John Hodgman
(1) HODGMAN TO PRESENT NEBULAS. SFWA has picked comedian John Hodgman to emcee the 50th Annual Nebula Awards in Chicago at the SFWA Nebula Conference on May 14.
John Hodgman is the longtime Resident Expert on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the host of the popular Judge John Hodgman Podcast. He has also appeared on Conan, The Late Late Show, @midnight, and This American Life. The Village Voice named his show Ragnarok one of the top ten stand up specials of 2013. In 2015, he toured his new show Vacationland. He has performed comedy for the President of the United States and George R.R. Martin, and discussed love and alien abduction at the TED conference.
In addition to the Nebula Awards, SFWA will present the Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, the Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book, the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award, and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
(2) BYE BYE BABBAGE. Chris Garcia is mourning the withdrawal of the Babbage machine from exhibit from the Computer History Museum.
Babbage Difference Engine No 2
After eight years at the Computer History Museum (CHM), the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 is bidding farewell and returning to its owner.
The Difference Engine No. 2 has had a wonderful home at the Museum. Our Babbage demonstrations have amazed more than 500,000 visitors, providing them with the unprecedented opportunity to see and hear the mechanical engine working—a stunning display of Victorian mechanics.
People will have to content themselves with CHM’s online Babbage exhibit.
Dave Doering said:
I figure they knew the price would one day come due for the chance to host it there for eight years. I mean, everyone today knows about “excess Babbage fees.”
(3) ASTEROID BELT AND SUSPENDERS. The government of Luxembourg announced it will be investing in the as-yet-unrealized industry of asteroid mining in “Luxembourg Hopes To Rocket To Front of Asteroid-Mining Space Race”. An NPR article says there are both technical and legal hurdles to overcome.
First, of course, there are technical challenges involved in finding promising targets, sending unmanned spacecraft to mine them and returning those resources safely to Earth.
Humans have yet to successfully collect even a proof-of-concept asteroid sample. …
The second issue is a legal one. Asteroids are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, nearly 50 years old now, which says space and space objects don’t belong to any individual nation. What that means for mining activities has never been tested in international courts because, well, nobody’s managed to mine an asteroid yet.
But there’s a fair amount of uncertainty, as Joanne Gabrynowicz, a director at the International Institute of Space Law, told NPR’s Here & Now last February.
“Anybody who wants to go to an asteroid now and extract a resource is facing a large legal open question,” she said.
The U.S. passed a law near the end of last year, the Space Act of 2015, which says American companies are permitted to harvest resources from outer space. The law asserts that extracting minerals from an extraterrestrial object isn’t a declaration of sovereignty. But it’s not clear what happens if another country passes a contradictory law, or if treaties are arranged that cover extraction of minerals from space.
Luxembourg hopes to address this issue, too, with a formal legal framework of its own — possibly constructed with international input — to ensure that those who harvest minerals can be confident that they’ll own what they bring home.
(4) WRITERS WHO THINK UP STUFF. Steven H Silver points out, “Of the authors listed in 8 Things Invented By Famous Writers at Mental Floss, Heinlein, Wolfe, Clarke, Atwood, Carroll, Dahl, and arguably Twain are SF authors.”
- THE PRINGLES CHIP MACHINE // GENE WOLFE
Prior to beginning his contributions to the science fiction genre with The Fifth Head of Cerberus in 1972, Wolfe was a mechanical engineering major who accepted a job with Procter & Gamble. During his employment, Wolfe devised a way for the unique, shingle-shaped Pringles chips to be fried and then dumped into their cylindrical packaging. (Despite his resemblance to Mr. Pringle, there is no evidence the chip mascot was based on him.)
(5) POLAR BOREALIS PREMIERES. The first issue of R. Graeme Cameron’s semipro fiction magazine Polar Borealis has been posted. Get a free copy here. Cameron explains how the magazine works:
Polar Borealis is aimed at beginning Canadian writers eager to make their first sale, with some pros to provide role models.
In Issue #1:
- Art by Jean-Pierre Normand, Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, and Taral Wayne.
- Poems by Rissa Johnson, Eileen Kernaghan, and Rhea Rose.
