(1) SOLID NUMBERS. “So How Many Books Do You Sell?” is the question. Kameron Hurley dares to answer.
It’s the question every writer dreads: “How many books have you sold? ”
It’s a tricky question because for 99% of the year, those with traditionally published books honestly have very little idea. But two times a year – in the spring and in the fall – we receive royalty statements from publishers, which give a sometimes cryptic breakdown of what has sold where. So for those keeping track here with my “Honest Publishing Numbers” posts, here’s an update.
(2) HAND JIVE. “Star Trek 50th Anniversary Celebration Honors Leonard Nimoy’s Artwork”.
More than 50 pieces will be featured during a 50th-anniversary Star Trek art exhibit honoring a half-century of exploring the final frontier. That includes the final piece of art created by original series star, the late Leonard Nimoy.
The event, which San Diego Comic-Con attendees will arrive just in time for, opens on July 21 at the Michael J. Wolf Fine Arts in San Diego, CA. It will then travel to Las Vegas, Toronto, and the UK.
The official Star Trek site is rolling out all the pieces bit by bit, but the artistic work of the beloved Nimoy was one of the first released. The piece, which depicts multiple images of Nimoy’s hand giving the “Live Long and Prosper” salute, was created for the Star Trek Art Exhibit.
The red, yellow and blue motif is a nod to the uniform colors worn by the Star Trek cast of characters in the original show.
(3) LISTEN UP. In “These hearing aids aren’t just for show A.k.a. This message speaks volumes”, Swedish fan Feeejay describes how her being hard of hearing impacted her experiences at the 2014 Swecon, her coping strategies, and how we can assist them.
What can you do to help? In social situations:
Face me when talking.
Repeat or double check that I’ve got the important information.
Help me sit in the center so I can hear everyone.
Speak clearly, and if I ask you to repeat yourself, try to raise your voice just a tad, but mostly speak slower and more clearly.
If you have a induction loop in a facility, use it.
Microphones should always be used, and if an audience microphone is available, use it too.
Alternatively, have the moderator repeat the questions.When I’m at conventions, I always sit in the front row. If I’m in a panel I prefer to sit in the middle. This is what works for me — if you don’t know what works for someone else, try asking!
And how did it go at the Steampunkfestival?
Some panels went just fine, if I was placed in the center and didn’t get an audience question. Some panels worked less fine if the moderator forgot to repeat the audience question before someone answered it.
In one panel, I got an audience question and waited for the moderator to repeat it. My silence was interpreted as confusion or not having a good answer, so other panel members answered instead, while I looked like a question mark. I felt really stupid.
(4) THE MAGIC NUMBER FIVE. Lavie Tidhar, interviewed by Shelf Awareness, is asked a numerical question.
Your top five authors:
The writers who most influenced me (for good or bad) are probably Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Cordwainer Smith (the pen name of Paul Linebarger, who was an intelligence specialist and the godson of Sun Yat-sen and wrote the most extraordinary and peculiar science fiction stories). Tim Powers–I still remember discovering him for the first time and being so blown away. T.S. Eliot.
It’s a sort of Hardboiled Five, isn’t it? It’s more a list of people who directly influenced my writing in some way than anything else.
(5) READ COATES. Rachel Swirsky makes a “Favorite Fiction Recommendation: ‘Magic in a Certain Slant of Light’”
I met Deborah Coates when I was in graduate school at the University of Iowa. She and I were in a writers group together with a lot of other people. We called it Dragons of the Corn.
Deb writes beautiful magical realism, fantasy and science fiction. At one point, she was tossing around the term “rural fantasy.” Her prose is lovely, and the moods she creates are delicate and pervasive.
“Magic in a Certain Slant of Light” is one of my favorites of her short stories….
(6) HAMNER. Earl Hamner, Jr.’s family thanked everyone for their condolences on Facebook, and at the post provides addresses of charitable institutions he supported.
We have been asked about a memorial or service and all I can tell you at this time is that Dad was emphatically opposed to the idea. He even made my mother promise him not to even consider the idea! So, we are respecting his wishes, but at the same time trying to imagine a way to remember him that he would like. (I.e., we all meet at the James River in Virgina and go fishing and drink a lot of Jack Daniels.) In the meantime, if you feel you need to do something to honor him, you will find below a list of organizations that Dad supported. A charitable gift in his memory would make him proud.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 25, 1956 — Lon Chaney stars as “Butcher” Benton, The Indestructible Man.
(8) RED MARS HITS RED LIGHT. Deadline reports “Spike TV ‘Red Mars’ Series On Pause After Showrunner Exits”.
Spike TV has pushed the pause button on Red Mars, its 10-episode straight-to-series drama adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s best-selling “hard” science-fiction trilogy. The move comes as executive producer/showrunner Peter Noah has exited the project, produced by Skydance TV.
…. I hear Straczynski, who had written the pilot script out of his passion for the books, had the option to stay on as showrunner or leave and keep an executive producer credit. The writer, who had been busy in features and TV, opted for the latter, and Noah came in as showrunner. He has now departed too over what I heard were creative differences with Spike.
(9) THE MESSAGE. Chris Van Trump is “Back In The Sad-dle Again” at Shambling Towards Bethlehem.
…What bothers me about the whole Sad Puppies situation is how often the existence of talent in the opposition has been denied, by both sides in this small battlefield of the culture war. Obviously that was Correia’s point in kicking off the whole affair; to expose what he considered to be ideological filtering in the Hugo nomination and voting process.
Personally, I think he was right. Not because of some grand cabal of liberal hypocrites willing to trash good authors on the grounds of political dissent, but because communities develop specific cultures, and those cultures create preferences.
And WorldCon has its own subculture, and as a result its own preferences, and those preferences lean towards the kind of pretentious twaddle that bores me to tears. But hey, it has the right messages, and that’s what’s important.
Or is it?
You see, there’s something that bothers me more than the denial of talent on the grounds of ideology, and that is the degradation of talent in the service of ideology.
