(1) WIRED DOES A JOB ON SANDERSON. In his WIRED article: “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God”, Jason Kehe slags Sanderson, his writing, his fans, his business, his religion, his taste in movie musicals, and anything else that comes to mind — and it really feels like puppy-kicking – in the original sense, not that Sanderson is/was a Sad Puppy.
…Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. It’s kind of fun to talk about, until it isn’t, and that’s when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He’s excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.
He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.
So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well….
There’s such an uproar that Sanderson’ has posted a letter to his fan community about the WIRED story on his sub-Reddit — “On The Wired Article” — in which he expresses his own confusion about the article but asks his fan community not to harass Jason Kehe over it (apparently this has been happening on Twitter.)
I appreciate the kind words and support.
Not sure how, or if, I should respond to the Wired article. I get that Jason, in writing it, felt incredibly conflicted about the fact that he finds me lame and boring. I’m baffled how he seemed to find every single person on his trip–my friends, my family, my fans–to be worthy of derision.
But he also feels sincere in his attempt to try to understand. While he legitimately seems to dislike me and my writing, I don’t think that’s why he came to see me. He wasn’t looking for a hit piece–he was looking to explore the world through his writing. In that, he and I are the same, and I respect him for it, even if much of his tone seems quite dismissive of many people and ideas I care deeply about.
The strangest part for me is how Jason says he had trouble finding the real me. He says he wants something true or genuine. But he had the genuine me all that time. He really did. What I said, apparently, wasn’t anything he found useful for writing an article. That doesn’t make it not genuine or true.
I am not offended that the true me bores him. Honestly, I’m a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories. There’s no hidden trauma. No skeletons in my closet. Just a guy trying to understand the world through story. That IS kind of boring, from an outsider’s perspective. I can see how it is difficult to write an article about me for that reason….
(2) NEW AWARD COMPETITION. The Oxford Centre for Fantasy and Pushkin Children’s Books announced creation of The Oxford/Pushkin Children’s Fantasy Prize for fantasy novels aimed at Middle Grand and YA. (Entry fee: £5)
Calling all fantasy novelists at the beginning of their career to a new adventure. To mark this 50th Anniversary year since the death of J R R Tolkien, we are looking for fresh ideas and new voices in the fantasy genre. This is your chance to win our brilliant prize of £2000, as well as the incredible opportunity for mentorship with an editor at Pushkin Children’s Books.
Four runners-up will win further prizes to help them develop their writing skills.
… We will be looking for finalists writing novels for the following reading ages:
…When chatting with AI today, I decided I needed to know whether or not it could give me a good answer to one of our most burning questions here at Winter is Coming. Could it tell me, or even just predict, when George R.R. Martin will release The Winds of Winter? We’re going on 12 years now since the last entry in the A Song of Ice and Fire book series was released, so maybe I’m a little desperate to find out. Does AI know something we don’t? Well… no. I discovered that it doesn’t….
… Inside Octavia’s Bookshelf is a carefully curated set of books and non-book items that High has sourced from mainly independent Bipoc-owned businesses – “not on Amazon”, she emphatically said. Beyond books, Octavia’s Bookshelf has everything from quirky book-nerd socks to prayer candles dedicated to iconic Black women literary figures such as Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde.
“I had been thinking about [this bookstore] for about 10 years, but not in a way where I was ready to leave my job and do it,” said High, who managed communications for 15 years at Trader Joe’s.
But what pushed High to lean into her dream was the May 2022 death of her grandmother, who had always championed her granddaughter’s pursuits. High took the leap a few months later in October of that year and began the process of starting her own business….
The central relationship in Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is the lifelong creative partnership between Sam and Sadie, childhood friends who go on to start a video game company. The novel depicts the exhilarating highs and enraging lows of collaboration, including fights over recognition — that is, how Sam and Sadie see each other’s contributions to their work compared with how the world sees them.
One of the games they develop together, “Solution,” is now caught up in a real-life debate about artistry and credit.
On Thursday, game designer Brenda Romero wrote in a Twitter thread that Zevin had drawn on the ideas and structure of her board game Train without acknowledging its inspiration.
“A theme in the book is how women struggle to get credit for their work,” Romero wrote….
Nearly a third of the LGBT+ characters to have featured on US TV over the past year will not be returning in future, a new report has revealed.
Over the period between 1 June 2022 and 31 May 2023, a total of 596 LGBT+ characters were featured on scripted TV.
Of these, 175 will not be returning in the following season, as a result of series being cancelled or coming to a pre-agreed end. The majority of these characters (140) are the result of series being cancelled.
The statistics are taken from the annual report published by the US media monitoring organisation GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).
The report takes into account LGBT+ characters across scripted primetime broadcast networks, scripted primetime cable networks, and scripted series on the eight major US streaming platforms: Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+.
Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of GLAAD, describes the significant cancellation rates of LGBT+ “disappointing”.
“Some of the year’s biggest hits have been LGBTQ-inclusive series – including HBO’s The Last of Us, ABC’s Abbott Elementary, FX’s What We Do in The Shadows, Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Netflix’s Stranger Things, and HBO Max’s Hacks, to name only a few,” she wrote in a statement….
I invite you to take a seat at the table with my guest Annalee Newitz at Tony and Elaine’s, a casual, old school, Italian red sauce restaurant in the North End of Boston.
Annalee is the author of three novels — The Terraformers (just out in January), The Future of Another Timeline, and their debut novel Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” won the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Their nonfiction books include Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which was a national bestseller and was praised in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New Yorker, and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science.
They’re also the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). They’re the co-host with Charlie Jane Anders of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and in addition to having been the founder of io9, served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.
