(1) KIRK AND WOZ. “Silicon Valley Comic Con: William Shatner holds court on inaugural con’s first night” in the San Jose Mercury News.
Shatner was the big attraction for the first night of the pop culture and technology festival at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. He held court for an hour before hundreds of fans who packed into the convention center’s grand ballroom. And right in the front row was the Comic Con’s No. 1 fan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Shatner misidentified Woz as the inventor of the iPhone (but for Kirk, we can forgive anything right?), but gave the genius behind Apple proper credit for starting up Silicon Valley Comic Con. “I’m going to embarrass Mr. Wozniak a little, but I want him to ask the first question,” Shatner said from the stage.
Woz obliged, walking up to one of the standing microphones like any fan would. Clearly on the spot, Woz initially asked Shatner to recite some poetry (he didn’t) and that led to a fascinating back-and-forth about the nature of science vs. science fiction.
Woz said when he was a kid he dreamed of being a starship captain like the one Shatner played on “Star Trek,” but his engineering background made him too grounded in reality. Shatner would have none of it. “You have two feet on the ground but your head is in the sky. You’re a pole, an electrical conduit,” Shatner said. “What do you think of that?”
“Humor is the ultimate creativity,” Wozniak said, “and you’ve got it.”
…But he wasn’t the only star in downtown San Jose on Friday. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony right before the doors opened, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and Vice Mayor Rose Herrera were flanked by Woz, “Back to the Future” star Christopher Lloyd and comic book legend Stan Lee. Nichelle Nichols, who co-starred with Shatner as Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek,” arrived later for an autograph and photo session with fans.
Other stars expected during the convention — which continues through Sunday — include Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, Nathan Fillion, Peter Mayhew, Jeremy Renner and “Deadpool” director Tim Miller.
(2) TIP US A TUNE. And the other day Mark Parisi’s cartoon Off the Mark zapped Shatner’s singing.
(3) NOTHING TO DISAGREE WITH. Crystal Huff said —
I loved @seananmcguire before she Tuckerized me in a book, but let's be clear: now she can practically do no wrong. ????
— Crystal M. Huff, ? ? (they/them) (@crystalvisits) March 18, 2016
(4) WINTER IS HERE. Sarah A. Hoyt shares the view from inside the Sad Puppies 4 control room in “The Gang’ll Know I Died Standing Pat” at According to Hoyt. Then she moves on to explain, as if to a child, how something Brad Torgersen himself labeled a “slate” was not (in addition, mislabels Torgersen’s edition “IV” rather than 3).
Over the last few days, since Kate published the list of Sad Puppies recommends, we’ve been inundated both in email and in social media by people requesting, clamoring and whining to be removed from the list. The eructations from these special snow flakes vary in levels of self-delusion and insanity and at least one was very polite.
The prize MUST go to Damien Walter of Grauniad fame for tweeting that he hopes Kate Paulk has deep pockets, to withstand all the lawsuits resultant from putting people on the list without asking their permission.
…. Speaking of which, all of you, even the polite ones, who send me purple prose about how badly Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies IV and how he created an evil slate also make me doubt your mental capacity. Seriously, guys? A slate? If you’d bothered to look at the numbers and had a minimum of arithmetic ability (did you also sleep through it in first grade, while dreaming of little Damien’s slights and grievances? — Seriously, he really should pull his socks up) you’d have realized the only real slate was “no award.” Sad puppies nominations and votes were not only not lockstep but all over the place. Because, you know, they were reading what was suggested and making up their own minds, instead of — like the other side — taking marching orders from their betters who told them to not even read and just vote no-award.
(5) PERSISTENCE OF REVISION. Nicki at The Liberty Zone asserts this is “Why the Puppies are Sad”.
You want to know why the Sad Puppies campaign still exists? Do you want to know why fans continue to nominate authors they consider to be worthy of a Hugo Award even though the elitist Puppy Kickers made damn sure everyone knew that no award would be given to any worthy author or editor if they were nominated by the “wrong” people?