One of the problems you run into, and this is something I’ve seen in other mediums as well, is that when you place the perceived political and social value of a work over its artistic value when determining merit, you get, well, precisely what you deserve. Passive, politically-correct-for-your-critical-lens pablum. A checklist of boxes to be marked off, with the expectation of accolades if enough boxes are checked.
You get boring message fiction. Or games. Or art of any kind….
(10) ON THE DOGS. Lela E. Buis, in “Discrimination against the Puppies?”, applies the thoughts from her recent posts about multiculturalism to the Puppy dilemma.
But, is Kate Paulk telling it straight? I don’t quite think so. Unfortunately I’m not going to have time to read the whole list of recommendations before the award nominations are due, but I have worked through the short stories and some of the related works. I can’t speak for the novels, but much of what I’ve read are not neutral recommendations. If you’re keeping up with my reviews, these works are slanted to present the Puppies side of the recent conflict. That means they are written by SJW’s on the Puppy side.
Who’s right? I suspect the SFF community needs to consider the Puppies’ point of view. If you’re reading along on my social commentary, you’ll note that the 50-year era of multiculturalism has closed, and we are now entering a period where community is becoming more important. This means the actions of divisive activists will be less well received than in the past—on all sides. I know people like to fan the flames, but wouldn’t community building be time better spent?
(11) PERFECTION. Sarah A. Hoyt begins “Perfectly Logical” with an epic autobiographical introduction to justify her view about why people asked off the Sad Puppies 4 List.
….It wasn’t a stupid fear. It was real. Even though writers can’t control who reads them and likes them, if you’re liked by the “far right” you must be using “dog whistles” — and thus the blacklisting starts.
So those people asking to be removed from the Hugo recommendations which were made by fan vote? Perfectly logical. Getting tainted by association is a thing in their circles.
The people proclaiming that we: Larry, Brad, myself, John C. Wright, I don’t know if they were stupid enough to include Kevin J. Anderson and Butcher in that, but definitely everyone else in the list, had “ruined their careers” are right. For their world and their definition of career. None of the big four will ever publish us again, except Baen.
They are stuck in the old push-model days in their head. They think that everyone down the chain will now boycott us. And they want to make d*mn sure it doesn’t splash on them.
Meanwhile we’re living in a different world. We’ve tried indie, and it worked. (Even though in my case it was just toe dipping. More to come once internet is fixed and bedrooms, kitchen and office unpacked. (It’s all we’re unpacking in this house.)
We’re living in a world where we can be rude to whomever we please, love our fans whoever they are, and have our own opinions. Because NYC publishing is NOT the boss of us….
(12) CASTING DUDES. “’Why Can’t We Have One White Superhero?’ Said No One Ever” is the topic today at Angry Asian Man.
Many of us who were following the casting of Marvel’s upcoming Iron Fist Netflix series were disappointed when news broke that some white dude named Finn Jones would play the title role of Danny Rand.
Inspired by this thoughtful plea by Keith Chow of The Nerds of Color, over the last two years a vocal fan movement had swelled and rallied around the possibility of an Asian American Iron Fist. While Danny Rand has traditionally been depicted as white in the comic books, there is no legitimate reason why he had to be played by a white actor. This could have been an interesting opportunity to cast an Asian American actor in the lead role, and complicate and reclaim some of the more problematic, orientalist elements of the character’s mythos.
It was a nice thought. But alas, Danny Rand will be white and it’s business as usual. Some people had some gripes about that. And of course, some people had gripes about the people with gripes.
Comic book creator Joshua Luna, best known for his work as a co-creator and writer of such books as Ultra, Girls and The Sword with his brother Jonathan Luna, recently posted a funny comic offering his take on the Iron Fist casting. Imagine, if you will, an alternate dimension…
(13) BEST SF TV. Adam Whitehead offers his list of the 20 Best SF TV shows of all time at The Wertzone.
In the grand tradition of Gratuitous Lists, here’s a look at the twenty Best Science Fiction TV Shows of All Time (that I can think of today). The list is in alphabetical order, not order of quality, nor is there a #1 choice as I’d probably have a totally different choice tomorrow. So rather than argue about arbritary placements on the list, you can instead yell at me at what got left off.
In case you’re wondering, the list contains only overtly science fictional TV shows. No fantasy (that’d be another, different list) and no anime, as I’m not well-enough versed in the field. After some debate, also no superhero stuff as the SF credentials of those shows can vary wildly and there’s enough of them now to make for another list.
(14) LEGO ACTORS. The LEGO Batman Movie – Batcave Teaser Trailer.
(15) DO YOUR DAMN DUTY. The Onion has a jaded view of the Batman v Superman experience:
Promising that it would be best to just buy a ticket and take care of the unpleasantness right away, a new Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice promotional campaign launched this week reportedly urged filmgoers to simply get this whole thing over with. “Listen, you all knew this day was coming, so just go sit your ass in the theater, stare up at the IMAX screen for a couple hours, and be done with this shit once and for all,” said Warner Brothers marketing strategist Elizabeth Harris, who encouraged fans to make plans with friends right now so they could all bite the fucking bullet over opening weekend.
(16) PRE-SUMMER HUMMER. No matter what you may have heard about the movie, Deadline says Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice set the cash registers spinning.
East coast registers are winding down and Warner Bros.’ Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is still on track to be the biggest pre-summer opening day with $80.5M (beating Furious 7‘s $67.4M) and weekend with $169.5M (outstripping The Hunger Games $152.5M) at 4,242 theaters. In sum, this is $20M better than where the industry originally estimated the film to be.
(17) THEME SONG. Darren Garrison’s salute to the late Garry Shandling takes a peculiar turn:
This is the theme to Glyer’s blog,
The theme to Glyer’s blog.
Glyer tweeted me and asked if I would write his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far?
How do you like the theme to Glyer’s blog?This is the theme to Glyer’s blog,
The opening theme to Glyer’s blog.
This is the music that you hear as you read the comments.
We’re almost to the part of where he starts to Pixel Scroll.
Then we’ll read Michael Glyer’s blog.This was the theme to Michael Glyer’s blog.
For those scratching their heads (starting around 30 seconds in):
(18) FLAME ON. Stoic Cynic rocked this verse.