We discussed how difficult (and disappointing) it would have been to eat a trilobite, what writing their non-fiction books taught them about creating the arcs of novels, why their brain seems more suited for novels than short stories, how best to include a message in fiction without the soapbox overwhelming the story, the greatest bad review one of their books ever got (it involved creamed corn), how to inhabit characters who are hundreds of years old, fun facts they learned about moose which helped make their new book better, the music they blasted to rev up for one of the novel’s big action scenes, how to make the growth of a fictional romance believable to readers, the serendipitous way in which Ken McLeod rekindled their love of science fiction, and much more.
(8) NBCC. The National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2022 have been announced, however, I did not recognize any genre works among the winners. If I missed any, drop a comment to fill me in!
(9) MEMORY LANE.
2016 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Our Beginning this Scroll is one of P. Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn Universe stories, to wit A Dead Djinn in Cairo which has as its central character Fatma el-Sha’arawi, a fascinating Muslim woman who will show up again in his Hugo nominated A Master of Djinn novel.
This was published on the Tor website in 2016. There’s a third story here so far, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, also first published by Tor.
It’s a perfect Beginning in my mind as it very nicely introduces us to Fatma el-Sha’arawi and the Djinn in all their chilling awesomeness.
And now for our most perfect Beginning…
Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, stood gazing through a pair of spectral goggles at the body slumped atop the mammoth divan.
A djinn.
An Old One, at that—near twice the size of a man, with fingers that ended in curved talons, long as knives. His skin was a sheath of aquamarine scales that shifted to turquoise beneath the glare of flickering gas lamps. He sat unclothed between tasseled cushions of lavender and burgundy, his muscular arms and legs spread wide and leaving nothing to the imagination.
“Now that’s impressive,” a voice came. Fatma glanced back at the figure hovering just over her shoulder. Two long graying whiskers fashioned in the style of some antiquated Janissary twitched on a plump face. It belonged to a man in a khaki uniform that fit his thick frame a bit too tightly, particularly around the belly. He jutted a shaved round chin at the dead djinn’s naked penis: a midnight-blue thing that hung near to the knee. “I’ve seen full-grown cobras that were smaller. A man can’t help but feel jealous, with that staring him in the face.”
Fatma returned to her work, not deigning to reply. Inspector Aasim Sharif was a member of the local constabulary who served as a police liaison with the Ministry. Not a bad sort. Just vulgar. Cairene men, despite their professed modernity, were still uncomfortable working alongside a woman. And they expressed their unease in peculiar, awkward ways. It was shocking enough to them that the Ministry had tapped some sun-dark backwater Sa’idi for a position in Cairo. But one so young, and who dressed in foreign garb—they’d never quite gotten used to her.
Today she’d chosen a light gray suit, complete with a matching vest, chartreuse tie, and a red-on-white pinstriped shirt. She had picked it up in the English District, and had it specially tailored to fit her small frame. The accompanying walking cane—a sturdy length of black steel capped by a silver pommel, a lion’s head—was admittedly a bit much. But it added a flair of extravagance to the ensemble. And her father always said if people were going to stare, you should give them a show.
“Exsanguination,” she declared. Fatma pulled off the copper-plated goggles and handed them over to a waiting boilerplate eunuch. The machine-man grasped the instrument between tactile metal fingers, folding it away with mechanical precision into a leather casing. She caught her reflection in its featureless brass countenance: dark oval eyes and a fleshy nose set against russet-brown skin on a slender face. Some might have called it boyish, if not for a set of full, bold lips passed on by her mother. As the boilerplate eunuch stepped away, she used her fingers to smooth back a mop of cropped black curls and turned to the constable. Aasim stared as if she’d just spoken Farsi.
“Those markings.” She tapped the floor with her cane, where curving white script engulfed the divan in a circle. “It’s an exsanguination spell.” Seeing Aasim’s blank look, she reached down to her waist to pull her janbiya free and placed the tip of the knife at the djinn’s thigh before sliding it beneath a scale. It came back out clean. “No blood. Not a drop. He’s been drained.” The inspector blinked, catching on.
“But where did it … the blood … go?”
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 24, 1834 — William Morris. Credited with creating the modern fantasy literature genre, he certainly wrote some of it its earlier works, to note his epic poem The Earthly Paradise, The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, plus his entire artistic motif fits nearly within a fantasy literature as it looks as if it was created by the Fey Themselves. (Died 1896.)
Born March 24, 1874 — Harry Houdini. His literary career intersects the genre world in interesting ways. Though it’s not known which, many of his works were written by his close friend Walter B. Gibson who as you know is the creator of The Shadow. And one famous story of his, “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”, was actually ghost-written by Lovecraft! ISFDB lists another piece of genre fiction for him, “The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstad.” (Died 1926.)
Born March 24, 1924 — Peter George. Welsh author, most remembered for the late Fifties Red Alert novel, published first as Two Hours To Doom and written under the name of Peter Bryant. The book was the basis of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (Died 1966.)
Born March 24, 1941 — Henry Glassie, 82. Folklorist who’s the author of one of my all-time fav Christmas books, All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming. I was delighted to see that ISFDB say he has two works of genre fiction, “Coals on the Devil’s Hearth“ and “John Brodison and the Policeman”. Both are to be found in the Jane Yolen anthology, Favorite Folktales from Around the World which is available at all the usual digital suspects.
Born March 24, 1946 — Andrew I. Porter, 77. Editor, publisher, fan. Major member of NYC regional fandom starting in the early Sixties. APA publisher and editor of Algol: The Magazine About Science Fiction (later renamed Starship) which won the Best Fanzine Hugo in 1974 (in a tie with Richard E. Geis’ SFR.) He also won two Best Semiprozine Hugos for his news publication Science Fiction Chronicle which he started in 1980 and ran for over 20 years. He has won myriad awards, including the Big Heart Award. He has attended hundreds of science fiction conventions and most Worldcons since his first in ‘63. He has been Fan Guest of Honor at several conventions, including the 1990 Worldcon. And he is an indispensible daily contributor to the Pixel Scroll!