Here’s one reason.
“Speak Easy” by Catherynne M. Valente was submitted for a Sad Puppies 4 nomination in September 2015. Several fans thought it was worthy of the award. Comments included:
“… I liked it a lot and will be nominating it for a Hugo.”
“…There is so much to discover in this little book and it absolutely blew me away”
I would think that any author would be grateful that readers not only bought her work, but read it and enjoyed it enough to recommend it for a prestigious award. I would think the author would be gracious and thank the readers for the honor. One would think that being included in a list of recommendations that this year includes such great and diverse writers as Lois McMaster Bujold, Ann Leckie, Stephen King, Eric Flint, and John Scalzi would be met with gratitude and some dignity.
But apparently, if you’re the wrong kind of thinker, the wrong kind of reader, who has the wrong kind of social justice and political views, Ms. Valente doesn’t want your business. She doesn’t want your praise or recommendation. She doesn’t want your recognition.
For the record, I was not asked and I do not consent to be on the Sad Puppies List. I am furious.
— Catherynne Valente (@catvalente) March 18, 2016
(6) REMOVAL APPROVAL. Lee at Lee’s Blog has a similar reaction, in“Sad Puppies 4 recommendations”.
“These kind [sic] of tactics” — yes, it’s just dreadful, isn’t it, that they would allow fans of Alastair Reynolds to publicly recommend his works to fans who might never have heard of him otherwise. Imagine! Just allowing his fans to make recommendations without permission! What’s the world coming to!
“staining your name” — yeah, in the good old days, allowing his fans to recommend his works to the world of fandom — even including wrongfen (gasp!) — would be an offence justifying a duel to the death. *Puke*.
Despite reading fantasy and science fiction my whole life, I really hadn’t been reading new works for probably twenty years. There’s a huge backlog of old “classic” science fiction and fantasy for me to enjoy, and there’s always nonfiction (history and science).
But the Sad Puppies controversy and the orchestrated international campaign of defamation introduced me to a whole world of new authors! The Sad Puppies 4 campaign introduced me to Stand Still Stay Silent, which I love. I mean to check out other works on the recommended list, not because of the Hugo Awards (I have never nominated or voted and never will), but because these works are recommended by other fen.
However, Catherynne Valente and Alastair Reynolds demand to be removed from the list because their fans failed to obtain permission before recommending their works to fandom in general. The Sad Puppies are holding firm: their fans thought their works were worth considering and it’s not up to them to contradict their fans.
But I am not holding firm. They don’t want their fans recommending their work to wrongfen: hey, I’m happy to remove them from my Recommendations to Check Out list and put them on my Not One Thin Dime list.
(7) 180 DEGREES. Chris Gerrib’s conclusion about “Sad Puppies 4” is —
In short, so far this is everything Sad Puppies 3 was not, namely open and transparent.
(8) A HAPPY FELLA. Declan Finn may have disqualified himself as a “sad” puppy with his post “Awesome #SadPuppies News”. Just kidding.
So, I am apparently the most awesome Puppy ever, having three award recommendations in the Hugos, Sad Puppies Bite Back being the #1 Best Related work.
I am UNSTOPPABLE, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH….
Aaaannnnnddddd that was me, gloating. I’m done now.
First of all, I am on the recommendation list in three categories. I will happily accept the recommendations, because I’ll take all the help I can get.
(9) NAMES TO BE CALLED. Kamas Kirian “Over inflated much?” at westfargomusings.
So, a certain author is having kittens over the fact her work ended up on the Sad Puppies IV list. How much of a delusional narcissist are you that you don’t want the wrong people liking what you’ve written? I mean really, if you don’t want people to recommend your writing I suppose they can take you up on that offer and review your work in the context that only the right people dare read it. God forbid it end up on a list that you think is a ‘slate’. For a writer, you don’t seem to know definitions very well. Here, let me help you out on that….
(10) SCOTTO OBIT. Cartoonist Augie Scotto (1927-2016) died March 15 reports the Timely-Atlas Comics blog.