With apologies to BOC:
You see me now a veteran
Of a thousand Usenet wars
I’ve been living on the edge so long
Where the posts of flaming roarAnd I’m young enough to look at
And far too old to see
All the scars are on the inside
I’m not sure if there’s candy left in me…
[Thanks to Karl-Johan Norén, Michael J. Walsh, John King Tarpinian, Will R., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]
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I also miss Meredith and hope she’s well.
As for all the comments on The Windup Girl, I haven’t read that thus far and now, I don’t really want to do so. I’m never reading the Thomas Covenant books again for one very specific reason and I know, given a particular plot point mentioned here, that I would throw TWUG across the room and into a wall. My shoulders not being what they used to be, I’d probably not throw it hard enough for it to bounce properly and I don’t want to ruin my average! 😉
Most fiction worth reading has a message, usually something the author is passionate about. I don’t care whether or not I agree with the message. I’m looking for something to read which is worth the time it takes me to read it.
I haven’t agreed with roughly half of the Hugo nominees overall since they started. That has little to do with their being “good” from my point of view-they just wouldn’t be pieces I would put on a list I would make. I’m okay with that. By and large, good work has been nominated, even if my personal list would be different. I can always make a list of “Robert Reynolds’s Choices For Really Good Stories”. But I already know what my choices would be, so I don’t need to come up with the list at all, outside my own head. I suspect that the Hugo shortlist has greater intrinsic value for most people.
@Chris S
I didn’t post all the winners since 1985 so maybe others are more to your taste. Or maybe you preferred the finalists as I do many years.
————-
Of the list the ones I’ve read and enjoyed: Lois McMaster Bujold, Anne Leckie
The ones I’ve read actual book so I can understand winning: Cixin Liu (mixed feelings), Neil Gaiman (had a hard time seeing the appeal), Orson Scott Card (personally hated the books – lack of personal responsibility – outsider knows better than indigenous people – blech)
Ones I’ve never read (some I keep meaning to get to): John Scalzi, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, J. K. Rowling, Michael Chabon, China Miéville, Connie Willis
But I’ve read others opinions on the books and people honestly loved the work. It may not be to my taste but that doesn’t mean the Hugos are wrong. I’ve never gone out of my way to read books with the Hugo logo on it even though I’ve been involved in Hogo voting longer than the puppy campaign has existed.
@airboy
I’m glad Baen scratches an itch for you. I think you’re blinkered though when you claim a special place for them as THE publisher of MilSF and adventure SF.
I’ve got a couple thousand books on shelf right now with more in storage. I usually couldn’t tell you the publisher of any of them.
Based on your statement I skimmed the spines looking only for MilSF and Adventure SF. I excluded anything with clear message or by an author perceived as liberal by the Pup campaign ( so for instance no Banks, Scalzi, or Leckie). I will grant I was surprised the most message-y books on my shelf were TOR. Those being books by noted libertarian and gun rights activist L. Neil Smith (also not counted).
List of publishers, all with multiple qualifying books on my shelves and some exceeding Baen in count, follows in no particular order:
Orbit, Baen, TOR, Aspect, Del Rey, DAW, Night Shade, Questar, Bantam Spectra, Ace, ROC, Fawcett, Bridge, FASA, Pocket, Harper.
Unlike others I haven’t received any update emails from MidAmericanII at all with my updated ballot, but when I log in, they’re all there. I am fine with this.
I loved “The Windup Girl” which I guess makes me not only a bad person of South-East Asian background, but also a bad SJW & Filer. I forgave its flaws because it was so compellingly bleak, more horror than sf.
(So once again we return to “Everyone has different tastes”, which is a message that had the Sad Puppies heeded, would have resulted in much less acrimony in the last two years.)
@Sean O’Hara,
I am somewhat forgiving of things in sf books that don’t make sense, or at least am more tolerant than you, given so many examples stuff from the real world that don’t make sense. Can someone please explain the Kardashians?
@Vasha at 9:03 am said: “Rattlesnakes and Men”
I am very pro-gun-regulation, and I found “Rattlesnakes and Men” off-putting because it was ‘too message-y’.
Boiling it down, the “Windup Girl” is the story is essentially a sexbot. While I think that creating a sentient sexbot isn’t a good idea, I have no problem whatsoever believing that there are people who wouldn’t have a problem with that and would build and use one if they could. So I see no more problem with a story depicting (in a negative light) people doing bad things with a sexbot than I do with stories depicting any other type of violence that–in a perfect society–would not exist (and in a large number of books, those other types of violence are glorified.) I didn’t even remember the scene people say they are bouncing off until this discussion of it.
@ Matt, Tasha, Kendall and others
Many thanks for the info, link and tips. Filers are the best.
@Michael Eochaidh: “A lot of blurbs indicate how many reviews they’ve gotten on Goodreads; I generally go past those.”
Heh, yeah, or when the only accolade is the number of 5-star Amazon reviews. Really, I’d almost rather they left off the Goodreads/Amazon info, if that’s the only praise to mention.
@BravoLimaPoppa: Thanks for mentioning Book Barbarian; it seems to be focused only on SFF! I’ll sign up and see how it goes. It sounds like it’ll be a variation on BookBub, and that’s groovy by me – similar methodology but probably some different results
BTW both of you, I notice another way to tell something’s probably self-published (NTTAWWT) is if it’s free. It’s extremely rare for traditionally published ebooks (including well-known small press ones) to have “free” sales.
@Chris S: I know your “OMG I’m a puppy” is just snark, but one should look at the finalists, not just the winners. You know, to determine where one falls on the Puppy-SJW axis of insanity. 😉
@Vicki Rosenzweig & @David Goldfarb: I presume (hope!) you both dropped a line to MAC II, in case they’re unaware of any wackiness. I still don’t have a confirmation from my last change, but I logged in again and my choices are correct. (whew)
@David Goldfarb: Did you login and see what was actually showing up, in case the main problem is the e-mails? Was your ballot blank when you logged in, or was it okay? Just curious.