Born March 24, 1946 — Gary K. Wolfe, 77. Monthly reviewer for Locus for 27 years now and, yes, I enjoy his column a lot. His brief marriage to Ellen R. Weil, which ended with her tragic early death, resulted in them co-writing Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Old Earth Books has reprinted many of his reviews done between 1992 and 2006. He’s also written several critical looks at the genre, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Finally I’ll note that he’s involved with editor Jonathan Strahan on the stellar Coode Street podcast
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Eek! remembers the time Dr. Frankenstein made a mistake…
(12) AVENGERS AT 60. Alex Ross celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Avengers and the X-Men with new connecting variant covers that will run on various titles, starting with August’s UNCANNY AVENGERS #1. For more information, visit Marvel.com.
“In the case of the Avengers, I wanted to capture something of the era I grew up with, but also something extensive,” Ross said. “So I captured the first 30 years of that team, from the ‘60s through the ‘80s. I end where 1989 closes. I’m trying to make sure my work is aligning with how the character looked and also the attitudes the characters had.”
(13) JEOPARDY! Last night David Goldfarb watched the contestants strike out against this Jeopardy answer:
In the Double Jeopardy round, “TV Lingo” for $1600:
This substance powers spaceships on “Star Trek”
A triple stumper.
(14) BRAIN POWER. Meanwhile, Daniel Dern sends along a trivia challenge of his own:
A: (1) Peter Watts’ Blindsight (protagonist Siri Keaton, who has only one organic hemisphere; (2) (IMHO) Gene Wolfe’s story “The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories,” Tackman Babcock (has both hemispheres, but they’re not connected fully).
Jack Daniel’s wants you to know that its shit doesn’t stink. Because it doesn’t poop. Sort of. NPR reports that the whiskey distiller made its case to the Supreme Court on Wednesday that a poop-themed dog toy resembling a bottle of Jack was an issue of trademark infringement.
The dog toy is made to look like a square Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle, and its label says “Bad Spaniels” instead of “Jack Daniel’s.” Where a normal Jack Daniel’s label notes that it’s “40% alcohol by volume,” Bad Spaniels reads “43% poo” and “100% smelly.” Jack Daniel’s took issue with the toy because it’s potentially equating itself with the whiskey brand in the eyes of the consumer….
VIP Products, the company that makes the dog toy, retorted that a reasonable person would not mix up the two, and that it’s just a joke. The brand also manufactures dog toys spoofing beer, wine, and soda, with products like Dos Perros (instead of Dos Equis), Kennel-Relax’n (instead of Kendall-Jackson), and 7Pup (goes without saying)….
…There are institutions like the Pontifical Academy of Science that tell the Vatican what’s going on in the world of science, but we actually do the science,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, an asteroid honoree (4597 Consolmagno) and director of the observatory, whose website tagline is “faith inspiring science.”
(17) BIG DUMB OBJECT? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It is never aliens except when it is aliens…. “A compelling explanation for the enigmatic small object ‘Oumuamua”: Research reported in Nature presents a simple and realistic framework for understanding the object’s many peculiarities…
Interstellar objects have long been thought to transit our Solar System. Planetary systems eject large quantities of small bodies during the initial phases of their formation and, once ejected, these small ‘planetesimals’ travel through interstellar space for millions of years. It stands to reason that some of their paths will pass by the vicinity of the Sun. When ‘Oumuamua was first discovered, astronomers therefore expected it to behave like one of these fragments — not too dissimilar from the comets that form on the outskirts of our own Solar System.
From the beginning, however, something was amiss. ‘Oumuamua did not look like a comet and did not display the usual defining features of comets — a tail and a fuzzy envelope called a coma, both made from gas and dust. Instead, it resembled an inactive object, like an asteroid, which moves mainly as a result of gravity. However, it soon became evident that the motion of ‘Oumuamua was not exclusively due to gravity: it was being pushed along its path in a similar way to that routinely observed in comets, which are subject to an acceleration caused by the recoil of emitted gas and dust. How was it possible that this object looked inactive, but was showing indirect evidence of activity?…”
The primary research paper with the explanation is here.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, Bill, David Goldfarb, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
39 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/24/23 First Fandom: The Next Generation”
(14) And I just read Blindsight earlier this month.
1) I guess as soon as you become big enough you invite a backlash. I’m about 50% of my way through The Way of Kings and I have to confess I’m not enthralled and finding it a struggle to keep going.
(10) I did not know Henry Glassie had sf/f works. He was a professor of mine some years ago and is a great story teller. I recommend his nonfiction Passing the Time in Ballymenone for a sense of that.
(1) I usually think of Wired as knowledgeable, but… if no one there knew who Brian Sanderson is, then the actual geeks are gone, and it’s pop writers. I mean, really – I don’t know any techies who don’t read science fiction and fantasy. My reaction is that the interviewer is an ignoraant jerk. To call that an unprofessional interview is an understatement.
(6) Of course they’re cutting back – the media aren’t looking forward to the number of spurious lawsuits that MAGAdiots are going to bring.
(9) I need to read that. And I still say Clark’s novel should have won the Hugo.
(10) Birthdays… William Morris was more than just a writer – he was one of the creators of the craft movement. Look him up…and look at his chairs, and clothes, and….
(16) Yes, and listen when Bro. Guy tells you this…. (ObDisclosure – he’s a personal friend. And I Tuckerized him in my novel, 11,000 Years….)