As mentioned above, Augie Scotto’s work appeared in Will Eisner’s PS magazine, the exact tenures unknown to me. The note above that Scotto was Wally Wood’s partner is somewhat apocryphal. In the Bhob Stewart edited Against The Grain (TwoMorrows, 2003), Stewart writes about the Wally Wood studio and AugieScotto
“The studio was often like a Grand Central of artists. They came and went. One night Augie Scotto arrived. Scotto had worked on 1949-53 Western and crime comics before settling in as an artist on Eisner’s PS magazine for many years. We were working our way through a pile of Topps’ Travel Posters, and Scotto was there to assist for a few hours. I was in the back room, and Woody appeared at the door with a big grin. “Bhob, come watch this.” Scotto sat down at a board while Woody, Don and I looked on. He clicked the snaps on his briefcase, pulled out a brush and dipped it in the ink. Silence. Then in a single deft stroke, Scotto moved his hand across the paper. He lifted the brush, leaving a 14″ long, perfectly straight line on the paper. It played like a magic trick, but it was for real. Woody then went back to work, still grinning.”
Scotto’s comic book career appeared as two brief spurts. He broke in in 1949 at Eastern Color’s New Heroic Comics, Hillman and Cross Publications, on crime and western stories. He also was at Lev Gleason in 1950, Atlas in early 1951 and Charlton in 1953. This early work is completely serviceable and at home in the earthy, gritty crime comics of the era. He then vanishes from the industry and re-emerges in 1968 at Tower Comics penciling Dynamo and then as an inker at DC Comics in the late 1970’s, inking several titles including a post-Jack Kirby story of The New Gods in Adventure Comics in 1978.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 20, 1972 — Tarkovsky’s influential Solaris opens in the Soviet Union.
(12) SLINGING MUD FROM ANOTHER WORLD. Two politicians traded insults couched in sci-fi terms reports Boston.com.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t understand why a congressman would call her Darth Vader—she’s always seen herself as more of a Princess Leia.
After Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri republican, called Warren “the Darth Vader of the financial services world” and said they should “find a way to neuter her” during a panel hosted at the American Bankers Association conference, the senator responded with a statement on her campaign site Thursday.
“My first thought was: Really?” Warren wrote. “I’ve always seen myself more as a Princess Leia-type (a senator and Resistance general who, unlike the guys, is never even remotely tempted by the dark side). Clearly the Force is not strong with Congressman Luetkemeyer (maybe he’s a Trekkie).”
(13) HAPPY HALF BIRTHDAY. Gregory N. Hullender issued a report on “Rocket Stack Rank at Six Months”. (That’s been long enough for me to change my mind – File 770 is a worse name for a site…)
Original Goals
Our original goal was to read and review all the short fiction in the six major publications in 2015. We accomplished that and also included all the original fiction from ten anthologies.
We hoped that would amount to 50% coverage of the stories in the Locus Recommended Reading List, but it actually came to about 65%.
We set out to offer advice on where to buy copies of back issues of the big three print magazines. We ended up with detailed instructions for several different ways to get electronic copies of back issues, and we even discovered several (legal) ways to borrow back issues without having to buy them.
(14) PEE-WEE INTERVIEW. “Paul Reubens on Pee-wee Herman’s Comeback” at Vogue.
The last time you did this it wasn’t the Internet age. I know in the past you’ve skirted publicity and you’ve valued your privacy, and now we’re in this era when things happen so quickly, in such a big way. How does it feel?
Part of that feels bogus to me, to be honest with you. Gigantic superstars still get married and no one knows about it. I was at a hotel recently, where people were complaining, “Oh, my God, there’s paparazzi every second out here in front!” Then I went, “Can I go out the back door?” And they were like, “Sure.” It’s not impossible. None of it is. I get that there are certain people that get such a high profile that they can’t do anything. I just think almost everything’s possible, really.
Including getting another Pee-wee movie made after 30 years.
Yeah, that’s true!