@Lois Tilton
I’ve been confused how the Puppies seem to be ignoring that, along with the way they explicitly discuss which messages they prefer in their fiction – what I can remember about those preferences off the top of my head is that: humanity triumphs or at least retains hope, the universe is an ordered system with justice meted out properly… I can’t remember what else (and am ignoring certain undertones). I decided a while ago that talking about themes with the Puppies would be a mistake, though, because it’s one of them fancy literary terms, and the Puppies are very explicit in their loathing of literary literature.
@Airboy – I love how Baen is publishing out-of-print works. My one gripe about this is that it’s very difficult to find this stuff out if you don’t keep up with their newsletter (which I’m now doing). I’ve arbitrarily discovered, while browsing through Baen’s website, various authors whose works Baen reprinted some time ago, but that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I primarily shop at Amazon, though, and I sure can’t blame anyone for not wanting to deal with them.
The two complaints I see most here about Baen are 1) their obviously and, c’mon, really, inarguably terrible book covers (which don’t bother me because I read almost all e-books now, so I don’t have to worry about covering up the buxom space-babe with my hand while reading on public transportation any more), and 2) the poor quality of their copy editing.
And it’s close to unanimous here that the transparency of the SP4 campaign is its high point, and that the continued bitter, caustic, insulting tone of the three women running the show is the problem people have with it. That, and the legacy the last three litters of Puppies left on the floor.
@kendall
Nice! Of course, SJWs don’t read books, we just read the reviews at Alinsky-approved review sites and make sure they check the correct boxes, so I’m not sure why you’d do that.
Which reminds me, what’s the deal with no Puppies talking about Alinsky lately? Has all of that been folded into “SJWs Always Lie”?
It won’t matter unless the book gets enough noms to get on the ballot, and in that case, we can at least hope it will be in the Hugo reading packet (assuming MidAmeriCon II puts one together as has become the custom).
No, the order doesn’t matter at the nomination stage. It will matter when you’re voting on the final ballot, though.
@Vicki, thanks for the heads-up – I checked, and my Graphic novel section was a little messed up. I would suggest everyone double check.
@Tasha, me, too. This is what I commented on the blog post:
“Excellent article. Much of it applies to me as well. I also have sensorineural hearing loss, though in my case it was caused by mumps or measles at age 4. (This was before the vaccines came out.) I use hearing aids and read lips. The only thing I do differently is to turn the hearing aids down in noisy situations rather than removing them, and also I prefer to sit against a wall (a corner if possible) in restaurants to avoid the confusion of sound coming from behind me. Otherwise my experience is very similar to yours. Again, thank you for writing this!”
I haven’t read The Wind-Up Girl (and may not, based on these comments) but in my opinion Bacigalupi’s latest book, The Water Knife, is a nightmarishly plausible climate-change thriller.
Also, thanks Mike for listing that Wertzone article. I just snagged a copy of Ultraviolet on Ebay. I hadn’t known a vampire miniseries (with Idris Elba, yay!) with this title existed…there was a horrid science fiction movie with the same title that I ragequit about twenty minutes in, due to its sheer stupidity.
@David Goldfarb:
Thanks. I have mentioned your comment to the Hugo admins, and specifically Ron Oakes, who is answering my email on this, but it might help if you notified them directly as well. I’ve been going back and forth with them in email, and once I got them to understand that the problem was missing nominations (and only incidentally duplication), Ron Oakes said that mine was the first report in four years of nominations not being accepted, and he needed more information (which I have given him). I wasn’t convinced I was the only one, but it seems even less likely that we are the only two.
(Before being asked for more information, I had to explain that normalization won’t help with this because you can’t “normalize” a blank line because it’s supposed to say “Letters to Tiptree.” Even if they knew that I had “Letters to Tiptree” on my ballot yesterday and not today, they wouldn’t “normalize” it because nominators are encouraged to change our ballots as often as we like.
I’m still getting emails from yesterday’s entries into the Hugo ballot. I finished before 6pm EDT. I saved many, many times. Turns out my copying and pasting put a space in front of many of my entries so tomorrow I’ll drag the laptop out to fix the space errors as my iPad wants to delete all those strange words in titles and names. I don’t trust my spelling because autocorrect takes over and is don’t always notice.
@Lois Tilton
Where “message fiction” gets me is when the story falls flat and then the Bad Guys who sneer, etc. get outlined in rhetorical neon. When I talk about “checkbox” fiction, that is the sort of thing that I’m talking about.
As an example, I am giving Dinosaur Lords a 3 star on Goodreads (I’m working on it…really) primarily because the story fell flat for me. I went into it thinking “dinosaurs! knights! together!”. I thought there would be more about how to catch/tame/train/ride dinosaurs (a la the Pern series). But really there wasn’t much about that in the story. The dinos were brought out to fight every now and then with the interaction between knights and dinos limited largely to “hold on tight”.
[SPOILERS]
A couple of other interesting, but largely unexplored features were that the characters were long lived (a couple hundred years was common) and apparently had to be killed more than once in order to become fully dead (sort of unclear how that worked, but that’s my point).
Instead we had the obligatory feminist nod (petite young woman that wants to wear plate armor and ride a dino, also it is apparently appropriate for women to run around in various stages of undress in public – yay girl power?), an alternative gender nod (one group of knights engages in ….erm…. mutual satisfaction with one another when women aren’t around), obligatory multi-culti nod (everything/person had at least two names – a quasi-Spanish name and an English name), and a socialist nod (a noble decides to stop being a noble and turn his territory into a commune of sorts).
There was a rape scene that I also found disturbing and not terribly needed in service of the narrative.
In my opinion, if you strip away the marginal narrative, then what you have is a bunch of checked boxes that rarely serve to further the plot along.
And before anyone gets their dander up, I’m going to point to Peter V. Brett’s “Demon Cycle” as a series that includes strong feminist, alt-gender, and multi-culti themes that integrally support the larger, well written narrative. IMHO, Mr. Brett does a fantastic job of world building and story telling.
—–
In general……
With respect to the general discussion over the last few days and to (9) – (11), I’m a little tired of folks that use the word “literary” as something between a cudgel and a shield. Like airboy and some others, when I encounter Hugo nominated works from the last 20-25 years, my general though is that I have already read something better. (I name names at the link!)