- Stories by Christel Bodenbender, R. Graeme Cameron, Steve Fahnestalk, Karl Johanson, Rissa Johnson, Kelly Ng, Craig Russell, Robert J. Sawyer, T.G. Shepherd, Casey June Wolf, and Flora Jo Zenthoefer.
(6) A RATHER LARGE SCIENCE FAIR. The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair, to be held March 16-19 in Birmingham, “is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) for young people in the UK.”
Held at the NEC, Birmingham 16-19 March 2016, The Big Bang Fair is an award-winning combination of exciting theatre shows, interactive workshops and exhibits, as well careers information from STEM professionals.
We aim to show young people (primarily aged 7-19) the exciting and rewarding opportunities out there for them with the right experience and qualifications, by bringing classroom learning to life.
Having grown from 6,500 visitors in its first year (2009) to nearly 70,000 in 2015, The Big Bang Fair is made possible thanks to the collaborative efforts of over 200 organisations
(7) JUST NEEDS A LITTLE SMACK. Michael Swanwick, in the gracious way people do on the internet, expressed his bad opinion of the movie I, Robot (2004) in these terms:
Just watched I, ROBOT. I want to punch everybody involved in the face. Very, very hard. Dr. Asimov would approve.
[Okay, to spare people’s feelings, I want to punch THOSE RESPONSIBLE in the face. Still hated the movie.]
This ticked off Jeff Vintar, who wrote the original spec script and shared credit for the screenplay. Vintar posted a 1,200 word comment telling how his original script got turned into an “adaptation” and how these links of Hollywood sausage got made.
Having been one of the film’s biggest critics, I have watched over the years — to my surprise — as many people find quite a bit of Asimov still in it. I’m always glad when I read a critical analysis on-line or a university paper that makes the case that it is more Asimov than its reputation would suggest, or when I get contacted by a real roboticist who tells me they were inspired by the movie and went on to a career in robotics. And then of course there are the kids, who love it to death…
But I never go around defending the film or talking about it, because although I still believe my original script would have made a phenomenal ‘I, Robot’ film, there is no point. That any film gets made at all seems at times like a miracle.
But your stupid, yes stupid, ‘punch in the face’ post compelled me to write. I love Asimov as much as you do, probably more, because of all the time I spent living and breathing it. I also wrote an adaptation of Foundation that I spent years and years fighting for.
So, you want to punch me in the face? My friend, I would have already knocked you senseless before you cocked back your arm. I have been in this fight for more than twenty years. You’re a babe in the woods when it comes to knowing anything about Hollywood compared to me, and what it’s like fighting for a project you love for ten years, some for twenty years and counting.
Yet this exchange did not end the way most of these Facebook contretemps do.
Michael Swanwick answered:
I feel bad for you. That must have been an awful experience. But I spoke as a typical viewer, not as a writer. The movie was like the parson’s egg — parts of it were excellent, but the whole thing was plopped down on the plate. For my own part, I’d love to have the Hollywood money, but have no desire at all to write screenplays. I’ve heard stories like yours before.
Then Vintar wrote another long reply, which said in part:
Other writers are not our enemies. We are not fighting each other, not competing with each other, although that is a powerful illusion. As always the only enemy is weakness within ourselves, and I suppose entropy, the laws of chance, and groupthink. Ha, there are others! But I stopped throwing punches a long time ago. (Believe me, I used to.) You guys are great, thanks Michael….
And the love fest began.
(8) OGDEN OBIT. Jon P. Ogden (1944-2016), devoted Heinlein fan and member of the Heinlein Society, died January 27, Craig Davis and David Lubkin reported on Facebook. [Via SF Site News.]
(9) ALASKEY OBIT. Voice actor Joe Alaskey, who took over performing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck after actor Mel Blanc died in 1989, himself passed away February 3. CNN reports the 63-year-old actor had been battling cancer.
Mark Evanier’s tribute to Alaskey on News From Me also tells about one of his vocal triumphs outside the realm of animation —
When [Jackie] Gleason’s voice needed to be replicated to fix the audio on the “lost” Honeymooners episodes, Joe was the man.
