @Greg – “I wish you luck, then. I sometimes think the root problem here is that the Sad Puppies are actually unable to see how bad their own writing is, and so they imagine that they are being denied awards unfairly.”

    Jim Butcher, Larry Corriea, John Ringo, S.M. Stirling and David Drake have written many novels in the last 20 years that I found better than any recent Hugo winner. Many share my opinion – at least in terms of sales.

    770 people can blather about “quality” versus “sales” all they want. But at least for me these authors stand head and shoulders over any Hugo novel winner in at least the last 10 years. Hugo voters are a small slice of the SF reading public. They have distinct tastes that I do not share. I would not say that the last decade of Hugo winning novels are “poor quality.” I would say that I do not care for them.

    “Quality” is in the eye of the beholder in writing and art. Simply because you do not like something does not mean that it is poor quality.

  14. There was actually a Canadian ‘Heritage Minute’ video about Joe Shuster and the creation of Superman, though the details of it were… less than historically accurate.

    Interestingly (and actually referenced in that Heritage Minute), Joe Shuster of Siegel and Shuster was actually first cousin to Frank Shuster of Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster.

  15. @ Msb: My dead-tree version of The Interior Life does have different fonts, three of them to be exact. One is used for Sue’s plotline, one for Amalia’s, and the third only comes in after Amalia’s consciousness has been trapped in the Hall of the Dead. The first two are similar enough that I didn’t twig for most of the first chapter and had to go back and re-read from the beginning, but the third one is quite distinct, having wider letterforms than either of the others. However, my copy is from the original print run; if it’s been reissued, they may not have chosen to recreate that detail.

    @ Greg: There’s also the possibility that the top-tier magazines had a backlog and rejected the good-quality story because it would take them a while to get around to publishing it. Or perhaps that’s not a thing with online magazines the way it is with print ones? (AKA “the regrettable inelasticity of typeface”.)

    @ airboy: The examples you cite all suffer from the “it’s book X in a series” problem — the novels themselves may be outstanding, but you have to have read the whole series to understand why they’re outstanding. That’s why I end up not nominating Stirling’s Changed World books for the Hugo — because I don’t know how good someone without the series background would find them, and the series is now on book 12 or thereabouts.

  16. airboy:

    “Jim Butcher, Larry Corriea, John Ringo, S.M. Stirling and David Drake have written many novels in the last 20 years that I found better than any recent Hugo winner. Many share my opinion – at least in terms of sales.”

    “Many novels” aren’t interesting. What is interesting is the exact works that have been listed on any the puppy slates. Not what they have written before or after.

  17. Greg: I sometimes think the root problem here is that the Sad Puppies are actually unable to see how bad their own writing is, and so they imagine that they are being denied awards unfairly.

    airboy: Jim Butcher, Larry Corriea, John Ringo, S.M. Stirling and David Drake have written many novels in the last 20 years that I found better than any recent Hugo winner. Many share my opinion – at least in terms of sales. “Quality” is in the eye of the beholder in writing and art. Simply because you do not like something does not mean that it is poor quality.

    I note that you’re not bothering to defend the Puppy-written works which were actually on the Puppy slates, works by JCW, Antonelli, Eness, Tank Marmot, Shao, Tabo/Harris, VD, etc (as well as that ridiculous compilation of racist and sexist e-mails not written by MZW) — which I’m pretty sure were the works to which Greg was referring.

    So nice try at misdirection, but no cigar.

  18. @airboy

    Jim Butcher, Larry Corriea, John Ringo, S.M. Stirling and David Drake have written many novels in the last 20 years that I found better than any recent Hugo winner. Many share my opinion – at least in terms of sales.

    I’ve read and enjoyed work by Jim Butcher and David Drake myself. However, none of the gentlemen above has been nominated by the puppies. (Actually, a Butcher novel was nominated in 2015, although it wasn’t his best work.)

    I do agree that judgments of quality are subjective at some level, but some types of badness really are objective. A story with as-you-know-Bob dialogue is objectively bad–it is not merely a matter of opinion. A story that’s just a fragment of a longer tale and incomprehensible on its own is objectively bad as well, albeit in a different way. A story where the dialogue is so unnatural that you feel embarrassed for the author when you read it is another example. At the other extreme is prose so purple that the author seems to have spent more time with a thesaurus than actually writing the story.

    These are some of the basics of good writing that almost all of the puppy-nominated short fiction violated.

    It’s as though you were at the Olympics trying to judge ice skating. There can be quite a debate over who did the best. There should be no debate over people who kept falling down.

  19. airboy on February 28, 2017 at 5:08 pm said:
    @Greg – “I wish you luck, then. I sometimes think the root problem here is that the Sad Puppies are actually unable to see how bad their own writing is, and so they imagine that they are being denied awards unfairly.”