The field has gotten large. That means that there are lots of different books to satisfy different tastes. (a good thing (TM)! )
IMHO, the taste of Worldcon voters has changed over my lifetime from being towards things that scratch my SFF itch properly to things that don’t do as good of a job at it. Had I known about how to participate in the Hugos, I would have been doing it all along.
Books (and authors) I didn’t think were that great having been winning Hugos for basically as long as there have been Hugos. Which is why I laugh at the Puppy complaints that the Hugos have become terrible recently. The thing is that other awards haven’t done much better, and overall, the Hugos have a pretty decent batting average, even if they’re far from perfect. Which is why they have the prestige they do.
We don’t have a short-list for 1955, but here are some of the possible candidates that failed to beat the famously obscure They’d Rather Be Right:
* The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
* The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov.
* Gladiator-at-Law by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
* The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
* A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn
* Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg
* Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick
* Star Guard by Andre Norton
There’s some fine SF on that list!
@dann:
I’ve only seen “multi-culti” used in a sneering way, which I doubt was your intent based on the rest of the post. Was that an error? Is this phrase commonly used in a less antagonistic fashion?
Vasha – perhaps I was being overly-literal [again]. I took thee to be saying that thou preferred message fiction if thou agreed with the message, whereas I tend to be more critical of such messages that I approve when badly presented.
It’s worth remembering that the Hugos are a popular award – while many of us (I would suspect, most of us) are trying hard to decide which stories were “the best” out of the ones we liked, it does, ultimately, come down to “the stuff the voters actually like”.
Because of this:-
1) Small, niche groups who overestimate their popular appeal risk getting a rude awakening when the numbers are actually counted, and
2) People who go about making themselves and their associates personally unpopular – say, by calling Hugo voters fascists or cock-sucking whores – can find themselves punished for it in the voting. It’s maybe not fair, in a strictly-by-literary-merit sense, but it’s a factor that should not be neglected.
@dann665
Your naming of names is very interesting. If you’d just identify which years those works date from and perhaps some of the finalists you think they should have replaced, we’d have an interesting basis for discussion.
I might have fleas too. There has only been one year since 1985 that I have read – not liked, just read – more than two of the Hugo novel finalists. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the Hugos, just that my taste differs from the collective will of WFSF nominators.
@airboy, Linda Nagata writes terrific MilSF and recently self published the first book in her The Red series, before getting it picked up by Saga Press. She still self-publishes her backlist and she’s been writing high quality fiction for a really long time. I mention her because you seem to think there is some significance to Correia’s story, possibly based on his politics, but there really isn’t any evidence for that.
11) PERFECTION – Why? Just, why? I’m not sure if it’s the inevitable straw men, the frothing or the risible conclusions, but every time I read anything Sarah Hoyt writes, I find myself wanting to tell her to get a grip, because she’s embarrassing herself again.
I suspect the SF community is made up of individuals, and each one of them should consider their own tastes and experience when voting for stuff.
The Puppies, being largely a subset of the SF community, should do the same.
But nobody in the SF community should decide that out of consideration for another group, they’ll vote for things they don’t actually like. And the Puppies shouldn’t ask for that, because the Puppies are already making false accusations that that’s what’s happening.
What I suspect the Puppies are truly saying, at heart, is that they want “the SF community,” that giant floating intangible brain that thinks as one, to like what they like, and vote for it because the SF community likes it after all.
But if the SF community (or, rather the Hugo voter community) doesn’t actually like that material enough for it to win Hugos, then it doesn’t matter how much the Puppies say they want the SF community to want to go out with them. The answer was sorry, but I just don’t feel that way about you.
Next year is another year, and the makeup of the community will have changed a little, as will the output of SF publishers, mainstream, small and self-. Better luck next time.
But you know, there’s no shame in not being the Prom Queen. Do what you like, like what you do. If you attract an audience big enough to keep doing it, cool. But the audience doesn’t owe you their love. If you want to appeal, you need to be appealing.
And being commercial is a great way to appeal to people who buy books. It’s not always the best way to appeal to people who vote in literary awards, because with “the SF community” includes both, they’re not the same people.
Do what you like, like what you do. If the audience doesn’t respond the way you want them to, that’s not their fault, they just want different things. You can try to appeal their tastes or you can try to find more people who share your tastes. Either is cool.
But arguing that people who don’t feel that way about you should reassess and feel that way about you after all, because you don’t want to be friendzoned and you especially don’t want to be enemyzoned, so you’re going to start calling them stuck-up bitches…
…well, that doesn’t end well for you, trust me.
The SF community, whatever subset of it you pick, is made up of people. Each of those people has their own taste. They don’t have to “consider” yours. If they do consider yours, then “Yeah, tried that, not for me” is an acceptable answer. Yelling at them for several years for not wanting to go out with you is a lousy strategy.
There is no obligation on the part of any individual SF reader to love you, or love what you love, whether you’re liberal, conservative, literary, pulpy, hard SF, soft SF, fantasy of manners or whatever. Demands to consider your feelings amount to demands to ignore their own.
That doesn’t work out so well. It just doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never produce anything that people will want to date, whether it’s these people or some other people. But it does mean that “Thanks but no” is a legitimate answer, and the solution is to change what you’re offering, change who you’re offering it to, or both. It’s not to insist that the people who don’t want to go out with your books are bad people who should rethink their ways.
Mike, have you had a problem with your subscription emails? I keep trying to click the link in my email to subscribe to this thread, and I’ve been getting a “Internet access is blocked” message. (This occurs in both Opera and Firefox.)
re “gentile feelings”: Never attribute to typos what can be blamed on Autocorrect. (It’s more fun that way.)
[huh, try ticky again]
Kendall on March 26, 2016 at 11:56 am said:
@Msb: I signed up for BookBub, too. It sends a daily e-mail with ebook deals at ebookstores you select (in my case, iTunes & Kobo, but you can pick other ones), based on categories you select.
One of the categories offered is “time travel romance.”
So apparently there’s enough of that to be one of a half-dozen romance categories.
Who knew?