A few years after that, Joe was called upon to redub an old Honeymooners clip for a TV commercial. When he got the call, Joe assured the ad agency that if they needed him, he could also match the voice of Art Carney as Ed Norton. He was told they already had someone to do that — someone who did it better. Joe was miffed until he arrived at the recording session and discovered that the actor they felt could do a better job as Art Carney…was Art Carney. Joe later said that playing Kramden to Carney’s Norton was the greatest thrill of his life, especially after Carney asked him for some pointers on how to sound more like Ed.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 4, 1930 – The Snickers bar hits the market.
- February 4, 1938 — Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (Did Disney miss a product placement opportunity by naming a dwarf Grumpy instead of Cranky?)
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY CLUB
- February 4, 1976 – Sfera, the oldest SF society in former Yugoslavia, was founded.
[Via Google Translate] On this day in 1976, a group of young (and less young) enthusiasts launched as part of the astronautical and rocket club Zagreb “Section for science fiction”…
(12) TODAY’S BITHDAY BOY
- Born February 4, 1940 – Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero.
(13) WEIRD AL CAST. “Weird Al” Yankovic will voice the title character in Milo Murphy’s Law, Disney XD’s animated comedy series, reports Variety.
The satirical songwriter will provide the voice of the titular character Milo Murphy, the optimistic distant grandson of the famed Murphy’s Law namesake. In addition to voicing the main character, Yankovic will sing the show’s opening theme song and perform other songs throughout the duration of the series….
“Milo Murphy’s Law” will follow the adventures of Milo and his best friends Melissa and Zack as they attempt to embrace life’s catastrophes with positive attitudes and enthusiasm.
(14) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day posted four picks for the Best Fancast category today.
(15) SAD PUPPIES. Damien G. Walter japed:
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/693001785141772288
(16) PUPPY COMPARISON. Doris V. Sutherland posted “2014 Hugos Versus 2015 Sad Puppies: Novellas”, the third installment, the purpose of which she explains in the introduction —
In this series on the Sad Puppies controversy, I have been comparing the works picked for the 2015 Sad and Rabid Puppies slates with the stories that were nominated for the Hugo in 2014. Were the previous nominees truly overwhelmed with preachy “message fiction”? What kinds of stories had the Sad Puppies chosen to promote in response?
Having taken a look at the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories, I shall now cover the Hugo Awards’ final short fiction category: Best Novella, the section for stories of between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Let us see how the two sets of stories compare…
At the end of her interesting commentary, she concludes:
…Let us take a look through some of the previously-discussed categories. Aside from Vox Day’s story, only one of the 2014 Best Novelette nominees can be read as “message fiction”: Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars,” which has an anti-colonial theme. I have also heard the accusation of propaganda directed at John Chu’s “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”, a story about a gay couple. But once again, I see nothing clumsy or poorly-handled about de Bodard’s exploration of colonialism or Chu’s portrayal of a same-sex couple. So far, the accusation of preachiness appears to be based largely Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, which has the straightforward message that hate begets hate.
None of these stories push a specific message as strongly or as directly as John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them. This raises an obvious question: exactly which group is rewarding message fiction here…?
[Thanks to Gary Farber, JJ, David K.M. Klaus, Brian Z., Steven H Silver, Jumana Aumir, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Dave Doering for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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It rests on the very simple concept that you can’t write science fiction until there is science fiction
It ignores the obvious fact that The War of the Worlds is Science Fiction.
I wanna go – Oh oh oh oh
To the late night, double feature, pixel scroll
For those following along at home, Teddy B. has made his picks for best fanzine. File 770 is on the list. My guess is that this is where he’s going to try and start forcing qualified people to turn down nominations because of his taint.
I’ve received three separate emails in the last week from the Hugos that contain the PIN. All of them are identical…not sure why I keep getting new messages.
@Mike Kerpan
Well it’s about bloody time. I was beginning to wonder if Day had given up on his Xanadu Gambits. I assume he’s already practising his “Just as planned” cackling.
You could argue that War for the Worlds is just invasion literature, a popular genre of the time, that just incorporates a new invader.