(1) I’m not sure which annoyed me more — the profile or the number of anti-Sanderson people on social media who were dancing around it in glee and mocking his fans. And assuming anyone who criticized the article for its content was some kind of fanboy (or fangirl) instead of, you know, somebody who thought the article kinda sucked. (Anyway, like many others, I’m working on an article about the article…)
10) Morris was also an outspoken socialist (arrested at least once for public speaking in its favor) and a pioneer in what we now call historical preservation of buildings. He was offered the Poet Laureateship on the death of Tennyson, but turned it down, disliking its associations with the monarchy and the political establishment.
Anne Marble – over the years, I’ve read reviews of movies and such, and wondered why the hell the editors let them near a review, unless the editor wanted a hatchet job. As an example, I have an old, old memory of a review of Howard the Duck, the movie, that began, “I don’t like this kind of movie….” and my instant reaction was “why the hell did you review it, and why did your editor greenlight the review?
Brother Guy Consolmagno just gave a talk at Stanford, you can listen to it and watch the slides here
1) that article on Sanderson was pure clickbait/ragebait. It wasn’t an honest review, just mean-spiritedness manifest. And I’m not even a huge fan of Sanderson’s. But the books of his I’ve read I’ve liked.
When his second book came out, he was sitting alone at an autographing table while the author next to him (I’ve forgotten who it was) had a long line. I was in the line and after I got my books signed I went over and chatted with him. I said I like his second book (Mistborn, I think) and that he’d improved a lot as an author. I realized that could be taken as an insult instead of a compliment and quickly apologized but he understood I was praising him, not dissing him. I went to the dealer’s room and got a copy of Elantris and went back to have him sign it. Super nice guy.
1) He broke the record on Kickstarter, I don’t understand how no one could have heard of him.
9) That book was a pleasant surprise for me. I wasn’t expecting much from the book description but I really enjoyed the story and characters.
@bookworm1398
Exactly! I got 93 views and 42 reads on my lowly Medium article about the Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter. That got covered by media all over the world.
(1) I read The Emperor’s Soul when it was on the Hugo ballot. I thought it was an exquisite, subtle, and beautiful story. I put it first on my ballot, and was delighted when it won. I’ve since read some of his other books, and while they were not perfect, they were marvels of creativity and energy, and I liked the characters. I can see why they are wildly popular. Fantasy has had a number of authors who were both prolific and good. I would rate Sanderson as among the best of them, and capable of true gems when he feels like it.
(17) The orbit looks wrong. The sun should be at the focus of the curve. And it doesn’t really look like a hyperbola. So yeah, I’m more than a bit skeptical of the authors conclusions if they’re the ones who created the diagram.
(1) Vile, classless, and ignorant article.
I’m not a Sanderson fan; what he writes mostly does not appeal to me. I have, though, read intros he’s written to other things, and they’ve been thoughtful, intelligent, and well-written. Worth the time spent before getting to the story.
This disinclines me to believe he has the very sizable audience he has because those fans have no taste or judgment. And given the success of his Kickstarter, it’s a tad difficult to believe “no one has heard of him.”
I think “the geeks are gone from Wired” is a likely theory. And this guy went looking for something “interesting,” i.e., scandalous, and was angry and resentful when he didn’t find it. feh
(9) A Dead Jinn in Cairo is an excellent story in a fascinating world.
@Rick Lynch: I can’t get through the paywall while using this tablet to check if that illustration is supposed to be precise, but you’re overlooking the fact that in this model ‘Oumuamua is being accelerated by non-gravitational forces, so the orbit will no longer be a hyperbola with the Sun at the focus.
5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Argh, Mike. I missed a trivia question about this book, not two days ago! Why couldn’t you have run this item on Tuesday?
(1) not for me does not automatically mean bad. (Rolls eyes.)
(5) what, no credit for Shakespeare?
(1) This is one of the reasons I stopped reading Wired ages ago, just like Rolling Stone (but for the opposite reason). This is just really, really bad, as writing, as journalism, as anything worthwhile in print. And you can’t put all the blame on the writer, even though he’s a creepy dumb ass, an editor should have tossed this in the bin, with a nice note as to why. Thus endeth that journalist’s (sic!) career, if he ever had one.
1) is baffling. Its less then the author didnt like Sanderson – Not all books of his a equllay good. Someone writing an article shouldf be at least be able to pinpoint what makes work appealing for their fans – in this case, I think that his appraoach to magic (always clear rules that are apllied very creative) thats the original hook for most (or they came via wheels of time). This doesnt even try to understand anything.
And if you wnted a hit piece… you could have used his views on homosexualitäty (which he usually doesnt advertise).
This is just a meandering piece about the author doesnt know what to write about. Which is nabel gazing and not very insightful,. regardless on your stand on Sanderson imho.
“A pixel less scrolled is a scroll saved” as the old saying doesnt go
I subscribe to Wired because it’s dirt cheap, less ten dollars a year and I find abundant dozen articles a year that are really reading though far less than Vanity Fair has and that costs the same, and yes I have eclectic reading tastes.
The rest of time Wired is crap with writers who couldn’t offer if a coherent article if Pixel sat dow in their lap and presented them with it. Indeed I’d argue that Pixel is than smarter they are.
I read Jason Kehe’s article, and I was astounded by how deeply illiterate it was. There seems to be no grasp at all of basic things like punctuation, sentence structure, etc.
Typically, our old English teachers would diagram out a sentence. You can’t do that here. As a writer, I tend to see sentences as a sort of crystallized thought, an organized sequence of words which conveys a thought or idea. For Kehe, a sentence is simply a period, which will be followed by capitalizing the next word.
Understand that I’m not a grammar nazi, but… my god, what is this?