(15) BUT NOT IF YOU HAVE ANY FRIENDS WHO ARE ENTS. A home styled for a wizard. The Chive has a big photo gallery of the exquisite and artistic woodwork. Asking price? $8.2 million. Hm, come to think of it, a lot of trees got chopped down to make that….
(16) BLACK PANTHER. “An Exclusive Look at ‘Black Panther #1’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates” at The Atlantic.
Despite the difference in style and practice of storytelling, my approach to comic books ultimately differs little from my approach to journalism. In both forms, I am trying to answer a question. In my work for The Atlantic I have, for some time, been asking a particular question: Can a society part with, and triumph over, the very plunder that made it possible? In Black Panther there is a simpler question: Can a good man be a king, and would an advanced society tolerate a monarch? Research is crucial in both cases. The Black Panther I offer pulls from the archives of Marvel and the character’s own long history. But it also pulls from the very real history of society—from the pre-colonial era of Africa, the peasant rebellions that wracked Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, the American Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the rise of isis.
And this, too, is the fulfillment of the 9-year-old in me. Reading The Amazing Spider-Man comic books as a kid, I didn’t just take in the hero’s latest amazing feat; I wrestled seriously with his celebrated tagline—“With great power comes great responsibility.” Chris Claremont’s The Uncanny X?Men wasn’t just about an ultracool band of rebels. That series sought to grapple with the role of minorities in society—both the inner power and the outward persecution that come with that status. And so it is (I hope) with Black Panther. The questions are what motivate the action. The questions, ultimately, are more necessary than the answers.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, David K.M. Klaus, Will R., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chris S.]
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Actually, dann, for once I agree with you. Hoyt apparently thinks that not wanting to be on the recommendation list makes you worse than people who sold out Jews to the Nazis–according to the quotes I’m seeing–so I’m curious as to whether these letters were actually what a reasonable person would consider hostile. Normally I don’t believe in tone policing this sort of thing, but she is something of a repeat offender.
Somebody refresh my memory–was Hoyt the one who had a raging freak out last year because a Pixel Scroll had a word like “green” in the title and that meant it was calling her a homophobe? I remember somebody did that, but it’s all blurring together now…
@dann
In addition to Aaron’s points, we know exactly what Reynolds and Valente said, because they did it in public and despite a lack of vitriol in what either of them said Hoyt massively overreacted. Now, admittedly there’s the chance that they and others penned private screeds filled with vitriol that we haven’t seen, but given her known overreaction I’m going to suggest that Hoyt is simply overstating her case.
The Elementary episode was written by Paul Cornell, who knows a bit about comics (as well as Doctor Who)…. paulcornell.com has some blog posts about the experience. He also live tweeted the episode (at 3 am UK time!) @paul_cornell .
For the Hugo’s, he has a novella (Witches of Lychford via tor.com publishing, Graphic Novel (The Four Doctors – Titan Comics), and the fancast “The Cornell Collective”. His other comic, This Damned Band, was also very good but the final issue came out in January, so something to check out for next year’s Hugos. Definitely Not a Puppy.
@RedWombat: Noted wordsmith Sarah Hoyt confused “Hydrophobia” with “Homophobia” in the title The Hydrophobia That Falls On You From Nowhere.
@Red Wombat
It was “The Hydrophobia That Falls On You From Nowhere” as a roundup title IIRC, and yes the reaction was a bit…extreme.
ETA: shakes ninja’d fist at Shao Ping
Right! Don’t know where I got green from. Too long ago, too far away, and the airport is claiming all. Thanks, guys!
Airports, man. They’re insidious. I hope that you at least aren’t stuck with a middle seat on the plane!
Cassy B on March 21, 2016 at 9:15 am said: The Phantom, why do you assume Cat Valente will be No Awarded?
Assterisk, is why. The behavior of Hugo voters is 100% predictable. If a Sad Puppies pick makes it on the ballot, it will be No Awarded. Just like last year.
Do you think that Hugo voters are robots?
No, I think they are Leftists.