VD did comment a great deal more in File 770 at one point during the troubles. (Used to comment on how it was one of the few places outside of his own blog that he would comment.) Perhaps he just sees his participation as an indication that it deserves nomination. Or he expects the heads of the regular participants to explode. Mine is feeling quite intact.
So Beale’s picks for fancast are two video game related podcasts, a video game relate YouTube channel, and a movie reviewing YouTube channel. Given all the gaming picks offered, one has to wonder whether Beale actually reads any actual science fiction or fantasy.
On another note, it is interesting that Beale picked Shamus Young for fan writer, but didn’t bother to pick his video game related podcast The Diecast or his game related YouTube show Spoiler Warning over an empty space on his slate. This seems to me kind of like when the Sad Puppies picked several stories from Analog last year for their slate, but didn’t pick Trevor Quachri as one of their picks for Short Form Editor.
I put File 770 on my Hugo Nomination Ballot long before Beale did. I did it the first day the form was available (I got my PIN on the Progress Report envelope).
My PIN e-mail landed in my spam folder.
snowcrash on February 4, 2016 at 11:41 pm said:
Oh, but don’t forget all the real planning is happening amongst the Dead Elks in e-mail.
@Niall McAuley. No, it doesn’t ignore the non-factual. TWOTW was published as a scientific romance. It meets two of the three criteria for a work of science fiction, but not all three. It is safe to say that it is a solid precursor to the kind of work that would later be identified as science fiction. It’s an Archaeopteryx. It’s descendants would become birds, and it possesses many bird-like qualities, but it is identified and belongs to the Dinosaur genre.
Birds are dinosaurs.
And no birds descended from Archaeopteryx: it was a side branch.
@Mike Kerpan:
More to the point, because people are going to argue over it forever.
Beale thrives on internet drama. Giving non-Puppies things to argue and be vehement about is how he works.
Mixing “popular” nominees in with RP picks gives people lots to argue about. Opportunities to say things that’ll have them mad at each other, and EVERYTHING they say on the topic will be easy to spin to get the various Puppies even madder.
So basically, same old, same old.
Margaret Atwood did not write The Handmaid’s Tale as a Science Fiction novel.
Does that mean it isn’t one?
(Her somewhat idiosyncratic definition of SF involves talking squids in outer space, which do not feature in her novel).
It should be remembered that it was Mr. Hodgman who, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, asked President Obama (who collected Conan the Barbarian comics in his youth) if he had found a church of Crom in Washington for his family to join, who showed a portrait of a sandworm rising out of the surface of Arrakis, and at the conclusion told him “I have been, and always shall be, your friend.”
Regarding when science fiction started.
I like discussing definition, categorisation and classification. However, it behooves us to understand that unless a definition, categorisation or classification create nonsensical or contradictory results, all such are basically arbitrary. What matters isn’t if this definition is more correct than another, what matters is how useful it is, eg in fostering discussion or finding relations between separate works.
So depending on how you define science fiction you may put the first sf work with Lukianos, with Kepler, with Shelley, with Wells, or with Gernsback. But a lot will depend on how you define science fiction, and also on how you define genre.
So, please, nothing about that some critic completely demolishes the argument of another critic.
(Personally, I believe Aldiss made a very good and fruitful definition of sf that made him put Shelley as the author of the first “real” science fiction work, and I gladly mention it as a seminal work for our genre. But I’m still aware of and acknowledge that other definitions exist, that give different results.)
@AndrewM: I think the emphasis on Frankenstein comes mainly from the fact that it’s the earliest work of science fiction that lots of people have heard of; rather fewer are conversant with the Somnium or Lucian of Samosata. (I’ll be honest, I’m not. The farthest back I’ve been is Cyrano de Bergerac… come to think of it, his trips to the moon and the sun are scientifically rigorous, at least by the scientific standards of the day; his spacecraft are technological in origin and operation. [I might even say that Cyrano is more rigorous than E.E. “Doc” Smith – at least he doesn’t actually ignore any known scientific principles, whereas Smith dismisses Einsteinian relativity in two casual sentences in The Skylark of Space.])