    Jim Butcher, Larry Corriea, John Ringo, S.M. Stirling and David Drake have written many novels in the last 20 years that I found better than any recent Hugo winner. Many share my opinion – at least in terms of sales.

    airboy, I buy every book Ringo, Stirling and David Weber write. Drake is good, too, but I’m not as enamored of him. Butcher has never appealed to me, and Corriea writes ‘urban fantasy’ and the only book in that genre I’ve ever liked was Weber’s very unconventional “Out of the Dark”.

    But I don’t remember any of those guys being on the puppy slates.

    Plus, Stirling, Ringo and Weber are all writing book x in long running series, which don’t tend to get nominated.

    I think “Dies the Fire” should have been a strong Hugo contender. The early Honor Harringtons. (Recent ones are bloated and infodumpy). Off Armageddon Reef.

    But again, don’t remember seeing those on the puppy lists.

  20. Jeff Jones on February 28, 2017 at 3:50 pm said: What is glory, anyway?

    A nice knock-down pixel scroll.

  21. Hampus:

    Gotham City has been in New Jersey since the 70s.

    Not quite. There is a map that shows it on a bay that’s the same shape as Delaware Bay, and if it was actually Delaware Bay Gotham would be in New Jersey, but that’s not Delaware Bay, it’s Metropolis Bay or something. There’s a moment in the WORLD’S GREATEST SUPER HEROES comic strip where that map is shown and the states are named, but in all other appearances, it’s not and that one appearance is regarded as non-canon.

    And since then, they’ve changed both Metropolis and Gotham in ways that no longer fit that map anyway.

    So it’s perhaps accurate to say that Gotham was momentarily identified as in New Jersey in the 1970s, but it didn’t stick.

    Kip W

    Things change. I remember reading that Metropolis started out being Toronto.

    Never. The Superman series started out set in Cleveland (never named, but the Cleveland newspaper was given as the newspaper Clark worked for once, and the city had political problems that were also true of Cleveland), and the newspaper building was drawn to look like a building in Toronto but there was also a building in Cleveland of a similar design, neither of which, in real life, were newspaper offices.

    Later on, things in the strip changed and the city gained the name Metropolis, well after any references to Cleveland had been eliminated, the newspaper was renamed the Daily Star and then later the Daily Planet.

    [It was renamed the Daily Planet because lots of cities had a “Daily Star” (including Toronto), so when the Superman newspaper strip started, the syndicate wanted the name changed so that their salesman could sell the strip to any newspaper, even if they happened to be a competitor of the local Daily Star. That was likely the first, but not by any means the last, time “other media” changed the Superman comic books.]

    But it was never set in Toronto. It had a couple of elements that suggested Toronto, but were not unique to Toronto, and was never presented as not in the US.

  22. @airboy: IIRC the original puppy-argument was something like “Our lesser known work is not being nominated, despite it being very good”.

    The authors you named are not lesser known authors. The authors slated were lesser known authors and they neither had the sells nor the quality (imho) of the authors you cite.
    Or to put it another way: Correira or Butcher can stand on their own. A lot of the lesser known puppies are (as it seems to me) only read, because they are puppies and because they are connected to these bigger writers, not because of the stuff they write.

  23. @Greg

    Have you calculated what percent of stories you rated 4 or 5 stars?

  24. @von Dimpleheimer

    Have you calculated what percent of stories you rated 4 or 5 stars?

    Sure. We track that on our Year-to-Date Page.

    In 2016, 14% got 4 stars and about 4.5% got 5 stars. The goal was to recommend about 20% (18.5% is close) and recommend against about 20% (it was actually 30%).

    We adjusted the guidelines a bit in 2016 vs. 2015. We allowed plotless stories to get 3 stars if they were pleasant to read (previously lack of a plot was an automatic 2 stars at most) and we allowed unsophisticated stories to get 4 stars, as long as they had strong characters (previously we’d required complex plots).

    That brought us a lot closer to the numbers we wanted, but it also accorded better with our general idea of what stories we’d really recommend/warn someone against.

  25. “Never call me a thesaurus.”

    What did the thesaurus have for breakfast?

    A synonym roll.

    Re: Stirling and series. My favorite book of his is a stand-alone — Conquistador.

  26. Having followed Vivienne Raper’s comments here, I’m not sure that it makes sense to call her a puppy. Instead, she seems like, for lack of a better term, ‘a fellow traveler’ There is definitely some of their framework of analysis that she embraces, but she’s independent enough to not be fully within those circles.

    As to the question of quality, I thought both of the Butcher novels that got nominated were solid and fun novels. In both the last Hugo votes, they got the 4th place position for me. I’ve actually read a lot more of his stuff since then. It doesn’t hurt having James Marsters reading them, to be honest. However, most of the other stuff in the year that the Dresden novel got nominated was dismal, and the good stuff the year after probably would have gotten nominated anyways.

    One last note, every time I see Kurt Busiek comment on the history of comics, I find myself thinking that I would really love to see him write a book on the topic. I never get around to it, though. So this time I will. Kurt, have you ever thought about writing a book about the history of comics? I think, given the material that you bring up everyday here, it would be spectacular.