Beyond that, I sense an attempt to emulate the ‘gonzo journalism’ of a Wolfe or Thompson, in which the observer becomes part of the story. But guys like Hunter S. Thompson were acute observers. Kehe’s writing is mainly about his narcissism, we get to learn a lot about him but very little about his subject.
This really is an incoherent article. The writer is thoroughly defeated by his subject matter, and tries to conceal his incomprehension with what amounts to 4000 words of ‘the dog ate my homework.’
I’m on the last of Mary Robinette Kowal’s available work–yes, I’m on my tenth of her ten novels in the last month–and wondering what to get from the library next.
I’ve been trying the last couple of days to nominate for the Hugos but the provided link doesn’t work. Has anyone else had that trouble?
@Cassy On March 22, I got a link from the Worldcon membership email that said they were upgrading the functionality of the site and that it would be unavailable. They said they’d send a further notice when it was back online. I haven’t seen a further notice to that effect.
1.) Kehe is trying his best to sound edgelordy and/or write gonzo-style, and fails miserably at it. He also left so many potential engaging topics on the table. I look at his work product and am gobsmacked that a.) he’s a senior editor at WIRED and b.) it took him six months to produce those 4000 words.
Meredith Moment (Meridithórien Momment?)
Celebrate Tolkien Reading Day by buying several eBook editions of Tolkien for just $2.99.
It’s also Maryland Day. I wonder if that bagel place has any of those red, gold, and black bagels left?…
@John A thorny problem. Mary Robinette is a hard act to follow.
Hmm, how about UP AGAINST IT by Laura Mixon?
1) Not to pile on the unfortunate Kehe, but: lazy research: A simple Duck Duck Go search kicked out Sanderson interviews or features in The Guardian, Forbes, and two in Wired (2009, 2013), and on NPR. There was also a Locus featured interview, but I suppose our circulation doesn’t qualify the magazine as “major.” Or maybe “in depth” is a particular Wired term of art.
A few years ago, when a Murderbot story was published in Wired, I went to a book store to find an issue – and the clerk hadn’t even heard of the magazine, which I found somewhat surprising (I got the Murderbot issue via Amazon). I won’t be getting the latest issue…
@John A Arkansawyer: I’m going to recommend Melissa Scott’s recent work. Her 2018 space opera Finders is a masterpiece. I’m surprised more people aren’t raving about it. And there is a prequel (set centuries before) coming out this year.
Her Order of the Air series, with Jo Graham, is a historical airplane adventure / occult mystery series, with really great characters. And there is another volume coming out this year.
Unless Wired has changed its typography, I would have needed a microscope to read it the last time I had it. Haven’t gone back and this has just reinforced that decision.
@Tom Becker, @Paul Weimer: Melissa Scott has books in our library and Laura Mixon does not, plus I really dug Burning Bright, so Scott it is!
(1) The thing I find absolutely baffling about Kehe’s profile of Sanderson is the throwaway remark that he’s read seventeen of Sanderson’s books,
and particularly: how is that such a throwaway remark?
Seventeen Sanderson books is tens of thousands of pages. That’s way beyond research for a profile — either Kehe put in the most massive hate-read imaginable, or else he’s… a reader who’s actually fond of Brandon Sanderson’s books?
It’s thousands of words about Sanderson from somebody who’s read thousands of pages by Sanderson and yet, incredibly, there’s just no mention of what Kehe actually thinks of Sanderson’s books. He obviously thinks he’s poor “on the sentence level”, and he refers to that again and again and again — but nowhere, nowhere does he say why he went through 17 books of the stuff. All the while treating it like an utter mystery why anybody would.
I just. Don’t. Understand.
@Standback–This is my theory, which is mine, and based on nothing but what we’ve all read.
He loves Sanderson’s books, and resents it because Sanderson is writing Story, not high-falutin” Litrachur.
When I read Dan Brown’s first book, I kept finding outrageous instances of Bad Writing on every page, but I had to know what happened on the next page, and the next, and…okay just one more chapter, all the way to the end.
And at the end, asked myself if that was the experience I wanted from a book, that conflict between bad writing and good storytelling, that kept me both complaining, and reading. I decided it wasn’t. Never read another Dan Brown book again. But a lot of people don’t care that much about the writing, and do care about the storytelling. I was wasn’t even a teeny, tiny bit surprised when he became a bestselling author.
Sanderson writes a good deal better than that, but it’s still prose in service of storytelling. It’s not the prose that makes you puck up the phone and read it to a friend, for the beauty of it.
Kehe wants to be the kind of reader who reads for the beauty of the prose, but what he really enjoys is Story. And Sanderson may not write brilliant prose, but it’s good prose, that lets you stay in the story.
And Kehe feels guilty for enjoying it. We’re reading his self-hate in this hit piece. Maybe he could have forgiven Sanderson if there were Dark Personal (or family) Secrets to build his story on. But being a very nice guy, with a nice family, writing competent prose in the service of really good Story, that sells like hotcakes? That’s unforgivable. There’s nothing there to excuse Kehe for liking those stories.
@ Lis Carey
When I read Dan Brown’s first book, I kept finding outrageous instances of Bad Writing on every page, but I had to know what happened on the next page, and the next, and…okay just one more chapter, all the way to the end.
For me, that book is The Selection series, a YA dystopia but really a “dystopia lite.” I avoided the first book because of negative reviews, but then, I got intrigued and gave it a chance. The worldbuilding was flakey, there were logic holes in the setting, the hero was blandly nice, etc. So of course, I read it in a few days, and as soon as I finished the first bought, I bought the second one. 😉
And Kehe feels guilty for enjoying it. We’re reading his self-hate in this hit piece. Maybe he could have forgiven Sanderson if there were Dark Personal (or family) Secrets to build his story on. But being a very nice guy, with a nice family, writing competent prose in the service of really good Story, that sells like hotcakes? That’s unforgivable. There’s nothing there to excuse Kehe for liking those stories.