@steve davidson: I’m having a hard time seeing your argument as anything but a circular one, based on Hugo Gernsback’s editorial standards: science fiction is anything that can be sold to the guy who markets his magazines as science fiction. Of course a lot of SF was written to suit Gernsback’s three criteria, because writers have to make some accommodation to editors’ tastes if they’re not going to starve to death…. Gernsback was immensely influential in building a community of SF writers and readers*, and of course he thought up the name… but the thing he named was there before he named it. Just like Australia. I will give Gernsback all the respect I think he’s legitimately due, but I’m having a hard time seeing his marketing label as an innate definition of the genre. (He was a talented man, but no literary genius. I know this, I’ve read Ralph 124C41+.)
*At least, in the US. Me, I got my taste in SF from my father, who was born dirt poor in Liverpool, and never set eyes on a copy of Amazing as far as I know. He got his start in SF from Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and later John Wyndham and George Orwell. But what was he reading, if it wasn’t SF?
@Standback
it does. Thanks for clarifying 🙂
When I studied postmodernism, we talked about irony and pastiche. One of the arguments in postmodernist literary theory – oversimplified – is no originality was possible because all texts are socially constructed and refer to each other. Although text can refer to something wider than ‘text on a page’, let’s assume that it means other books.
My argument against that ‘pomo’ position was that you can ‘get outside’ of social narratives by using the skills of a journalist or social researcher. Interviewing people, doing primary research (e.g. history, science, mythologies, biographies etc.), and visiting real places. At that point, you don’t need to consider ‘is my scientist a stereotypical boffin in a white coat?’ (or whatever). You’re basing your character on a composite of real-life scientists – historical and present – who are individuals with unique motivations. Your work is then, also, more relevant to readers because it has a ‘truth’ to it. Obviously, the risk of that is that you’ll end up writing the present and ignoring future social and cultural trends. So a certain amount of ‘speculation’ is required there.
Now, I think, without listening to the podcast (maybe I should) that they were talking more about fantasy. A situation where, for example, where you might have a jiangshi and some readers might feel a bit that’s not the vampires I was looking for, and you’ve got to manage those expectations. I don’t know how big an issue that is. For me, it isn’t, but I like novelty. Certainly, I’ve personally had people getting bothered or disorientated by the first draft of my novel because they need to know what ‘thing they’ve read before’ this novel is exactly like.
The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine appear on many lists of the 25 or 50 most important SF novels, which is odd if they are not SF.
H.G. Wells is often rated in the top 10 SF writers, again odd if he did not write SF.
I think this means that File 770 is this year’s obvious nomination choice of heaps of individual people, and yer man wants to be able to claim the credit.
@Vivienne: I’m so pleased! 🙂
I’d love to continue discussing, but Shabbat is coming in. I’ll be glad to continue tomorrow!
The Westfahl book that Steve Davidson recommended above is really a very interesting read if you like having the genre argument. And I find Westfahl convincing to some extent, that for the study of science fiction there is a need to restrict the category in order to make it useful. Just like there’s a need to identify, say, Romantic literature as a category that belongs to a time and place and has certain characteristics. So to talk about War of the Worlds, for example, as science fiction strikes me as ignoring its particular context. It’s a precursor, sure, and Gernsback himself identified it as the kind of thing he wanted to publish, as a model for submitters. But pushing the SF genre to include every piece of fiction that ever built on science or used a SF trope, well, that just makes the category meaningless. It’s like the Damon Knight, “SF is what we point to when we say SF” argument (paraphrasing). True enough, I guess, but not useful.
For me, because I have some academic involvement with this stuff, I tend to use the label in both a restricted sense and a broad sense. Sort of like there is Realist literature (a literary movement in 19th century France) and realist literature, as in literature that represents the real world. There is Science Fiction, the Gernsback definition, and science fiction, the broad world of speculative literature that doesn’t involve magic (much).
@Standback No problem. I wish this forum had threaded comments – it would be easier to follow/continue discussion threads with a pause in the middle 🙂
I think we will need pretty significant improvements to rocket technology before asteroid mining becomes even remotely profitable.
I’ll go you one further–I think we will need Von Neumann devices before asteroid mining becomes even remotely profitable.