  27. @ Techgrrl1972: Dies the Fire and the early Harringtons long predate the SPs. By the time they started slate-voting, both of those series were 8- to 10-volume epics. Which is not to argue against your overall point, but you can’t suggest that those books might have been on puppy slates. OTOH, you do have the chance to nominate for the Best Series trial award this year, and Stirling’s series is at the top of my list for that.

    @ Greg: When you hang out on AO3, “plotless stories” generally translates as “porn without plot”. 🙂

    @ Bill: I started Conquistador and bounced off it HARD. It ran up against my “no asshole protagonist rule” and went into the cull box for Half Price Books after about 2 chapters.

    @ Robert: Seconding your thought that a comics history written by Kurt would be awesome.

  28. @Greg

    I liked “Things with Beards” and “Terminal” more than you did, but so far I’ve agreed with you more than any of the Best of the Year anthologists. Nice to know there are still hundreds of thousands of 5-star words out there waiting to be read.

  29. @Lee
    @ Bill: I started Conquistador and bounced off it HARD. It ran up against my “no asshole protagonist rule” and went into the cull box for Half Price Books after about 2 chapters.

    Different strokes for different folks . . . .

    I bought one of his Shadowspawn books and tried a couple different times to read it, and never could get beyond the first few chapters. Read the Nantucket series once; picked it up a second time and only finished the first one. I enjoyed the first 3 Emberverse books, read the next three indifferently, and have no plans to pick up any of the rest.

  30. “One last note, every time I see Kurt Busiek comment on the history of comics, I find myself thinking that I would really love to see him write a book on the topic.”

    So much yes to this.

  31. One last note, every time I see Kurt Busiek comment on the history of comics, I find myself thinking that I would really love to see him write a book on the topic. I never get around to it, though. So this time I will. Kurt, have you ever thought about writing a book about the history of comics? I think, given the material that you bring up everyday here, it would be spectacular.

    Thanks for the kind words, but:

    A. I’d rather write stories.
    B. When it comes to stuff from the 30s to the 70s, I know this simply because I’ve read lots of what’s available on comics history (and, in some cases, the comics), not because I’d bring new scholarship or insight to the field.

    On the other hand, someday writing stories in the context of the history of comics and the people who made them, that would have appeal for me…

  32. @Msb and Lee: I actually looked up the names of the fonts used in the Baen Books version of The Interior Life one time. To me they all seemed quite distinct, and I can sympathize with their book designer. (A professional typesetter / book designer is more attuned to the nuances of fonts than most people in the public at large. Go figure.)

    @Robert Wood: “Fellow traveler” was just the phrase that came to my mind about Vivienne Raper also. Not one of them, but coming from very similar places. If I recall right, she was the first person I saw using the phrase “virtue signaling” (and in a way that was really offensive, too).

  33. Hi all,

    I apologize. I asked a question, received good answers, and failed to respond.

    Thanks for your thoughts on the formatting issue. I already had some idea as to how the problem might have been created. I was just curious as to how much that sort of formatting/editing played into your evaluations.

    The book in question is James Moore’s “The Silent Army”. It is the fourth in a four book series. Pretty much all he needs to do is make a decent conclusion and it will be on my Hugo ballot. I’ve read enough of The Silent Army that I have no qualms about it being on the ballot for best series. As a single novel, Jim does a good job of bringing the important parts of the first three books into the final installment without excessive info dumps.

    My sympathies to Mike for the abuse he received on the other site. That other individual is a pretty good example of what raises my hackles.

    Regards,
    Dann

  34. @Dann

    My sympathies to Mike for the abuse he received on the other site. That other individual is a pretty good example of what raises my hackles.

    Ugh, same here. It’s like reverse-bullying.

  35. From Greg:

    Authors are going to submit their work to the most prestigious magazines first and only if they get rejected will they resubmit them further down the chain. For a lower-tier magazine to get a top-quality story it requires either that the upper-tier magazines all passed on it by mistake or (more likely) the author lacked self confidence and didn’t even try submitting it elsewhere.

    Just saw this and wanted to address it a little, because it is really not true. Every magazine has its own vibe (for lack of a better term), every editor has their own preferences. So for example, if I write a story that I think is a good fit for Shimmer, a magazine I like, I would probably send it there first, even if Shimmer might be lower on some people’s imaginary hierarchy than, say, Uncanny or Lightspeed.* Alternately, I might really want to send the story to Lightspeed, but gosh darn it, submissions are closed for a while (they often are), so I send it to Shimmer. Or maybe my story seems like a perfect fit for an upcoming Lackington’s theme issue. Or my story might be amazing and wonderful in all kinds of ways but it’s just not the kind of thing F&SF publishes, so F&SF rejects it, even if it’s a good story.

    Basically there are all kinds of reasons why you cannot just assume that the stories in “lower tier” magazines have all been rejected by “higher tier” magazines and therefore are not as good as the stories that were accepted.

    *Everybody’s imaginary hierarchy is different. Shimmer accepts like 0.05% of their submissions and I think it’s a good magazine, so it’s high on my list, but they’re semi-pro so I guess they’d be “lower tier” in some eyes.

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