Regarding people asking about Meredith, I chuckled a bit at a book that BookBub told me about this week – one about dragons (MEREDITH!) with a protaganist named Kyra (KYRA!). 😀
Then I got bummed ‘cuz I wonder how Meredith’s doing, as others have mentioned. I saw Kyra comment on a thread a while back, though, so that’s good.
@kathodus: LOL, I should change my program to check these Alinsky-approved review sites, for sure. 😉 5 boxes required to be check minimum before approved purchase. Then it goes on a hidden shelf where even *I* can’t find it to read it.
@Cheryl S. & @airboy: Good example, Cheryl. If I may offer one that spun around my brain when I read @airboy’s comment:
Scalzi’s MilSF Old Man’s War was originally self-published on his web site, then picked up by Tor. This happened years before Correia’s experience. So, yeah – definitely not unique to Correia, his politics, his publisher, etc. 😉
Re: Wind-up Girl, I bailed when they were feeding scarce food to mammoths for power, plus the entire world apparently had forgotten the complex technology of the water wheel. So I didn’t even get to the gratuitous rape. It went below No Award on my ballot.
Puppy whining: the usual. Pretending to know what other people think, lying, pretending to be the victims instead of the perpetrators. Pretending they had no contact with Teddy. Pretending they stood for exciting quality works while gaming terribly-written boring crap onto the ballot. And if they think the Hugo winners of the last (10, 20, 30, whatever they’re claiming today) years were boring… well, you know what they say about people who are easily bored.
To take one example, “Blackout/All Clear”, the message there was “England in the past was pretty neat. Friends, love, and children are important. Nazis are bad.” Not a political message at all!
Nthing Kino’s Journey. It’s lovely, elegiac, and devastating.
I’ve read the first chunk of Lovecraft Country, and wow is it good. Ordinary, decent people caught up in weirdness and a hostile society. As someone who’s so white as to be translucent, I haven’t felt hated or insulted yet by it, since the bad white people in it are all transparently stupid and evil. The conclusion is left as an exercise to the reader…
Last weekend at SVCC, the mods were quite good at repeating questions, and the big events had sign interpreters who were also on camera for the big screens. The facility was wheelchair accessible (elevators! all over!), and they had good seats reserved for disabled people. I escalatored a lot. And service dogs in costumes, like the one done up as K-9 who posed for pics with a chap in a long scarf who was delighted to run into doggie.
Well, not my statement, but just for the fun of it…Hugo novel winners of the last 20 years?
2015: Cixin Liu, THREE-BODY PROBLEM – it had strengths and weaknesses — flat characters were the biggest turnoff for me — but ultimately, I didn’t feel driven to read the sequel. Want more Katherine Addison, though.
2014: Ann Leckie, ANCILLARY JUSTICE – liked it! Read the second one and liked it, haven’t gotten to the third yet.
2013: John Scalzi, REDSHIRTS – liked it! Have read all of Scalzi’s novels and some of his short fiction, and expect to keep reading it until and unless I stop enjoying it. I’ll buy his stuff and read it without leaving it to simmer on the TBR pile.
2012: Jo Walton, AMONG OTHERS – liked it, liked other Walton stuff even more. Haven’t read all of Walton but will keep picking up more as time allows.
2011: Connie Willis, BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR – got fed up with the characters acting like idiots, so I gave up on the first book early on. Have read Willis short fiction I liked, so will try other books eventually.
2010: (tie) Paolo Bacigalupi, THE WINDUP GIRL and China Miéville, THE CITY AND THE CITY. Haven’t read either. Have read work I liked by both authors, so I’ll read more over time. Books by both in the TBR pile.
2009: Neil Gaiman, THE GRAVEYARD BOOK – loved it. I’ve read most of the fiction Neil has published (I’m sure I’ve missed stuff here and there) and even unintentionally kinda-sorta collaborated on a story, and I like the vast majority of what Neil writes. So at this point he’s a reflex purchase and gets bumped up to the top of the TBR list.
2008: Michael Chabon, THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION – haven’t read it, but I’ve liked almost everything I’ve read from Chabon, so I’m sure I’ll get to it. And whatever else I haven’t read by Chabon.
2007: Vernor Vinge, RAINBOWS END – haven’t read any Vinge that I’m aware of, don’t really know enough about him to know whether I ever will. At least so far, I haven’t formed a desire to read his work or a desire not to.
2006: Robert Charles Wilson, SPIN – same situation as Vinge. Haven’t read any, don’t have any reason not to, but don’t yet have any reason to, either.
2005: Susanna Clarke, JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL – one of my favorite books of all time. Have read all the Clarke I can find, and when there’s more available I’ll read that too.
2004: Lois McMaster Bujold, PALADIN OF SOULS – haven’t read it. Read the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga, didn’t like it (felt to me like the author was setting things up for the character and then telling us the character was brilliant rather than that the situations were rigged). Have heard enough good things about Bujold that I’ll try a non-Vorkosigan book someday.
2003: Robert J. Sawyer, HOMINIDS – haven’t read it. See Vinge and Wilson again, except Sawyer’s work seems at first glance overly tech-y for me. I’m far more interested in character than in hard science stuff. Then again, my impression of Sawyer could one completely wrong.
2002: Gaiman again, AMERICAN GODS – parts of it I love, parts of it I’m not all that wild about. Neil describes it as a book readers seem to either love or hate, but I find it a mixed bag with enough good stuff in it to reread and admire.
2001: J.K. Rowling, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLT OF FIRE – liked it fine, and have liked Rowling overall to the point that I’ll read anything she writes and not let it simmer in the TBR pile. I don’t think her mysteries are top-notch mysteries but they’re quite readable, and I thought A CASUAL VACANCY was ambitious and effective.
2000: Vernor Vinge again, A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY – still haven’t read any.
1999: Connie Willis again, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG – this one’s probably the next Willis I’ll try.
1998: Joe Haldeman, THE FOREVER PEACE – haven’t read it. I liked THE FOREVER WAR when I was in my teens, don’t think I’ve read anything more by him.