I think the ‘gambit’ is relatively clear. If people vote for File770, then obviously their real objection all along was not to ‘slates,’ but to who SP/RP nominated last year. Basically, it’s to demonstrate that the most common rhetorical device utilized by those who no awarded the Hugo categories in 2015 was more or less a lie that people were telling themselves.
Which is likely accurate. I’ve pretty much thought all along that if Tor or Scalzi came out with a slate of works and asked the people at their website to vote for it in 2010, most people wouldn’t have blinked. Slates really became ‘the thing people were really objecting to’ when it was revealed who managed to successfully push the slate through.
Well, my life plan didn’t specifically include becoming a minion in a hive of scum and villainy but que sera, sera…
For those who have missed it, the delightfully grumpy Peter Watts’ delightfully grumpy take on Atwood:
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Atwood.pdf
(Also, trying to read the Swanwick piece, but Facebook seems to be down. Let the rioting and burning of cities begin.)
@Stevie. I suspect few of us expected to be minions in a hive of scum and villainy. But we are dealt the cards we are dealt, eh? 🙂
@idon’tknow
I think people were consistently saying that the slate tactic was dishonourable and that the works forced onto the shortlist by that tactic were largely shit.
Including names on your slate that were already likely to be nominated does not provide the ‘aha!’ moment you’re hoping for. It didn’t for Guardians of the Galaxy, it doesn’t for Andy Weir or File 770.
Should we have a game of it though?
What else do we think Poxy Voxy will try and nominate as part of the Xanthium Gumbit? Paul Cornell’s novel sized novella? Something by the local wombat? I’m expecting him to nominate Seveneves.
I’ve pretty much thought all along that if Tor or Scalzi came out with a slate of works and asked the people at their website to vote for it in 2010, most people wouldn’t have blinked.
Your counterfactual has a lot of problems, the most glaring of which is that Tor and Scalzi didn’t come out with a slate because they knew that doing so runs counter to accepted custom. To put out a slate they would have to have a completely different way of thinking about awards than they actually do. They wouldn’t put out a slate precisely because of who they are, so wondering what would happen if they did put out a slate is to contemplate a virtual impossibility.
When Correia came out with his “get Correia a Hugo” campaign in Sad Puppies 1, he wasn’t voted down because it was a slate. He was mostly ignored or treated as just another author promoting their work. Some people were annoyed by his whole “make people’s heads explode” rhetoric. He didn’t win because his work wasn’t something voters thought was good enough. It was only when he switched to promoting a slate that he received a voting backlash. Not because of who he is, but because he promoted a slate.
As to Beale’s “gambit”, it is a empty and foolish as per his usual. If File 770 gets a Hugo nomination, it won’t be because of his slate. Putting something on your slate that is likely to get a nomination anyway doesn’t actually demonstrate anything about what people do or do not object to. All it does is prove that your slate can jump on a bandwagon that is already in motion.
Or it demonstrates that people are not as stupid as Beale likes to imagine, and we’re perfectly capable of distinguishing between “things that only get nominated because they were on a slate” and “things that would have been nominated anyway”
This is not even new. Guardians of the Galaxy was on a slate last year, and people still voted for it. File770 has won multiple Hugos without Beale’s ‘help’, and so has Mike Glyer.
Is “if Tor had done it, no-one would have cared” the new, improved version of “Tor have been doing it all along and nobody cared”? Because it is equally convincing.
Someone in Luxembourg is a Leonard Wibberley fan, I betcha.
To me, it looks like Vox has realized that he can’t actually achieve his main goals and is resorting to a backup plan in order to stay relevant.
Vox’s goals seem to have been:
1. Garner Hugos for authors who are from his own publishing house or whom agree with him ideologically. Last year showed conclusively that he doesn’t have the voting power to pull that off, not unless he wants to spend thousands of dollars buying memberships and set up hundreds of fake accounts to stuff the ballot.
2. Burn the Hugos by filling up the ballot with a slate of obvious junk, forcing most people to vote No Award (either because they hate the works or because they don’t want to reward slates). He showed last year that he can do that… sort of… but it ultimately didn’t matter that much. Last year’s good works were still honored with the Long List Anthology and other measures, so he didn’t exactly succeed in blocking other people’s fiction from being rewarded. While this sucked for several authors, things ultimately worked out well for most of them, while Vox’s nominees were humiliated. So this strategy’s probably also out.