He reminds me of fans who downplay fun books they like when someone interrogates them on those books. (“How can you read that crap?”) Instead of just saying “Shove off,” some fans have learned to say things like, “Yeah, yeah, I know they’re badly written, but I read them anyway.”
My nephew said he couldn’t believe that people read things they didn’t like. I tried to get him to understand that the fans really do like the books they are downplaying — that fans often say those things about a book they like just to avoid getting grief. But it can be hard to explain. And maybe because he’s a guy, he doesn’t have to defend his reading choices as often?…
Also, maybe Kehe was hoping to be a sort of reverse Tom Junod (the journalist who wrote the Mr. Rogers profile called “Can You Say Hero?”).
@Lis: I feel like my take is maybe more quotidian:
I think Kehe is generally a fan (hence: 17+ books),
but found out that “I like this author’s books” doesn’t translate into “I have interesting things to write about this author.” (This feels like what Kehe keeps coming back to: not that somethinrg here actually upsets or bothers or interests him, but just that he’s not finding any purchase that feels… newsworthy.)
So in order to have an actual article with some semblance of substance, he built it around a really trivial observation (“Sanderson’s prose os meh but he’s fun to read”), but bulked it up to give it a mystery/revelation structure. The punchline is, after all, “hey people really enjoy this.”
And if doing that cast the whole piece as a loop of saying how self-evidently poor Sanderson’s prose is, and that winds up obscuring the closing “insight” entirely, well, so it goes.
@Standback–And all the personal denigration of Sanderson and his family? Sorry, no, the best you can say of Kehe is that he’s embarrassed that he likes Sanderson’s work, and is denigrating a really nice guy and his family in a pathetic attempt to distract from that.
(1)
From the article:
Made a dent in his podcast empire (most of it, incredibly, about writing). Like his books, it all blurs together
That part can’t actually be about anything other than Writing Excuses, that’s a very particular way to dismiss a podcast that has 3 Hugo nominations and 1 Hugo award, and that aside from Sanderson was also hosted by Dan Wells, Mary Robinete Kowal, and Howard Taylor, not to mention all the very high profile guest hosts that joined that podcast over the years. I presume that “blurs together” translates here too “I did not watch it for long nor have I done any research about it afterwards.
Edit: It appears Sanderson also has a new podcast which he hosts with Dan Wells, but that one is not about writing.
(14) And I just read Blindsight earlier this month.
1) I guess as soon as you become big enough you invite a backlash. I’m about 50% of my way through The Way of Kings and I have to confess I’m not enthralled and finding it a struggle to keep going.
(10) I did not know Henry Glassie had sf/f works. He was a professor of mine some years ago and is a great story teller. I recommend his nonfiction Passing the Time in Ballymenone for a sense of that.
(1) I usually think of Wired as knowledgeable, but… if no one there knew who Brian Sanderson is, then the actual geeks are gone, and it’s pop writers. I mean, really – I don’t know any techies who don’t read science fiction and fantasy. My reaction is that the interviewer is an ignoraant jerk. To call that an unprofessional interview is an understatement.
(6) Of course they’re cutting back – the media aren’t looking forward to the number of spurious lawsuits that MAGAdiots are going to bring.
(9) I need to read that. And I still say Clark’s novel should have won the Hugo.
(10) Birthdays… William Morris was more than just a writer – he was one of the creators of the craft movement. Look him up…and look at his chairs, and clothes, and….
(16) Yes, and listen when Bro. Guy tells you this…. (ObDisclosure – he’s a personal friend. And I Tuckerized him in my novel, 11,000 Years….)
(1) I’m not sure which annoyed me more — the profile or the number of anti-Sanderson people on social media who were dancing around it in glee and mocking his fans. And assuming anyone who criticized the article for its content was some kind of fanboy (or fangirl) instead of, you know, somebody who thought the article kinda sucked. (Anyway, like many others, I’m working on an article about the article…)
10) Morris was also an outspoken socialist (arrested at least once for public speaking in its favor) and a pioneer in what we now call historical preservation of buildings. He was offered the Poet Laureateship on the death of Tennyson, but turned it down, disliking its associations with the monarchy and the political establishment.
Anne Marble – over the years, I’ve read reviews of movies and such, and wondered why the hell the editors let them near a review, unless the editor wanted a hatchet job. As an example, I have an old, old memory of a review of Howard the Duck, the movie, that began, “I don’t like this kind of movie….” and my instant reaction was “why the hell did you review it, and why did your editor greenlight the review?
Brother Guy Consolmagno just gave a talk at Stanford, you can listen to it and watch the slides here
1) that article on Sanderson was pure clickbait/ragebait. It wasn’t an honest review, just mean-spiritedness manifest. And I’m not even a huge fan of Sanderson’s. But the books of his I’ve read I’ve liked.
When his second book came out, he was sitting alone at an autographing table while the author next to him (I’ve forgotten who it was) had a long line. I was in the line and after I got my books signed I went over and chatted with him. I said I like his second book (Mistborn, I think) and that he’d improved a lot as an author. I realized that could be taken as an insult instead of a compliment and quickly apologized but he understood I was praising him, not dissing him. I went to the dealer’s room and got a copy of Elantris and went back to have him sign it. Super nice guy.
1) He broke the record on Kickstarter, I don’t understand how no one could have heard of him.
9) That book was a pleasant surprise for me. I wasn’t expecting much from the book description but I really enjoyed the story and characters.
@bookworm1398
Exactly! I got 93 views and 42 reads on my lowly Medium article about the Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter. That got covered by media all over the world.