1997: Kim Stanley Robinson, BLUE MARS – haven’t read it. Don’t think I’ve read any Robinson, but not because I’ve made a choice not to.
1996: Neal Stephenson, THE DIAMOND AGE – it’s in my TBR pile, and I read a Kindle sample of and liked it enough to buy it and put it in my TBR pile.
**
So for me, at least, “Hugo winner” seems to indicate, “This writer is good at what they do and if what they do looks interesting to me I stand a good chance of liking it, maybe a lot.” But not, “You will be interested in any Hugo-winning novel.”
Kurt wrote: “Read the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga, didn’t like it”
Which of the three “first” books did you read? FALLING FREE is chronologically first in the series, but centuries prior to the rest, and doesn’t tie back into the Vorkosigan saga (lightly) until several volumes later. SHARDS OF HONOR spotlights the meeting of Miles’ mother and father; Miles isn’t born until the sequel to SoH, BARRAYAR. The “Miles Vorkosigan” saga proper begins with THE WARRIOR’S APPRENTICE.
Hmm, Vinge is probably my favorite SF writer of the last couple of decades. His early stuff isn’t so great (although the Hugo-nominated novella, “True Names” from ’82 is worth checking out), but starting with A Fire on the Deep, he’s pretty much topped my must-read list every time he’s come out with a new book. (Which is all-too-rare an occurrence.)
Bujold’s early works are also kinda so-so IMO, but her later stuff is absolutely fantastic. And overall, I think the Vorkosigan books are her best work. I usually recommend people start with Brothers in Arms.
I’m pretty meh on Sawyer and Robinson and Wilson, though.
@Kurt: tl;dr. It’s called stalking, and that’s not good.
Demanding someone’s attention, not taking no for an answer, insulting them while still pursuing, restating the rejected arguments, Still More demanding attention, threats, Even More Demanding… at that point you’re asking for a restraining order IRL.*
In awards voting, you should maybe just go about your own business and let others go on with theirs. You may have a fundamentally different view of the world, and that’s OK. We don’t all have to think alike!
* or you are a house cat. Meow!
Kurt, I think/hope you’d like A Fire On The Deep and A Deepness On The Sky, at least, of Vinge’s work. The way he does epic sense of wonder reminds me a lot of the way you do it, actually.
@Lois — I think there could be good fiction which subordinates everything else to Message but it would have to be very, very well done to pull it off. I can’t think of an example right now. And now that I think more about it, you’re right that it ought to be possible to recognize such works without agreeing with the message.
(Wherefore hast thou regressed to the sixteenth century?)
Kurt Busiek
I thought of bringing up TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG earlier, when humor written by women came up as a topic. It’s a series of complications a la Wodehouse, and it’s wrapped around Jerome K. Jerome’s classic THREE MEN IN A BOAT (To Say Nothing of the Dog). I may have read some Willis before it, but this really put her on my mental map.
BLUE MARS was compelling enough for me that I went on and read some other colors of Mars. So there ya go.
I didn’t think Redshirts or Hominids were strong enough to deserve a Hugo, and I thought Blackout/All Clear was really weak, so much so that I bailed 30 or 40 pages in. I really like Wilson & read all his books as they come out these days. The Windup Girl I thought was powerful, atmospheric and interesting. I didn’t think about any lack of realism in the technology and the rape stuff people talk about didn’t throw me out of the book either. Perhaps I’ll be more aware of it if I reread the book (not currently very likely) or if/when I read future novels by the author. I’ve enjoyed a couple of Bacigalupi’s more recent young adult novels but didn’t care for the violence in The Water Knife.
@Lois: I liked your use of the unambiguous second person singular pronouns! To mean of course that you were talking to Vasha only, not the generic “you”. And also knowing when to use thee, and when to use thou. I learned it from Kage Baker’s (RIP) Ren Faire guide.
@lauowolf: that’s been a big romance subgenre since at least the 90s.
Thanks to all for the free book lists. And if anyone knows how to reach Meredith outwith here, please do convey my best wishes. Mike, can you see the e-mails we post under? Would it be a breach of decorum for you to send her a hello from us?
> “I saw Kyra comment on a thread a while back, though, so that’s good.”
(I’m around … I’ve just mostly gone into Hermit Mode to finish working on writing a novel. It’s getting there, though, so I should be coming up for air sometime.)
@kendall – Scalzi’s MilSF Old Man’s War was originally self-published on his web site, then picked up by Tor. This happened years before Correia’s experience. So, yeah – definitely not unique to Correia, his politics, his publisher, etc. ?
I had totally forgotten that. So, now there are at least two other examples of originally self published authors who have had an experience similar to that of Correia. Maybe it happens to others too? 😉
In the last 20 years, I’ve read five of the Hugo winners for novel in their entirety, bounced off two (well, actually, they bounced, because both of them were actual books and I threw them) and have a few more in my TBR mountain. The only one I loved in its entirety was The Graveyard Book, which I have reread numerous times and recommended even more often. I thought the codas to Redshirts elevated what was otherwise perfectly readable fiction and made it memorable. I loved 90% of American Gods and thought the rest of it could have used better writing.
@Kyra, yay. I wish you success.
I wasn’t thrown out of The Wind-Up Girl, I left of my own accord. I think with any two of the factors I mentioned before I might have carried on: mammoths and springs and zeppelins should have made for a wonderfully bonkers setting, if the rest of the writing had been bonkers too; stereotypes I’ve read before and will no doubt read again, though it’s a bad sign when I can’t decide if the stereotypes are parodies or shallow writing; and even if I struggled with the mixture of prurience and detachment of the stage-rape, I might have carried on to see what came of the titular character. But the combination of those things just made the book too much of an effort for me. So I put it aside, and haven’t picked it up since.
@Kyra
Good to see you. Wishes for much success on the novel.
(11) Pefection
Sarah Hoyt appears to be tying herself into knots as tortuously as Kate Paulk in order to escape recognizing that people who asked to be removed from the SP4 list simply do not want to be associated with the Puppies. Period. Full stop. |
There is no grand paranoid agenda involving fears of being blacklisted or dissed, dropped from publishing or banished from awards consideration, if the “wrong” people like your books. Such claims are as ludicrous as Puppy claims I read last year that Tor was bribing Puppy picks to withdraw from the Hugos by offering them book contracts for doing so. The people who withdrew last year, like the ones asking to have their names removed from the SP4 list now, just DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE PUPPIES. A concept which is easy for everyone BUT the Puppies to understand, it seems.