3. Play kingmaker. Support genuinely good works and then act like the Puppies are the bloc which chooses between them, in order to claim that he’s influential or in order to taint the wins. He did this last year with 3 Body Problem–despite his best efforts, it made the final ballot, so he told his followers to support it and then took credit when it beat out the other 2 non-slate novels. He’s likely already starting this by supporting File770, Shamus Young, and other quality writers/works. This is the one strategy where he actually has the votes to win.
…the problem, of course, is that strategy 3 doesn’t burn down the Hugos like he claims to want. If all the winners this year are really good, that’s good for the Hugos, and nobody will care that some fraction of the votes were Vox’s faction. “Hah! We got one really good book to win over another really good book” doesn’t actually hurt the awards. The most he can do is annoy other people who don’t want a troll to have influence over the winner. But ultimately, if the final winner is still a really good book, it’s not going to have any kind of major affect.
(He may be hoping to support good works and get people to reject them on slate grounds, but Hugo voters are not sheep and aren’t going to reject something just because Vox tossed it on a slate, so that pan’s a dud too).
TL:DR version: Vox has realized he can’t meaningfully hurt the awards and so is using his coalition to pick between good books with an actual shot of winning, then claiming credit when one of them does win, in a desperate effort to seem relevant.
I see Idontknow is living up to their handle, and does not know a thing.
I think our gracious host’s wishes will be respected by those who don’t jump when Teddy says toad; I also think our gracious host has something Teddy will never have.
I’m just voting for what I like. Teddy-boy is just gibbering in the background, like the irrelevant troll he is. The intersect between RP/SP slates and total shit was about 95% last year (obviously in my opinion, but as a voter who read it) so his slate failed at the “Is this Hugo-worthy?” stage without any reference to the politics of the slate. The 5% wasn’t as good as TGE or 3BP. If the blind squirrel does find a Hugo-worthy nut, after picking myself up from the floor due to shock, I’d evaluate it against the other nominees.
Obviously, others felt differently and just No Awarded everything slate-y, and that’s OK too – each voter to their own be true.
Any posturing after something he puts on the slate winning a Hugo is just tiresome noise, from my point of view. He tried this with Guardians last year and failed miserably.
On the other hand, if he does game Seveneves onto the slate (which I doubt – I don’t read his internet dribblings but apparently he hates it for some no doubt incoherent reason) then I’d gladly vote that below No Award – the good people/things of this parish know my opinions on that book…
I’m also just nominating what I like. I’ll react to the puppy moves after they’ve made ’em. I’m kind of curious to see if last year’s ruckus produces enough new nominators to overcome the puppy slate, but I’m not going to be terribly disappointed if it doesn’t. We all know that what worked in 2015 can work again in 2016 and we’re all already prepared for Xanatos to 4th-generation Aristotle one last set of Hugos before EPH shuts the slatemongers down for good.
I would suggest that anyone who gets slated by Vox Day should simply lay low and say nothing about it until nominations are complete. Then withdraw and let an organic nominee become a finalist. (Unless, like Weir or File770, the nominee was so strong that it seemed obvious that Day was just trying to poison the well.)
In other words, if you don’t think you can be “Guardians of the Galaxy,” let someone else be “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” Either one defeats his strategy. (And George R.R. Martin might invite you to a cool party as a consolation prize.)
But don’t announce it in advance; otherwise he could just change his list.
1) “John Hodgman is the longtime Resident Expert on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart…”
Yeah. Nothing remotely political about that pic, right SFWA?
Vivienne Raper on February 5, 2016 at 3:08 am said: “…but – if the only thing you want to do with speculative fiction is struggle against someone else’s speculative fiction – you’ve lost the plot…”
Viv, you’re not allowed to say that here. Casting doubt upon The Struggle is ‘trolling’. Please report for re-education immediately.
No it’s not and that’s the point. There are so many different interpretations and ramifications that any objective or outcome can be spun as the true one. The guy’s a spin doctor first and foremost. We’d be in trouble if he was persuasive to any but his own true believers.