@The Young Pretender
Lovecraft Country is somewhere on the tbr, but that suggests I need to move it up a bit. I read another interesting post-Lovecraft story recently: The Ballad Of Black Tom by Victor LaValle is a tor.com novella that retells The Horror at Red Hook with a sympathetic eye to rehabilitating the story as a mythos tale, and a deeply unsympathetic eye on the racist elements*. I’m not sure how successful it was as a story, particularly with the midway POV change, but it was very interesting as a commentary on Lovecraft.
*I hadn’t read tHaRH until just before this but it’s hands down his most blatantly racist work.
RedWombat: The Xanax Gambit?
@Glyer – I hope you’re titling a scroll with THAT!
@The Phantom
The behavior of Hugo voters is 100% predictable. If a Sad Puppies pick makes it on the ballot, it will be No Awarded. Just like last year.
Well, that’s a bold statement. How about you come back in a few months to the awards announcement article and if you’re right I’ll let you say “told you so” to me for as long as you like until you get bored.
Aaron on March 21, 2016 at 9:26 am said: The reason for this is quite simple, and runs counter to your conspiranoid fantasies: Most people weren’t paying any attention to the SP4 process, because most people don’t really care about the Pups nearly as much as the Pups think they do. Valente, Reynolds and so on didn’t know they were being recommended until the Puppy list was put out and someone saw it and told them.
Sure. Cat Valente, the Puppy Kicker Extraordinaire, who hasn’t shut up about how eeeevile the Sad Puppies are since forever, wasn’t “paying attention” to the fact that her stuff was listed on SP4.
Does it hurt, twisting yourself into weird shapes like that?
The behavior of Hugo voters is 100% predictable. If a Sad Puppies pick makes it on the ballot, it will be No Awarded. Just like last year.
If you believe that, you are a bigger idiot than you have thus far led everyone to believe. (Also, you’re factually wrong about last year. Go back and look at last year’s results, and then look at the SP3 picks).
Did I cross over into the timeline in which Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t win a Hugo last year?
VD’s list is interesting in one regard.
In the draft versions for Fanzine ‘Mad Genius Club’ was listed. In the final version it is not.
In the draft versions for Fan writer ‘Dave Freer’ was listed. In the final version he is not.
Some thoughts:
– MGC & Freer asked privately not to be on the RP list?
– MGC & Freer told VD that they wouldn’t accept a nomination (the was an ambiguous statement about that around SP4 announcement) and so VD left them off so as not to waste a vote.
– A tactical move to avoid associating the two campaigns.
– The split and acrimony over Cruz versus Trump has led to VD unpersoning the whole of MGC
– Who really cares what goes on in his head – it doesn’t make sense anyway
– I’ve spent too much time thinking about this already
@rob_matic
Check for airships!
@Camestros
Interesting. Freer has muttered in the past about how he wouldn’t have wanted to be nominated last year.
Cat Valente, the Puppy Kicker Extraordinaire, who hasn’t shut up about how eeeevile the Sad Puppies are since forever, wasn’t “paying attention” to the fact that her stuff was listed on SP4.
I assume you have links to blog posts she made about the Pups between last year’s Hugo results and this past week. Or really, all of the blog posts she made about the Pups between April 2015 and last week. Or her many tweets about how evil the Puppies are since last August? That would be an interesting trick, since as far as I can tell, they don’t exist.
Does it hurt, twisting yourself into weird shapes like that?
Does it hurt living in the purely fantasy world that you live in? It must make reality a strange and frightening place for you, which would explain your paranoia and love of conspiracy theories.
@Mark
Just finished Lovecraft Country last week. It is definitely recommended by me.
I’m not so optimistic. Remember that 586 members voted Vox Day first place in their “Best Editor, Short From” ballot last year. They all are eligible to nominate this year & bloc-voting gives them proportionately much greater power over the rest of the nominators (I expect they are almost exclusively members of the Rabid Puppy bloc-voting cohort).
@Camestros
I’m guessing our would-be herrenvolk may have had some political frictions.