I posted my article about the WIRED profile tonight. With the ever-so-clever title
“What’s Up With That WIRED Brandon Sanderson Profile?”
(1) I read The Emperor’s Soul when it was on the Hugo ballot. I thought it was an exquisite, subtle, and beautiful story. I put it first on my ballot, and was delighted when it won. I’ve since read some of his other books, and while they were not perfect, they were marvels of creativity and energy, and I liked the characters. I can see why they are wildly popular. Fantasy has had a number of authors who were both prolific and good. I would rate Sanderson as among the best of them, and capable of true gems when he feels like it.
(17) The orbit looks wrong. The sun should be at the focus of the curve. And it doesn’t really look like a hyperbola. So yeah, I’m more than a bit skeptical of the authors conclusions if they’re the ones who created the diagram.
(1) Vile, classless, and ignorant article.
I’m not a Sanderson fan; what he writes mostly does not appeal to me. I have, though, read intros he’s written to other things, and they’ve been thoughtful, intelligent, and well-written. Worth the time spent before getting to the story.
This disinclines me to believe he has the very sizable audience he has because those fans have no taste or judgment. And given the success of his Kickstarter, it’s a tad difficult to believe “no one has heard of him.”
I think “the geeks are gone from Wired” is a likely theory. And this guy went looking for something “interesting,” i.e., scandalous, and was angry and resentful when he didn’t find it. feh
(9) A Dead Jinn in Cairo is an excellent story in a fascinating world.
@Rick Lynch: I can’t get through the paywall while using this tablet to check if that illustration is supposed to be precise, but you’re overlooking the fact that in this model ‘Oumuamua is being accelerated by non-gravitational forces, so the orbit will no longer be a hyperbola with the Sun at the focus.
5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Argh, Mike. I missed a trivia question about this book, not two days ago! Why couldn’t you have run this item on Tuesday?
(1) not for me does not automatically mean bad. (Rolls eyes.)
(5) what, no credit for Shakespeare?
(1) This is one of the reasons I stopped reading Wired ages ago, just like Rolling Stone (but for the opposite reason). This is just really, really bad, as writing, as journalism, as anything worthwhile in print. And you can’t put all the blame on the writer, even though he’s a creepy dumb ass, an editor should have tossed this in the bin, with a nice note as to why. Thus endeth that journalist’s (sic!) career, if he ever had one.
1) is baffling. Its less then the author didnt like Sanderson – Not all books of his a equllay good. Someone writing an article shouldf be at least be able to pinpoint what makes work appealing for their fans – in this case, I think that his appraoach to magic (always clear rules that are apllied very creative) thats the original hook for most (or they came via wheels of time). This doesnt even try to understand anything.
And if you wnted a hit piece… you could have used his views on homosexualitäty (which he usually doesnt advertise).
This is just a meandering piece about the author doesnt know what to write about. Which is nabel gazing and not very insightful,. regardless on your stand on Sanderson imho.
“A pixel less scrolled is a scroll saved” as the old saying doesnt go
I subscribe to Wired because it’s dirt cheap, less ten dollars a year and I find abundant dozen articles a year that are really reading though far less than Vanity Fair has and that costs the same, and yes I have eclectic reading tastes.
The rest of time Wired is crap with writers who couldn’t offer if a coherent article if Pixel sat dow in their lap and presented them with it. Indeed I’d argue that Pixel is than smarter they are.
I read Jason Kehe’s article, and I was astounded by how deeply illiterate it was. There seems to be no grasp at all of basic things like punctuation, sentence structure, etc.
Typically, our old English teachers would diagram out a sentence. You can’t do that here. As a writer, I tend to see sentences as a sort of crystallized thought, an organized sequence of words which conveys a thought or idea. For Kehe, a sentence is simply a period, which will be followed by capitalizing the next word.
Understand that I’m not a grammar nazi, but… my god, what is this?
Beyond that, I sense an attempt to emulate the ‘gonzo journalism’ of a Wolfe or Thompson, in which the observer becomes part of the story. But guys like Hunter S. Thompson were acute observers. Kehe’s writing is mainly about his narcissism, we get to learn a lot about him but very little about his subject.
This really is an incoherent article. The writer is thoroughly defeated by his subject matter, and tries to conceal his incomprehension with what amounts to 4000 words of ‘the dog ate my homework.’
I’m on the last of Mary Robinette Kowal’s available work–yes, I’m on my tenth of her ten novels in the last month–and wondering what to get from the library next.
I’ve been trying the last couple of days to nominate for the Hugos but the provided link doesn’t work. Has anyone else had that trouble?
@Cassy On March 22, I got a link from the Worldcon membership email that said they were upgrading the functionality of the site and that it would be unavailable. They said they’d send a further notice when it was back online. I haven’t seen a further notice to that effect.
1.) Kehe is trying his best to sound edgelordy and/or write gonzo-style, and fails miserably at it. He also left so many potential engaging topics on the table. I look at his work product and am gobsmacked that a.) he’s a senior editor at WIRED and b.) it took him six months to produce those 4000 words.
Meredith Moment (Meridithórien Momment?)
Celebrate Tolkien Reading Day by buying several eBook editions of Tolkien for just $2.99.
It’s also Maryland Day. I wonder if that bagel place has any of those red, gold, and black bagels left?…
@John A thorny problem. Mary Robinette is a hard act to follow.
Hmm, how about UP AGAINST IT by Laura Mixon?
1) Not to pile on the unfortunate Kehe, but: lazy research: A simple Duck Duck Go search kicked out Sanderson interviews or features in The Guardian, Forbes, and two in Wired (2009, 2013), and on NPR. There was also a Locus featured interview, but I suppose our circulation doesn’t qualify the magazine as “major.” Or maybe “in depth” is a particular Wired term of art.