There was already trenchant criticism of the practice of putting up eligibility posts, so I don’t see that at all. It wouldn’t have been as acrimonious, which is not the same thing.
Oh good, my script has apparently blocked out Idontknow’s gibberish.
I intend to nominate File 770/Mike Glyer myself (if I ever get my PIN) so whatever Mr Beale does will not matter in the least to me.
Last year I read all the horrid works and voted accordingly. I will do the same this year (unless John C Wright gets piled in again–I can’t take any more of his prose for love or money). As we’ve stated all along, last year not voting for a slate/rejecting subpar works was functionally the same thing. If the Pups nominate stuff like Andy Weir that would likely have ended up on the ballot anyway…well, then their slide into irrelevance has already begun, methinks.
@NowhereMan
I wonder why he thinks that, though. If he really can manage slate discipline, my math suggests that he could easily sweep every category (with the possible exception of Best Dramatic Presentation [long form]) with trash and force a situation where no Hugos are awarded to anyone at all. This will be the only year he could pull that off, and he doesn’t even need any help from the Sad Puppies to do it. Either he doesn’t really have the 525 followers he claims, or he doesn’t think he can control them, or he’s got some other objective. (Or maybe he’s just screwing it up.)
[rats, forgot ticky]
Unless, like Weir or File770, the nominee was so strong that it seemed obvious that Day was just trying to poison the well.
That’s tricky, though. Weir was obviously going to be nominated anyway (presuming he’s eligible), as can be seen from his figures from last year. File 770 was also a safe bet. What about Brown, though? What about Seveneves, if he does nominate it? These are not foregone conclusions, but neither are they implausible nominees. If anyone who was not a certain nominee withdraws, they are giving VD power to control who is on the list.
We have a winner!
(at least, not 525 followers who will pay for Worldcon membership just to please him)
he doesn’t really have the 525 followers he claims
We have a winner!
(at least, not 525 followers who will pay for Worldcon membership just to please him)
Don’t last year’s voting figures show that he has? And have they not already paid (for Sasquan, which makes them nominators)?
Andrew M – what exactly is the problem here?
X is on the shortlist. X was nominated by Beale.
If you look at X and think “You know, X was quite possibly going to be on the shortlist anyway. Not definitely, but quite possibly” then Beale’s 4th generation warfare boils down to the ability to jump on bandwagons.
FEAR HIM
“who collected Conan the Barbarian comics in his youth”
I loved Conan books and comics when I was in college. Staggering under a double major in English and history, I loved their simplicity. You get in Conan’s way; he unseams you from the nave to the chops, and he goes merrily on. I felt the same way about John Wayne movies (as I hadn’t seen the Searchers, or any of the other more complex ones).
Don’t last year’s voting figures show that he has?
Maybe, maybe not. When one looks at those nominees who were on the Rabid slate but not on the Sad slate, they generally didn’t do very well in the voting.
Best editor, Long Form – Vox Day – 166 votes
where do you get 550?
@Darren Garrison – For those who have missed it, the delightfully grumpy Peter Watts’ delightfully grumpy take on Atwood
Ooh. I liked that. It’s a far more entertaining response than the eye sprain I get whenever Atwood explains why her SF isn’t SF.
@NowhereMan, I’m pulling out excerpts instead of quoting you in full, for reasons of brevity.
I think you’re giving VD way more credit than he deserves, particularly with items two and three. In particular, burning the Hugos by forcing No Award only became a stated thing after it was clear that No Awarding was clearly going to happen in some of the categories. Retconning what was going to occur as a goal isn’t the same thing as a goal. Fortunately for VD, “burning down the Hugos” is a fairly amorphous goal that can be stretched to fit all sorts of eventualities. Also, I think what was nominated was only determined to be crap by that subset of voters who voted NA on quality, rather than due to intent by VD.
As for item three, nope. There are reasons, but nope is really all the words I have left for this. Somebody else can compile the statistics in the RP/SP overlap to show why this isn’t true.
where do you get 550?
In Short Form Editor he got 586 votes on the first pass.