The best line from last night’s Elementary was while Sherlock was recounting the five different ways a super-hero had died over the years, he mentions his favorite was when the hero fell into a waterfall whilst being clutched by his arch-nemesis.
would that your participation included actually reading and discussing authors and stories rather than merely using the issue as a platform to spew anger and hate.
The Phantom
Last year, however, with only one exception, the fiction chosen by the Puppies (either variety) ranged from mediocre to poor. People may indeed have felt like voting things below No Award purely because they were on a slate, but the Puppies made it easy for them to justify it because the choices were so poor in the first place.
This year, they also have a lot of mediocre to poor works, but they also have some excellent mainstream works and at least six highly-qualified “overlooked works.”
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2016/03/2015-torcom-puppies-ratings.html
I’m fairly confident that enough fans will vote by quality (regardless of slating) to prevent a repeat of No Award sweeping the fiction categories. Chaos Horizons had a nice analysis of how voting broke down last year. https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/2015-hugo-analysis-best-novel/
Thanks Aaron. Inhuman Garbage esp sounds interesting.
@The Young Pretender: Because really, this is just a spectacularly written, well plotted and charactered book…
That pretty much describes any Matt Ruff novel. (Have you read Bad Monkeys?) Lovecraft Country is sitting at the top of my post-Hugo reading TBR pile. (Which somehow I still haven’t gotten to here in the year 7853.)
@PhilRM, Mark, andyl
I had not been aware of Ruff before this; I am planning to correct this at speed. In particular, I’ve never seen someone do the linked vignette thing with such verve – each is a story, a complete story, but they exist as part of the same whole with no wasted words or excess.
I’m hoping others have the same experience – I’ll fully admit to thinking Vasha had some really solid points on Planetfall, even if I did like and recommend it.
Here in 7253 we are shocked anyone would avoid such books, merely because being reminded of historical guilt hurt their man-feels.
@Soon Lee
I agree. I don’t expect SP4 to have any measurable impact on the voting this year. It’s all about RP2016.
The unknown factor is how many of those 586 will bother to nominate. It’s a nontrivial task, and they’ve got other things on their minds. Also, VD was very late getting his list out, which should limit the response to those people who follow him closely. (Far-right people have a big choice of people to follow this year.) Finally, whatever their claims to the contrary, they really imagined some of their nominees might actually win last year, and so some of them are bound to be discouraged and not bother nominating.
Soon we will know.
@bookworm1398
If you’re still looking, here’s a list of highly-rated SF Novellas from 2015.
Stand-alone novellas tend to suffer on this list, since many reviewers don’t consider them. For my money, Penric’s Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold, was the best SFF novella of 2015.
Seconding the recommendation for “On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers” — it’s a bizarro satire of modern American city life where drugs have been invented that keep people from sleeping and stock traders chase after the predictions of computer algorithms they can’t understand and one man, an immigrant from Ghana, journeys perilously through the nighttime streets.
I also liked “Quarter Days” (the aftermath of World War I, and social change, in a London where magic is a profession), “The Bone Swans of Amandale” (snarky rat narrates interesting variation on “The Pied Piper”, and Witches of Lychford (witchcraft with a distinctly modern flavor in an English village).
Camestros Felapton: Vox Day says he removed Mad Genius Club and Dave Freer because it was only after posting the draft he learned they had taken themselves out of awards contention this year (ala Scalzi).
I do recall that about Freer, now that I’ve been reminded, and so I expect I’d find the MGC recusal too if I went back and looked.
I vaguely remember reading the MGC recusal way back when. The list of people not wanting to be nominated this year seems larger than in the past. I don’t know if this is perception or reality.
Sorry, a bit late to the party–
re: 4,5,6,8,9–
I don’t know why people can’t understand that after the fiasco of last year, and the reprehensible way the Puppies acted, a lot of people want nothing to do with them. I certainly wouldn’t.
How dare the mad genius club decline the applause of their devoted fans! Ungrateful termegants!
I hadn’t considered that angle… Hilarious.