A few years ago, when a Murderbot story was published in Wired, I went to a book store to find an issue – and the clerk hadn’t even heard of the magazine, which I found somewhat surprising (I got the Murderbot issue via Amazon). I won’t be getting the latest issue…
@John A Arkansawyer: I’m going to recommend Melissa Scott’s recent work. Her 2018 space opera Finders is a masterpiece. I’m surprised more people aren’t raving about it. And there is a prequel (set centuries before) coming out this year.
Her Order of the Air series, with Jo Graham, is a historical airplane adventure / occult mystery series, with really great characters. And there is another volume coming out this year.
Unless Wired has changed its typography, I would have needed a microscope to read it the last time I had it. Haven’t gone back and this has just reinforced that decision.
@Tom Becker, @Paul Weimer: Melissa Scott has books in our library and Laura Mixon does not, plus I really dug Burning Bright, so Scott it is!
(1) The thing I find absolutely baffling about Kehe’s profile of Sanderson is the throwaway remark that he’s read seventeen of Sanderson’s books,
and particularly: how is that such a throwaway remark?
Seventeen Sanderson books is tens of thousands of pages. That’s way beyond research for a profile — either Kehe put in the most massive hate-read imaginable, or else he’s… a reader who’s actually fond of Brandon Sanderson’s books?
It’s thousands of words about Sanderson from somebody who’s read thousands of pages by Sanderson and yet, incredibly, there’s just no mention of what Kehe actually thinks of Sanderson’s books. He obviously thinks he’s poor “on the sentence level”, and he refers to that again and again and again — but nowhere, nowhere does he say why he went through 17 books of the stuff. All the while treating it like an utter mystery why anybody would.
I just. Don’t. Understand.
@Standback–This is my theory, which is mine, and based on nothing but what we’ve all read.
He loves Sanderson’s books, and resents it because Sanderson is writing Story, not high-falutin” Litrachur.
When I read Dan Brown’s first book, I kept finding outrageous instances of Bad Writing on every page, but I had to know what happened on the next page, and the next, and…okay just one more chapter, all the way to the end.
And at the end, asked myself if that was the experience I wanted from a book, that conflict between bad writing and good storytelling, that kept me both complaining, and reading. I decided it wasn’t. Never read another Dan Brown book again. But a lot of people don’t care that much about the writing, and do care about the storytelling. I was wasn’t even a teeny, tiny bit surprised when he became a bestselling author.
Sanderson writes a good deal better than that, but it’s still prose in service of storytelling. It’s not the prose that makes you puck up the phone and read it to a friend, for the beauty of it.
Kehe wants to be the kind of reader who reads for the beauty of the prose, but what he really enjoys is Story. And Sanderson may not write brilliant prose, but it’s good prose, that lets you stay in the story.
And Kehe feels guilty for enjoying it. We’re reading his self-hate in this hit piece. Maybe he could have forgiven Sanderson if there were Dark Personal (or family) Secrets to build his story on. But being a very nice guy, with a nice family, writing competent prose in the service of really good Story, that sells like hotcakes? That’s unforgivable. There’s nothing there to excuse Kehe for liking those stories.
@ Lis Carey
For me, that book is The Selection series, a YA dystopia but really a “dystopia lite.” I avoided the first book because of negative reviews, but then, I got intrigued and gave it a chance. The worldbuilding was flakey, there were logic holes in the setting, the hero was blandly nice, etc. So of course, I read it in a few days, and as soon as I finished the first bought, I bought the second one. 😉
He reminds me of fans who downplay fun books they like when someone interrogates them on those books. (“How can you read that crap?”) Instead of just saying “Shove off,” some fans have learned to say things like, “Yeah, yeah, I know they’re badly written, but I read them anyway.”
My nephew said he couldn’t believe that people read things they didn’t like. I tried to get him to understand that the fans really do like the books they are downplaying — that fans often say those things about a book they like just to avoid getting grief. But it can be hard to explain. And maybe because he’s a guy, he doesn’t have to defend his reading choices as often?…
Also, maybe Kehe was hoping to be a sort of reverse Tom Junod (the journalist who wrote the Mr. Rogers profile called “Can You Say Hero?”).
@Lis: I feel like my take is maybe more quotidian:
I think Kehe is generally a fan (hence: 17+ books),
but found out that “I like this author’s books” doesn’t translate into “I have interesting things to write about this author.” (This feels like what Kehe keeps coming back to: not that somethinrg here actually upsets or bothers or interests him, but just that he’s not finding any purchase that feels… newsworthy.)
So in order to have an actual article with some semblance of substance, he built it around a really trivial observation (“Sanderson’s prose os meh but he’s fun to read”), but bulked it up to give it a mystery/revelation structure. The punchline is, after all, “hey people really enjoy this.”
And if doing that cast the whole piece as a loop of saying how self-evidently poor Sanderson’s prose is, and that winds up obscuring the closing “insight” entirely, well, so it goes.
@Standback–And all the personal denigration of Sanderson and his family? Sorry, no, the best you can say of Kehe is that he’s embarrassed that he likes Sanderson’s work, and is denigrating a really nice guy and his family in a pathetic attempt to distract from that.
(1)
From the article:
That part can’t actually be about anything other than Writing Excuses, that’s a very particular way to dismiss a podcast that has 3 Hugo nominations and 1 Hugo award, and that aside from Sanderson was also hosted by Dan Wells, Mary Robinete Kowal, and Howard Taylor, not to mention all the very high profile guest hosts that joined that podcast over the years. I presume that “blurs together” translates here too “I did not watch it for long nor have I done any research about it afterwards.
Edit: It appears Sanderson also has a new podcast which he hosts with Dan Wells, but that one is not about writing.
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