The people proclaiming that we: Larry, Brad, myself, John C. Wright, I don’t know if they were stupid enough to include Kevin J. Anderson and Butcher in that, but definitely everyone else in the list, had “ruined their careers” are right. For their world and their definition of career. None of the big four will ever publish us again, except Baen.
I’m not sure what she’s saying here.
There are five major New York houses, not four. (They are Simon&Schuster, MacMillan, Random Penguin (the biggest), HarperCollins, and Hachette.) And Baen is not one of those houses. It’s distributed by one of those (I forget which one), but it’s an independent house, not one of “the big four [sic].”
I can’t tell is she’s being ironic and means that of course Puppy ringleaders will be contracted by the major houses despite these rumors/speculations about them, or if she’s actually saying that none of them will ever write for any house again but Baen. Her subsequent comments give the impression that she means the latter:
Meanwhile we’re living in a different world. We’ve tried indie, and it worked…. We’re living in a world where we can be rude to whomever we please, love our fans whoever they are, and have our own opinions. Because NYC publishing is NOT the boss of us….
(There are many advantages to the rise of self-pubishing, but being rudeto people isn’t one that I count among them.)
@Laura Resnick
Poor Hoyt she remembers two of the big houses merged but since she doesn’t pay attention to the business side of publishing she can’t be bothered with the details that they went from the Big 6 to the Big 5.
She also believes there is a blacklist used by the Big 5 and she’s on it. I suspect many of the editors have never heard of her but I could be wrong. I don’t know if she has a reputation for being a big problem author who doesn’t bring in enough sales that she’s not worth working with. I thought problem author was defined by not meeting deadlines, arguing too much over edits/revisions, and other issues related to getting your book out not just talking badly about trad publishing but things could be changing rapidly as trad publishers work on maintaining relevancy.
I believe it is Simon&Schuster which distributes Baen.
Vasha – as lurkertype notes, I’m attempting to recapture the 2nd-person singular pronoun. The verb conjugations remain problematic, as so many of the verbs we use now don’t have that form in all tenses.
Hit’s a work in progress.
Soon Lee, I think “compellingly bleak” is an excellent description for the book.
DMS: Wind-up Girl is the only book to ever make me actually vomit. It was one of the audiobooks I listened to during my midwest roadtrip before Chicon7. Not the stage rape, but the later graphic rape scene was so intense that I pulled over and threw up on the side of the interstate.
I thought it was a good book overall. My line is a little different than JJ’s. If the book includes rape it better be integral to the story *and* treated as though it is rape. So, no “ha ha rape is funny” and no “seduction.”
Actually, you captured how I feel perfectly, you just said it a lot more articulately than I did. So thank you for that.
I didn’t vomit, but between all the non-consensual sex which was (in my view) just glossed over as part of the way things were, and the egregious world-building fails, I had to force myself to finish the book — all the while wondering what the hell it was that other people seemed to be loving so much about it.
I’m a lot kinder to myself these days; I gave my OCD self permission not to read Hybrids after Hominids and Humans were so horrible, and I let myself quit The Dark Between the Stars last year after reading around 15% of it. I’m also a lot more willing to use “No Award” where I think it’s justified.
I’ve got too many things I really want to read waiting, to spend precious time reading things I don’t enjoy. I am generally trying to read anything that gets a lot of love in discussions here — though I may not finish it.
And I’ll give anything in the Hugo packet a fair chance — but now, as MRK says, based on my past experience with an author’s works, that “fair chance” may consist of closing the book after reading the title page.
Cat Eldridge: we reviewed one of [Hoyt’s] Ace books and the reviewer was less than fond of it, so we got a nasty email from her saying the reviewer was obviously not worthy of reviewing her or anyone else writing ‘intelligent’ fiction.
She did what??? That is so unbelievably unprofessional.
Mike, ignore my question about subscription emails–it was a problem with my antivirus program, which I’ve since fixed.
Data:
I loved “Jupiter Ascending” despite its shit worldbuilding.
I hated “Prometheus” because of its shit worldbuilding.
ETA: @Kurt Busiek, Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” & Willis’ “To Say Nothing of the Dog” are two of my favourite books.
Vasha: Message fiction exists and can be received well if (likely only if) the reader agrees with the message… Kim Stanley Robinson’s rant against the Supreme Court’s relationship with corporations, “Oral Argument”, has been much liked here and elsewhere; Michael Bishop’s pro-gun-control “Rattlesnakes and Men” has been nominated for a Nebula.
Soon Lee: I am very pro-gun-regulation, and I found “Rattlesnakes and Men” off-putting because it was ‘too message-y’.
I am also very pro-gun-regulation. I just read that story a couple of days ago. I found it about as subtle as a sledgehammer, to the point of tedium by the end. It won’t be going on my Hugo nom list.
I haven’t read “Oral Argument” yet, and probably won’t get to it before the deadline, because based on my past experiences with his works, KSR is not priority reading for me.
Kendall: Scalzi’s MilSF Old Man’s War was originally self-published on his web site, then picked up by Tor. This happened years before Correia’s experience. So, yeah – definitely not unique to Correia, his politics, his publisher, etc. ?
Cheryl S.: I had totally forgotten that. So, now [including Linda Nagata’s The Red: First Light] there are at least two other examples of originally self published authors who have had an experience similar to that of Correia. Maybe it happens to others too?
Becky Chambers and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
ETA: Andy Weir and The Martian.
Huh. According to Wikipedia, Eric Bloom of Blue Oyster Cult wrote three SF-related songs in collaboration with Michael Moorcock, including the filked-by-Stoic-Cynic Veteran of the Psychic Wars, which was used in the original Heavy Metal movie. And Bloom and Moorcock performed the song live at the Dragon*Con convention in Atlanta, Georgia in 1987.