I foresee the rise of yet another splinter group, the Ungrateful Ptarmigans.
.
.
.
…Cormorants?
Kip W, I like Ungrateful Pteranodons, myself.
To be fair, there is a big difference between people saying “I am not in contention for the Hugo this year and will decline if nominated” vs. saying “I think I might be up for the Hugo, and I don’t want you to mess that up by endorsing/criticizing me.”
If someone says they aren’t going to accept the award at all, then of course it makes sense to remove them from a list. Failing to do so doesn’t actually hurt anyone; it just wastes everyone’s time. Anyway, the ones the Puppies removed seem to be entirely from the “I don’t want a Hugo this year” camp.
There are plenty of solid reasons to criticize the Puppies, but I don’t think this is one of them. They’re being consistent, if nothing else.
Books!!
Steal the Sky by Megan E. O’Keefe: I picked this up on a whim, not expecting too much, because steampunk is not usually my cup of tea—and I loved this. The story follows a nobly-born con man, a watch commander, and a grieving mother/shapeshifter (among various and sundry others), who all live on a volcano-laden desert continent that is the only source of selium, a magical substance that powers basically everything and which can only be controlled by certain people. Witty writing, intriguing characterization, excellent worldbuilding, and an engrossing plot—I’m excited for the sequel (there’d better be a sequel).
Borderline by Mishell Baker: A young movie director with Borderline Personality Disorder attempts suicide, loses her legs, and ends up recruited to a secret organization that manages relations between humanity and the Fae. Definitely one of the more unique urban fantasy takes I’ve read, particularly in the nature of the narrator. The writing is vivid and oftentimes brutal (in the sense of watching the world through a mentally-ill, self-destructive person’s eyes), but it’s to the author’s credit that even at the worst, I couldn’t stop reading. Definitely worth the read.
The Cold Between by Elizabeth Bonesteel: Space opera, in a future where FTL exists and humans have colonized many planets. Most of those planets being particularly inhospitable, two space fleets (Central Corps and PSI) resupply the colonies, having various and sundry adventures along this way. This book (the series opener) follows a murder investigation on a wealthy planet that somehow ties to a mysterious ship explosion decades before. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and the series looks like it has a lot of potential. The author cited the Vorkosigan novels as an inspiration, and I can see some of that in here, particularly in the romantic plotline and certain elements of the overall aesthetic. I did find the informality between ship officers to be somewhat . . . jarring? And there’s a rather triggery minor plot point that I’m not sure was treated quite as well as it could have been, though it’s possible that the author will re-explore the aftereffects in future books. I’ll definitely pick up the sequel, and I’m curious to see how this series ends up being structured.
Arkwright by Allen Steele: Nathan Arkwright, a famous sci-fi author, starts a foundation to accomplish space colonization, and we follow his descendants as they take up that work. This book was such a huge letdown. The premise sounds fantastic, but the failures in execution are just so . . . abundant. The author clearly wanted to write an epic family saga that showed the power science fiction could have on human scientific accomplishment, all wrapped up in an ode to the Golden Age of SF. He forgot to make the members of the Arkwright family particularly interesting, leading to an “epic family saga” that was more of a boring and tedious slog. It was hard to read this as championing the power of SF when not one of our POV characters (with the exception of some journal entries from Arkwright himself) actually cared one whit about science fiction. There were some interesting bits in the opening section (Arkwright’s reminiscences about early fandom, in particular), but the plot and character beats frequently made little sense, leading to results (and an overall ending) that felt distinctly unearned. Also, this is one of those “hard” SF novels that pontificates on the value of accurate science in SF, likes to go into lots of detail about physics, but then treats all the other sciences like hand-wavey magic. (Ordinarily I don’t care about scientific accuracy in my SF, but that juxtaposition was just really jarring from a plot perspective.) Overall, this has many of the weaknesses of the “Golden Age” but few of its strengths, and I did not feel the book accomplished any of what it set out to do.
You know, I went over to SP4 and recommended some works for two reasons.
Firstly, if you want to encourage people to alter objectionable behavior, you kind of have to give them both the opportunity and incentive to do so. Obnoxiously phrased though some of the SP4 into posts were, it was clear that they were in earnest about achieving greater transparency in their recommendation process and that they weren’t actually going to weed out the recommendations of suspected — or known! — SJW BADFIC READING SCUM.
Secondly, I wanted to recommend some stuff for them to read that I knew wasn’t unbelievably bad crap. ^_^ I’M NICE THAT WAY, I CAN’T HELP IT.
And now I and my good intentions are reduced to massaging my eyes and reaching for the bottle of plum wine because, seriously, how fucking hard is it to not be a frothing moron?
Thanks for those reviews Emma. Steal the Sky sounds interesting (the author’s eligible for the Campbell this year). So much agreeing with you on all of your complaints about the Arkwright stories based on the one I read, “The Long Wait” published in Asimov’s this year… tedious characters, tedious writing, uninteresting depiction of the motivation for doing an enormous science project…
*Ominous music plays in the background*
@emma I really liked BORDERLINE and STEAL THE SKY as well. We had an interview on the S&F podcast with Megan O Keefe about her book, and, well, soap.
I like Ungrateful Pteranodons, myself.
SPLITTER!!
Pretty hard, apparently. Which is bad because I feel a lot of jerkish behavior is successful only because others aren’t jerks.
Sometimes I feel the Puppies looked at John Scalzi and instead of realizing he’s popular and somewhat influential because he’s a nice guy who regularly helps out others, decided he was popular and somewhat influential because of his political views.
But even a lot of the so-called political views the Puppies object to are, in my opinion, simply a matter of being decent to others. For instance, one should oppose sexual harassment not to advance some left-wing agenda but simply because it’s the decent thing to do. Yet I don’t think many of the Puppies would agree. So perhaps they really can’t separate Scalzi’s “politics” from his decency.
@TheYoungPretender: Planetfall may take the prize for the novel creating the most divided opinions of 2015. There’s a lot to like and even love about it; I don’t think anyone would call Ren’s narration uninteresting, for example. But the plot, that divides readers.
Reality check: Between the Wednesday after the Hugos and her recent reaction to being on the
slaterecommendation list, I can find exactly one sentence that Cat Valente published about the Puppies on her blogs. I reproduce it in full below:So no, she doesn’t appear to have been paying much attention to Puppies qua Puppies during that time. No reason why she should; life is short, and fandom is big and full of interesting, intelligent, informative, pleasant people. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for Puppies.
Finding out one of her works was being recommended must have been rather a big surprise, and it was perfectly reasonable for her to assume it was some kind of mean spirited trick, especially given that we now have it from a Puppy’s mouth that as far as he is concerned that is exactly what it is.
For the record, here is Paulk
insulting her readersmaking a simple request not to be featured on her list for fanzine or fan writer.IIRC, SP3 took people off their slate when asked to do so, so the refusal to remove people from the SP4 this-is-not-slate! Hugo-nominations-recommendations-list is a clear departure from that aspect of the SP process last year.
Requests for removal presumably did not occur in SP1, since SP founder Larry Correia was himself his only proposed nominee. I’ve no idea about SP2, when Correia appears to have stuck to campaigning for just a few of his pals. It became self-evidently relevant in SP3, when there was a big slate and various people who declined to be put on it or asked to be removed from it.
It’s obviously relevant in SP4, too… and I wonder why the SP4 ringleaders decided they would oppose the SP3 custom and refuse to remove names as requested (and also spew noisy, incoherent rage over being asked to do so)? Given that SP3 removed people who asked to be removed, why is SP4 reacting as if it’s an unexpected shock and unconscionable insult when some people want removal from their no-really-it’s-not-a-slate-no-matter-how-much-it-might-resemble-one? (This is a rhetorical question. I don’t anticipate a rational explanation for Puppy behavior–then, now, or in future.)
@Laura: My guess is that they want to be able to claim “victory” if people vote in some of the “good” titles on their list. But who knows?